I have three family member who work for MPS or another school district. my cousin has a masters degree in speech pathology with 4 years experience and gets paid 48k salary working for MPS.

my cousin with a bachelors degree from Marquette in education makes $65k working for a private school in the Bayview district teaching history to junior high students

my aunt with a masters degree in german and bachelors in education works for MPS with over 15 years experience gets 52k salary

those who work for MPS clearly don't do it for money/benefits but because they want to make a difference. my suggestion is to increase the budget for MPS so that teachers who are already run ragged with misbehaved children and low salary can have the supplies they need to teach. I already stated that in the previous thread btw, increase funding for education

This post was edited by Giannis on May 15 2020 09:04am

The president is right in that more testing means more confirmed cases and thus makes a country look worse.

He is awfully wrong, however, when he claims that the US is doing more testing than anyone else. In reality, testing in the US is very lacking, and the reason the US numbers are looking so bad in comparison to other countries is because it has handled the crisis badly. Which is on him and his administration, no one else.

Furthermore, he is awfully wrong when he implies that the US should do less testing. The truth is that extensive testing and tracing is the only option to have a shot at safely reopening the country without having cases spike again.
Just think about it: if a country was able to test its entire population twice a week, it would be able to erradicate the virus in no time. Testing is paramount, and Trump arguing against it because of perceived bad optics is a fucking stupid and short-sighted take.

Nice virtue signaling

This post was edited by Duckling on May 15 2020 09:20am

Who you serve and how much society values them determines the salaries of the people who serve those populations. It is the same in social work. Working with veterans or working in hospice pays more than working for the mentally ill or those struggling with addiction for example.

There are a lot of people with masters working for 40k/year and i know I did to break into the field and its been difficult. And that was after hundreds of unpaid hours during practicum. I remember thinking after being assaulted by a psychotic person for the first time 'what a weird sector of the economy, did I work so hard to get punched?'

I think social workers should be paid more, but there is a lot of them...and I've worked with people, often in adult protective services, who i have basically had to train how to do good crisis stabilization and that doesn't just mean institutionalization because there are like a dozen or more levels of intervention between fucking up in the community and eating out of trash cans and being in a state hospital with 'surrogate decision makers'.

Teachers probly fall into the same mold as social workers and that we value ourselves and our abilities based on the successes of those we try to assist... In this context taking on special education seems very brave to me. I had to step back from addictions because of to a degree. That and being sick of antisocial bullshit lol.

This post was edited by Skinned on May 15 2020 09:26am

you'd be far better off paying the teachers the same, or even less, but hiring more teachers to lower class sizes. and you'd be better off still creating and funding birth to 3 programs and bolstering pre-k rather than paying teachers any more. MPS has terrible birth to 3 programs and where they are the attendance is bad because community outreach isn't successful and evals are not even done.

my wife has the exact same issue, parents with kids who are behind in the trailer park refuse evals for their kids for pre-k and early childhood due to poor views of education, and children who could catch up before even kindergarten starts instead enter at 5 years well behind.

it's easy to say pay teachers more, but thats a short sighted approach. increase funding is too vague to be a plan too, that's politician talk.

well said! I agree that attacking the root of the issue is the best solution, when we can improve early childhood education. this sets the stage for their whole life. the older people get, the harder it is to instill new values and habits.

increase funding is very vague and I won't pretend to have all the answers. I believe that the military spending is well over the top and could be redirected to health and education, even just a small fraction of the federal military spending done would have an impact. about half of our federal tax payer budget goes to military spending, and a lot of it is on stockpiling nuclear warheads which are somewhat obsoleted for war due to all of the tech armies have to shoot down missiles before they ever have a chance to hit their target

This post was edited by Giannis on May 15 2020 09:29am

this is how it goes tho:

teachers of milwaukee white kid suburbs > teachers of poor black kids > teachers of white kids in madison area >>>>>> teachers of poor white kids in the north, central, and western part of the state.

milwaukee has massive taxes in their area, defers more of that money to education than other areas, and teachers even in the poorest districts make 10k$+ more per year than people who teach in a similar poverty area that's predominately white.

This post was edited by thesnipa on May 15 2020 09:31am

not to mention people who live in Milwaukee get charged extra to have their license plate stickers renewed supposedly for "road repairs" and other various taxes such as your property taxes you get hit with in Milwaukee supposedly budgeted for "road repairs" yet there are so many streets in Milwaukee that are terrible.

one good thing they changed was forcing Milwaukee government workers to live in Milwaukee, my dad is a civil engineer in the water works department for the city and was forced into buying a home in Milwaukee where the neighborhood has just gotten worse and worse.

I mean I live by Mount Mary (tosa/milwaukee border) which was once considered a very nice neighborhood. last Fall my locked car was stolen by some thug who had a key made by getting the VIN off my dash. the district police office told me car thefts have risen over 300% in the past 4 years

This post was edited by Giannis on May 15 2020 09:38am

you're absolutely right, as a society we overvalue celebrities and athletes among other things, then on the other hand push critical jobs like teachers and social workers to the wayside.

Milwaukee politics is a cess pool. Politicians live in Nicolet, Brookfield, Mequan, Muskego, etc. They make county wide tax policy that goes something like this:

we take 5% of all the profits in the county, then each district gets an equal share. and they know Nicolet is already ahead, the roads are already in good shape, the kids already have a good starting education from private daycares, the houses are already nice. etc. so the districts that need a bigger share dont get it, they get the same size slice of the pie even tho it needs to feed 2x more people, fix 2x more problems, etc.

and poor milwaukee residents keep voting them in, because they hear higher taxes and schools get more and think its great.

construction crews patching 50 year old roads with asphalt because that's all that's in the budget meanwhile north puts in new bypasses and the city pays 2x the real cost to get people to Miller park and pays cops to facilitate traffic for every game.

the whole city is a fucking mess, i'd rather move to the border of the UP than within 30 miles of that city.