It’s been a stereotype for at least the last 50 years. Why has this never changed? Why has organized labor not had a substantial effect for such an essential part of the workforce?
Not just in the US.
There’s a wild spread on both pay and the requirements to work as a teacher. Some places require barely more than a pulse. Some places require years of schooling. Some places pay teachers no better than shelf-stockers. Some pay a decent wage and/or have a decent pension/benefits system. It’s definitely not a monoculture.
Let me tell you a story about a man named Ronald Reagan.
the actor!?
Who’s the president in 1985?!
Please, go on
Forget what it says on the tin. To truly understand a society, look at its institutions.
Education isn’t valued by the sociopaths that run the US.
Clarification: Education is so dangerous to the ruling class that they are attempting to remove it.
The GOP is fully to blame.
They sell the American public on the idea that any taxes are bad, no matter what they are meant to fund. When they are in power they cut public services, give tax breaks to corporations, and schedule tax raises to occur when they’re out of power.
When they aren’t in power they yell about taxes nonstop to make sure democrats are too scared to re-fund them, so they don’t get voted out.
Cycle after cycle, and now there’s no money to give the teachers.
One of their main arguments against taxes is that government will always waste tax dollars due to corruption and incompetence… Which is a self fulfilling prophecy, as they’ve proven to be some of the most corrupt and incompetent political leaders in history.
There’s also the feedback loop where they point at the broken underfunded public services and are like “see how shit public services are? They’re a waste of taxes. We could gut them to save you money”
Absolutely intentionally designed to be that way by the GOP and blatantly obvious when you look at their voting records.
To add to the (absolutely accurate) commentary in the rest of the thread, this hits on a something Grabber talks about in Bullshit Jobs. Almost universally, the jobs that are the most important to society actually functioning are the ones that pay the least (with the one notable exception of physicians). There’s this idea that you should be “grateful” to have such an important job, and that’s in a way almost part of your pay. See also nurses, elderly care providers, daycare employees, anyone who works for a charity. People in charge use this “moral capital” as a way to convince you to take less actual money
George Carlin said it best. We want dumb happy obedient workers. Smart enough to runthe machines, but not smart enough to realize how badly they’re getting fucked by the system. So don’t count on the schools to do much more than basic math, and basic skills. Because what helps the elite class screws over the working class. It’s best to start screwing them in kindergarten. Teach them the pledge of allegence, so they feel endebted to our system, and keep them there for their entire lives.
Paraphrasing here, but that’s the jist of a routine he had in the 90s. The important thing to note is that Carlin was NOT a time traveler. He didn’t predict the future. It’s just that we as a society have had the same problems for 100 years, and we never fixed our shit.
Maybe because 98.1% keep voting for either evil or the lesser evil; but almost none of them vote for the good like Nader?
“Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and American universities - and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, […] you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain’t going to do any good; you’re just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public.” – George Carlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBrbXOmnW70
“It is infinitely better to vote for freedom and fail than to vote for slavery and succeed.” - Eugene V. Debs, Appeal to Reason, 1900-10-13
“Wage-labor is but a name; wage-slavery is the fact.” - Eugene V. Debs, The Socialist Party and the Working Class 1904-09-01
Please show me one time in the past 50 years that a third party candidate in the US helped the Left win an election.
The GOP constantly funds and pushes for the Greens and Libertarians because they know those candidates sap the Dems.
The Democrats are not Left wing. They’re left of the Republicans, and less authoritarian, but they’re a right-wing party who crippled banking regulation in favor of oligarchy, bailed out the worst banks, lied about drilling for oil[1] and causing a mass extinction event, and kept giving Israel weapons even after they went from defending themselves to committing genocide.
The goal for ethical people is not to get the Democrats to win, but instead to elect ethical people to government, e.g Hawkins and Nader.
