Slow Day - so I will pick on public school teachers

The vast majority of what I hear from public school teachers is that they are not paid enough. And they have done a great job convincing everyone else, even those without health insurance or pensions, that they are not paid enough. I frequently remember being told specifically by many of my teachers that they were not paid enough through either the direct appeal or your garden variety grumbling.

The question that we were not allowed to ask, of course, is why these incredibly talented underpaid pour souls didn't quit teaching to get jobs where they would be paid well for the extremely valuable skill set. After all, they weren't being forced to be teachers were they? Were they? Oh, that's right, society would fall apart without them and since they invested all that time and effort into getting a teaching certificate, they owed it to society to continue teaching.

Here's a question though. How many men and women do you know in the 20s and 30s who have teaching certificates that are still doing substitution work after 10 years because there aren't enough full-time teaching positions available? Here's an economic question: if there are people who want to do a job than there are openings for that type of job, is it is an indication that the wages and benefits of the job are too low? If I believed my teachers for the twelve years they complained about their paychecks, I would have to assume that every new teacher I met must either be some kind of moron or masochist. The couldn't be that dumb though, right, they have a teaching certificate. They must be masochists!

Now, of course, the argument could be made that the shortage is artificially caused by the school boards and taxpayers who are not giving enough money to the schools to hire the correct amount of teacher to achieve the right level of student-teacher ratio in the classrooms. Then I, the partial owner of a standard 20 year old suburban house with 2.4 kids who are not yet of school age look at my annual tax bill of $4,000 and wonder how much money could possibly be enough. And, of course, my school taxes just went up again this year.

There may be some other arguments out there to explain why we have such an abundance of 20 and 30 year-olds looking for full-time employment in a job that apparently pays so little, but I'll have to ask a few more people for that.