Ble rydych chi’n byw?

Something Needs to Change--And It Might Be Your Voting Habits

So, I'm tooling around in the Craigslist job listings, and I come across a listing entitled:

Prudential Real Estate: Some of our Best Agents Used To Be Teachers
http://seattle.craigslist.org/tac/edu/272305056.html

And I just start to seethe. For the obvious reasons.

Seriously folks, we need to just buck up and pay some taxes and elect officials who will provide for our public services. Teachers need to be paid enough to live reasonably in the cities where they work and they need to be paid by regular tax-based budgets and not PTA funds raised by parents in rich neighborhoods (see Elaine Porterfield's article in this month's Seattle magazine: "How the gap is widening between Seattle’s have and have-not schools").

Your life will not be better if you have a little more money to buy something today, but your children are receiving a crummy education because only a few altruistic people are willing to become teachers and many of them burn out when it comes time to raise their own families because they want to spend more time with them and not waste two hours a day commuting into the places where they teach but can't afford to live. Then they get lured into more lucrative careers because, hey, who wants to give up their own personal American Dream in order to educate other people's kids at break-even wages?

(Yes, I know there are many factors at play here. I could go on and on, but frankly, this little rant has cleared my baffles a little and I'm off to think about something else now.)

Posted by Appalachia at February 2, 2007 07:36 PM