Oh. Oh my God. Oh my Lord in the heavens. We are actually paying teachers retirement pay? Oh my stars.
No seriously, am I supposed to be shocked by this? I sense from your dramatic reading of “five two” that this is supposed to be some kind of horrifying thing for me to read but I’m not feeling it.
I said five two so people wouldn’t think I mistyped $25,000, which is the kind of pension people in the real world get.
Well, I attended our fine Ohio public schools, so I know how to read. Thanks, though.
Which benefits would these be? The one that says that teachers are supposed to maintain discipline with class sizes 25% over the legal maximum? Or maybe the one about how they’re not allowed to defend themselves, even bare-handed, against students who attack them with weapons? No, wait, I know, it’s the one about how they’re required to act as bomb squads. I’m not exaggerating, there: That’s the pure, literal truth.
I’ve actually been pretty surprised by the BBO ads that just amount to “your life SUCKS, so vote to make more peoples’ lives SUCK.”
Dunno where you got that. I’m still trying to figure out how things work in your world, where people who win the lottery are just as likely to continue working as people who don’t.
I expect to vote no (for the repeal of SB5) because 1) elected officials should have the balls to turn down unreasonable/unaffordable union requests during collective bargaining, instead of denying public workers bargaining rights, and 2) it seems like an attempt to weaken the Democratic Party through eliminating automatic payroll deductions that go to unions.
Issue 2 looks like it will be resoundingly defeated, which is fine. What does annoy me are the anti-issue 2 ads which make it sound like police/fire/teachers are opposing it solely because they wouldn’t be able to bargain on safety/staffing issues, and thus the public would be put at risk. C’mon, it’s 99% about salary and benefits.
I still have my doubts that the $82K figure is legitimate, but even if it is, it is probably an outlier. Even if it was a typical teaching salary, what would be so bad about that? If a guy can throw a rubber ball through an iron ring, he gets a signing bonus that exceeds what most of us make in our lifetime. But the people that give our children the foundation of learning, we act as if they’re parasites and worthy only of the scraps that we want to throw them.
I still have my doubts that the $82K figure is legitimate, but even if it is, it is probably an outlier. Even if it was a typical teaching salary, what would be so bad about that? If a guy can throw a rubber ball through an iron ring, he gets a signing bonus that exceeds what most of us make in our lifetime. But the people that give our children the foundation of learning, we act as if they’re parasites and worthy only of the scraps that we want to throw them.
So you don’t want to set bar any higher than just having the teacher show up every day so she can collect a paycheck?
Could you please cite the law that says that if a student attacks a teacher with a knife, the teacher is not allowed to defend herself?
Regards,
Shodan
Having grown up in a family of Ohio public school teachers, and taught myself for a short time, teaching is an easy job if you don’t care and a hard one if you do. Of course, the union sees to it that there will never be a pay incentive for teachers to do a better job.
As far as the huge class sizes, if teachers were willing to take less pay, they could hire more teachers and reduce the class sizes. Given that the other things you complained about could be changed with no impact to pay, doesn’t it make sense to change them regardless of how much teachers are paid? I don’t see how SB5 makes any difference to those things.
Basketball players have a union too, but their pay is essentially tied to what basketball fans are willing to pay for tickets and merchandise. I don’t think it’s worth $X to go to an NBA game, but a lot of people do, and it’s their money, not mine.
I think teachers should get the exact same deal. If the state needs a superstar science teacher and they have to pay $200,000 a year to get him, that’s fine. If times are tough, and they can get qualified kindergarten teachers for $25,000 a year, that’s fine too. If they have more teachers and administrators than they need, they should be able to lay them off. But as a taxpayer I don’t want to deal with a union telling me that if I don’t do so-and-so, then they’ll strike or give a million dollars to a candidate who will give them what they demand. No company wants to have to deal with a union.
Unions are great for the workers, bad for the employers. What people don’t realize here is that in the case of state employees, every taxpayer is in effect an employer.
No doubt this bill will be defeated, but it will be an unfortunate mistake for the vast majority of Ohioans.
Of all things to rage against in this country, It’s disheartening that some have landed on teachers salary as the most egregious. The vast majority are severely underpaid for bearing the responsibility of preventing us from being a nation of idiots.
No joke. Even if teachers were overpaid (whereas most are not) there are a lot more egregious examples of misspent taxes. Think about it this way: if teacher salaries go up, competition for those positions increases, and we end up with better teachers. That provides value to taxpayers.
SB5 covers all state employees, most of whom aren’t teachers.
Nobody’s “raging” against anything, and the only person who used the word egregious was you.
There is nothing in SB5 that prevents the state from spending as much money as it wants/needs on teachers. The only thing it does is get the union out of the way. We cannot afford an unaccountable process in which the politicians pay the teachers, the teachers pay the union, and the union pays the politicians. We also do not need a union whose objectives are to block all efforts to reward excellence and to defend incompetent or harmful teachers at the expense of students and taxpayers.
What world do you live in where paying less for a job means more people want to do it?
As for “salary incentives to do a good job”, that means that you have to pay more. You think the unions oppose that?
Ain’t nothin’ to be done for it – the Constitution says citizens have freedom of speech and assembly; the Supreme Court says giving money to politicians is a form of free speech. Ergo, you can’t get a group of assembled citizens “out of the way” or their money out of the process.
By that logic, when I am hired to do a job, I should do the least amount of work I can get away with, and still get paid.
I’ve helped out in my kids’ public school classes. I’ve worked with cops. I know firefighters. The great majority of public service employees IME are badly underpaid for the good work they do. I’ve seen nothing that proves that SB5 is going to save the state or its political subdivisions bucketloads o’ cash. It seems to me the bill was much more about bashing unions, which tend to be pro-Democratic, and settling political scores. I’ll be voting no.