It’s possible, even in FPTP voting systems, for people to reject the 2 parties that usually wins - see the UK where the Tories or Labour have been the only 2 winning parties for more than 90 years (including 2 short coalition governments); but where polling shows the 5th party (the horrible Reform) and 8th party (Greens) are now leading.
“It is infinitely better to vote for freedom and fail than to vote for slavery and succeed.” - Eugene V. Debs, Appeal to Reason, 1900-10-13
“Wage-labor is but a name; wage-slavery is the fact.” - Eugene V. Debs, The Socialist Party and the Working Class 1904-09-01
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/08/16/biden-oil-drilling-production/ As he campaigned for president in 2020, Joe Biden made a bold promise at a New Hampshire town hall, adding repetition for emphasis: “No more drilling on federal lands. Period. Period. Period. Period.” […] The Biden administration has now outpaced the Trump administration in approving permits for drilling on public lands, and the United States is producing more oil than any country ever has.
All that effort to show that you can’t tell the difference between ‘bad’ and completely horrible.’
You can babble on and on, but you can’t actually show one time that a strong third party candidate didn’t help the GOP.
From your point-of-view, the Democrats winning is good, and the Republicans winning is bad. You might see them on a left-right scale of 0-10, where 0 is good, the Ds are at 3, the Rs at 9, and Hitler at 10.
Some other people see a bigger window than that: look at https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 and compare how these people see the distance between Trump +9+9 and Biden +7+6, compared to the distance between both and Hawkins -5-3. These people agree that the Rs are worse than the Ds, but they don’t want to help the Ds win because the Ds are mass-extinction causing capitalists. To convince these people to vote for the Ds instead of Greens/socialists/not-voting at all, you have to convince them that the Ds actions of:
- making anthropogenic climate change worse and so causing a mass extinction,
- helping genocides, and
- propping up an economic system that rewards narcissistic psychopaths and punishes ethical people;
are good, and worth voting for.
Again, you ignore the actual facts.
Maybe you live in a world of privilege where things like schools, roads, hospitals, and wars are merely theoretical. We who actually have to deal with those things know differently.
Nowhere do you link to a 3rd Party that has any realistic chance of making any change anytime soon.
Quick historical note. Look up a fellow named Frederick Douglas. He was a former slave. In 1860 he had the choice of supporting a full on pro-Abolition candidate who had almost no chance of winning or supporting a candidate who had stated he wasn’t prepared to end slavery.
Douglas figured it made more sense to support a winner and have a foot in the door. He abandoned the Abolition candidate and backed the winner instead.
So, when you reply, please explain why people shouldn’t follow Douglas’s lead and back the imperfect candidate who might win over the ‘pure’ candidate who is sure to lose.
When I was in 8th grade, my school district furloughed over 100 teachers at the same time the superintendent was getting a heated marble driveway installed at his house.
Part of it not said in any of the other answers is that schools are managed at a very local level and get a significant amount of their funding through local taxes. So, you get a lot of towns that don’t have the local tax base to raise revenue or you have a local tax base where the wealthy few would rather pay for private school than the taxes to pay for a better public school.
The problem with organized labor in this case is that the organized labor is generally fighting the government and a lot of states don’t want an effective union network getting built or spreading.
Republicans have taught Americans to resent public education. Also, most teachers are Women, so I’ll let fill in the blanks.
All the other answers are correct.
Republicans / conservatives in the US are a poison. Delusional, evil. Either opportunist pieces of shit or certifiably the dumbest people in the world.
Their existence is a net negative, period, full stop. Their non-existence…well, take that as you will.
Knowing what you’re talking about is considered elitist by most Americans. Under-funding education is effectively a DEI program for idiots.
Not raising the education of the public is an easy control method and also easily keeps up the myth of the USA being such a great country while completely obviously contradicting itself.
In the US, public schools are funded by the local tax base. If the local tax base is broke as fuck, their services will be broke as fuck. That means you’ve got crumbling sewer systems to worry about more than having well paid teachers.
