Wages are set by the importance of the work one does & teaching is not considered a priority. When budget cuts come around the school systems suffer the deepest cuts & they're the ones that feel it first. This causes many of our best educators to leave the public sector for the private sector where the pay is better, their responsibilities more in line with being reasonable. This leaves behind the ones who are burned out, young teachers with little or no experience & cost half of those that are leaving. Ones that haven't got a clue as what to do & then there are those who should go back school so they can first learn about the subjects they're going to teach (they themselves must have been educated in the systems). Then there are those teachers that are naturals & those that just love to do what they're doing & do it well & wouldn't leave the field until they've been starved out of it. We get letters from teachers to principles that should be proof read before they're sent in part because they too have also been educated in a failing system. In our district the head of special ed was a gym teacher first & has no qualifications & are not certified at all to hold the position she holds, this happens all over. At 504 & IEP meetings when asked who is certified or has what kind of qualifications. Out of a round table of 6-12 you'd be hard pressed to find more than one (if one can even be found). Again this is the result of non-funding, budget cuts & administrations trying to keep themselves afloat. Older & more experienced staff is either paid better elsewhere or in one form or another pushed out to let in younger teachers that will work peanuts. Again leaving these teacher's that are fresh & green with no guidance, role model & or mentor to fend off the overwhelming expectations heaped on them. Then there's a government that knows squat about education telling them how they want the school systems & teachers to teach to the exams or insist or age inappropriate courses but yet they won't pay for any books that aren't at least out of use & date. My wife & a good part of her family are educators. Their summers are filled with preparing courses & curricula, going to workshops. Their evenings are spent grading work or some other job related activity. Their weekends seem to always involve or rotate around their work. Did someone say time off, when? Teacher's are like the wife who does more in a day than there husband could do in a week. They do all & more without knowing almost up until a new school yr starts if they're getting a new contract or getting laid off. No heads up to give them time to find work elsewhere because the hiring by that time has already been done & they've missed their one chance of having a summer life because, hey, what if my job's still there. This they do for an average wage well below that of a dog trainer. Which would seem say that trained dogs are more important than a child's education. So if you hear a whining educator hopefully it will remind you of a person who's holding the future of your child's well being & wither or not your child can succeed & be happy in life after education. Think of what they do when you piss & moan about the money they make for doing a job that's so easy or the time off they get to themselves or how they spend their lives on the front line fighting to give all they can give & more while the parents & students themselves & the rest of society abuses them. I 'spect we ain't learnt nothin bout nothin & at this rate we ain't gonna either.

Barry