> Parents would flat-out say that they can't respect her because of her salary. Along the lines of, if you're smart and can do stuff, why the hell are you working for such a low pay?
Damn, that is so gut wrenching to read. It's so short sighted that society does not value teachers more highly. The next generation is the ultimate investment.
True. We needs massive propaganda campaign to highlight teachers. And, of course, show respect by paying them accordingly.
Another semi-related issue is school system used for virtue signalling first. For example „special needs“ kids integration. It sounds nice on paper, but in reality one kids holds up whole class. And then smarter kids riot because they get bored. But hey, that's teacher's fault..
IMO that will be the crucial piece for West decline. This is reverting the best bit in post-industrial-revolution welfare states. Teach the masses to fish out the brilliant mind from the whole pool. But now we're reducing the pool to those who can afford private schools. And loosing lots of talent in the rest of society. If that trend continues, soon we'll be back in nobility-peasants split with little social mobility. Which a loss not onlh for the society as a whole, but for neo-nobility as well. At first it may be cool to be richer-than-thou, but over time „richest in the room“ will turn out to be poor at global scale.
It actually makes sense to deprecate teachers if you are one of the christian fascists in the republican party. We need only look at the recent string of laws, book bannings and similar to get an idea of what religious fascism does.
Attacking the teachers have been a long term goal. School funds already are now allowed to be directed to parochial (religious) schools from the state school coffers. This starves the public school systems one by one.
No Child Left Behind guaranteed that bad schools get less money, and get worse. This all but guarantees that low income areas have terrible school systems that are more just juvenile delinquency prevention and babysitting services.
Book bans are pushed by the "right" (which they rarely, if ever, are), with obvious canards like "Harry potter is evil occult and should be burned". Naturally, with the exception of https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzv9j/texas-school-bans-the... , most of the bans are done explicitly by the christian fascists forcing their beliefs on others.
Or, instead of more money and resources, we see Texas state legislature forcing schools to hang banners of "In god we trust." https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/18/texas-schools-in-god... . Again, it's the forcing of one myopic direction of religion on the masses. It brings the parochial school into the public piece at a time.
All of these different directions have the ultimate effect - deprecate the "godless" education to something with their variant of religion in it. And naturally, we get pablum like "Noah and dinosaurs lived together", and other completely non-science garbage taught as fact.
Globally, the root cause is definitely not „christian fascists“. For example in my country it's woke neoliberals pushing the notion of schooling freemarketisation. At the same time claiming that teachers' salary increase won't help with terrible students' performance at exams :)
Damn, that is so gut wrenching to read. It's so short sighted that society does not value teachers more highly. The next generation is the ultimate investment.