Why pay teachers more–they only have THE MOST IMPORTANT JOBS IN THE WORLD!/Image: Licensed Adobe stock, pathdoc.
Ahoy, right-wing travel aficionados!
Last week, your favorite Alt-right website, Spread Your Right Wings (SYRW), and I, Antoine Boordayne, its travel correspondent, took you on a tour of states that want to sicken their own citizens and fill their overall local cultures with as much desperation and squalor as possible by requiring Medicaid recipients to work in order to qualify for benefits. Hopefully, these states’ fantastic political leaders can spearhead our nation’s backward march toward seeing health care as a privilege, not a fundamental right! In light of the massive popularity of that right-wing guided tour, we’re taking another one, this time of states that already–not “want to”–pay their teachers the lowest salaries in the nation. What a great way to tell the people performing what is arguably the most important job in any society, that of preparing its youth for lives that sustain and reward them and the broader population in innumerable ways, that they’ve got another thing coming if we’re going to make teaching an easy life-choice for them! Let’s roll, SYRW readers!
Related: Get the truth behind Erik Prince’s Seychelles meeting.
Where the Winds Come Sweeping Down the Plain
So Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote in their classic piece of musical Americana, Oklahoma!. And, you know, the winds really do come sweeping down the Oklahoma plain. As you can see, they bring with them tumbleweeds and dust, the hallmarks of any destitute flatland whose local way of life has been devastated by economic strife–or, in Oklahoma’s case, a likely dearth of teachers due to low teacher pay rates.
Oklahoma pays its high-school teachers a mean wage of $42, 460, according to CNBC, which provided the map that inspired this tour. But, you don’t have to be able to perform high-school math to see that that’s really messed up, so even the locals know it. “The locals” includes local politicians, but why they’ve allowed the state of their local public educational system to get to this point is something we’ll have to look into later. Right now, we need to get a move on to our next stop in this wondrous jaunt.
Ole Hit or Miss
And that’ll be a “miss” as it relates to the mark on teacher salaries in this state.
Remember in grade school when you learned how to spell “Mississippi” and felt so proud? Well, Mississippi middle-school students might feel a mixture of pride and sadness when they learn to spell “deprecate,” when they realize that’s what the public school system is doing to teachers who provide them with the skills that will lead them onto bright futures. They might feel frustration, too, when they find it vexing and angering that an entire sub-population is told their vital, life’s work is worth a mean annual wage of $43,950.
Oh, well! On to our next stop!
No Duh, Dakota
Here we are in stunning South Dakota, home of the both the legendary Black Hills, sprawling grasslands, and rivers full of magical wildlife.
Careful where you step, SYRW readers, in the state capital of Pierre. Teachers have been protesting at the statehouse, demanding to be taken seriously and not for granted and paid living wages, instead of a paltry mean annual wage of $44, 210. Oh, if only liberals hadn’t infected our great country with the sickness known as expecting your surrounding culture to treat you with dignity–and also allow you to live with dignity off the work it demands you do to be a “productive” member of its society,
Oh, no! We can hear some teacher-protesters approaching now with their loudly-shouted chants. Let’s book!
And: See what food consistency levels have to do with political-stance consistency.
North and Next on the List
Here we are in lovely North Carolina. As many of you SYRW readers and tour participants may know, the town of Kitty Hawk in this great state is where the Wright Brothers made this state the “First in Flight,” as its nickname goes. It’s also home to the Outer Banks and Nags Head, beach towns of true seaside splendor.
Teachers who call this state home may not have such sunny, blithe things to say about their home state lately, but as Alt-righters, we don’t care, do we, readers and tourers?
Why don’t these whiny teachers earning a mean annual wage of $45,220 just bootstrap themselves to billionaire-hood, right? Sheesh! We’re not going to just hand them fair wages like some advanced society.
Not the Best In the West
Here we are on our last stop, West Virginia, home to some beautiful Appalachian mountains, even more beautiful souls (some of us in the SYRW offices visited WV a couple times and fell in love with its people,, and seriously underpaid educators.
High-school teachers in this state earn an annual mean wage of $45, 240. While back in North Carolina, we recommended the teachers there simply pull themselves up to a higher station in life by grabbing ahold of the straps on their boots, for West Virginia’s dissatisfied teachers, we have an altogether different suggestion.
Also: Get the deets on right-wing dance crazes sweeping the nation!
And that is, we advise them to hop into a time machine, be born into wealth like President Donald Trump, and stop complaining. Problem solved!
You Don’t Deserve a Raise
What a head-spinning, soul-crushing, heartbreaking expedition that was! Why don’t we all take a moment to process what we’ve just experienced? By “process,” of course, we mean pop some anti-depressants to stave off the nagging, lingering discomfort we feel knowing that teachers are epic human beings who have spent decades being devalued and delegitimized for choosing careers in education, yet being too Alt-cowardly to say we’re not going to let our nation recompense mendacious captains of industry at rates that put to shame the ones we reimburse teachers for their work with.
We hope good ol’ Secretary of Education Betsy Devos, who teachers gave a grade of “F” for her first year as Secretary of Education, can find a way to keep these greedy teachers from success in advocating for higher pay rates while continuing to line her own pockets and remain completely ignorant about best educational practices for “children and families,” whose well-being she claims to be oh-so-concerned with. Despite no background or advanced degrees in education, we have faith that Devos can accomplish this, perhaps using bootstraps and time machines as well.
Until next week, when I, Antoine Boordayne, take you on another inane, waste-of-time tour! Bon voyage!
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© 2018 Akbar Khan
