Chicago’s striking public school teachers earn $74,839 per year, and 39% of them send their own children to private schools

http://danfromsquirrelhill.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/chicagos-striking-public-school-teachers-earn-74839-per-year-and-39-of-them-send-their-own-children-to-private-schools/

The basic teaching degree takes a full 5 years of college. Most teachers, based simply on the requirement for continueing education to maintain their licence, have masters degress. Compare their salary in Chicago to the salary of an MBA in Chicago. My wife has had a masters degree in teaching for over 20 years. She has many hours of specialty courses beyond that and if she had persued it, would have a PHd. She makes 60K in the sticks of Arkansas. I assure you that the cost of living is more the 14K higher in Chicago. That being said, I have no respect for a group that is pushing to protect the jobs of the bottom 2% of performers in their profession. The Chicago salary issue is a done deal as per the reports. All that remains is the job protection issues which is a union issue,. not an educators issue. As far as the private school issue is concerned, when in LA we drove a great distance when we lived in East LA to get the kids in a reasonably good school. When we were forced to live in the Port of LA area, I sent the family back to Arkansas to get them out of that district. The quality of the school system is determined much more by the families of the students than the teachers that are trying to overcome that influence. Sending their kids to private school is the lesser of the two evils compared to white flight from the cities. You do what you have to do to protect your family.

How many teachers in that sh*t hole really care about the kids ??? I would bet it is not too many..Just there for the easy cushy job with lots of time off. Having said that I know for a fact that there are some damn fine teachers out there as I had a few myself... and was blessed to have them.

DonMatzeder wrote:The basic teaching degree takes a full 5 years of college. Most teachers, based simply on the requirement for continueing education to maintain their licence, have masters degress. Compare their salary in Chicago to the salary of an MBA in Chicago. My wife has had a masters degree in teaching for over 20 years. She has many hours of specialty courses beyond that and if she had persued it, would have a PHd. She makes 60K in the sticks of Arkansas. I assure you that the cost of living is more the 14K higher in Chicago. That being said, I have no respect for a group that is pushing to protect the jobs of the bottom 2% of performers in their profession. The Chicago salary issue is a done deal as per the reports. All that remains is the job protection issues which is a union issue,. not an educators issue. As far as the private school issue is concerned, when in LA we drove a great distance when we lived in East LA to get the kids in a reasonably good school. When we were forced to live in the Port of LA area, I sent the family back to Arkansas to get them out of that district. The quality of the school system is determined much more by the families of the students than the teachers that are trying to overcome that influence. Sending their kids to private school is the lesser of the two evils compared to white flight from the cities. You do what you have to do to protect your family.

my wife works at least 10 hours a day and some hours on the weekend. She also works 10 months out of the year plus mandatory classes in the two months off in the summer. She does not get any paid holidays although she is off....it's kinda like a layoff with no unemployment insurance. Oh and those mandatory classes, she pays the tuition to most of them. She also pays for at least half the suplies for the classroom because the system does not have the budget. I bought her a new chair last week and will need to buy her a computer this weekend as hers blew up yesterday. I.T. said they would see if one of the other teachers might not be using theirs.....

I hope your wife gets the respect that she deserves being one of the quality Teachers out there. I have to ask myself who in thier right mind would want to be a teacher today ??? I mean there is the liberal agenda which the teachers have to cram down the young people's throuts....
Then the whole system it's self is broken.

But it is good to know that there are fine folks like your wife trying to make a differance in todays messed up world.

DonMatzeder wrote:my wife works at least 10 hours a day and some hours on the weekend. She also works 10 months out of the year plus mandatory classes in the two months off in the summer. She does not get any paid holidays although she is off....it's kinda like a layoff with no unemployment insurance. Oh and those mandatory classes, she pays the tuition to most of them. She also pays for at least half the suplies for the classroom because the system does not have the budget. I bought her a new chair last week and will need to buy her a computer this weekend as hers blew up yesterday. I.T. said they would see if one of the other teachers might not be using theirs.....

to preach the liberal agenda. She doesn't but most of her co-teachers do. They bought into the liberal BS in college and no one ever disputes their ideas, including my wife. She knows they are idiiots but does not want to be in an adversarial position with them. My wife will ask the right questions in class to make the students think for themselves without preaching to them. She just avoids politics completely with the other teachers.

Don !! Do the other teachers REALLY avoid politicts ????? Down here in florida the teachers ram the collective mindset down the throuts of our young...I have seen it first hand in grades way to young to be doing so. If things are different where you are, then that is a good thing.

DonMatzeder wrote:to preach the liberal agenda. She doesn't but most of her co-teachers do. They bought into the liberal BS in college and no one ever disputes their ideas, including my wife. She knows they are idiiots but does not want to be in an adversarial position with them. My wife will ask the right questions in class to make the students think for themselves without preaching to them. She just avoids politics completely with the other teachers.

and is not told to do so but the lefties are hard at it all the time. They call it accademic freedom, I call it something else.

We know how tolerant the left is.

http://www.stoptheaclu.com/2009/06/11/kansas-high-school-teacher-fired-for-being-conservative/