The teacher union seems to be mostly ineffective based on what I've seen/heard in my county. My county literally hires teaching contractors at a significantly higher rate than union teachers because it is such an unattractive job. Somehow the union still fails to negotiate a salary within $20k of the state median.
--- Tangential Rant:
Look into your county's education budget and it might surprise you. In mine, the yearly budget is $1.5B and only about $900M goes to actual school operations (everything from ~300 principles, ~6k teachers, 64 physical/occupational therapists, IT, TAs, and benefits). Another ~$70M goes to bus contractors that can't accommodate reasonable start times across the grade levels. ~$30M goes to facility maintenance/construction/planning. Most of the left over is bloat that manages useless initiatives, flirts with ed-tech/curriculum grifters, marketers/comms/etc, and weird pork that doesn't belong in an education budget. That's like $300-400M/yr in bloat at just the county level (assuming at least some of the left over provides actual value).
It's embarrassing that these administrators get paid 2-4x the teachers, but still fail to staff schools properly with a $1.5B budget for ~80k students.
--- Tangential Rant:
Look into your county's education budget and it might surprise you. In mine, the yearly budget is $1.5B and only about $900M goes to actual school operations (everything from ~300 principles, ~6k teachers, 64 physical/occupational therapists, IT, TAs, and benefits). Another ~$70M goes to bus contractors that can't accommodate reasonable start times across the grade levels. ~$30M goes to facility maintenance/construction/planning. Most of the left over is bloat that manages useless initiatives, flirts with ed-tech/curriculum grifters, marketers/comms/etc, and weird pork that doesn't belong in an education budget. That's like $300-400M/yr in bloat at just the county level (assuming at least some of the left over provides actual value).
It's embarrassing that these administrators get paid 2-4x the teachers, but still fail to staff schools properly with a $1.5B budget for ~80k students.