But teacher pay has always been a point of contention in Oklahoma. It’s why people are always complaining that Oklahoma loses teachers to Texas. Oklahoma teachers have always been criminally underpaid, because it’s an undervalued profession.
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I know. If I was in charge, I would drop all state and national testing. It’s one of the biggest wastes of money in education. We test these kids and then put pressure on teachers to do all of these crazy things to improve test scores that still don’t improve. It’s a terrible cycle. There are plenty of ways to figure out where our students are without testing like that.
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Yessir! I got to go help my professor and my lab’s senior grad student with an experiment in Los Alamos over the summer. Learned more important stuff for my future career in a week than I did in 2 years of classes
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Or get so disgusted with it that you do the opposite and fail.
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To quote my cousin who is an Oklahoma State House Rep: “This is fucking insanity.”
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Exactly! Being out in the field can show you what you’re truly made of and whether or not you love what you chose for a career path.
Took a resident on a transport to a psych ward the other day. It was a two hour drive. With the person screaming the entire way. My fourth transport in two weeks. No clinical can prepare you for that.
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I hate this state so much sometimes.
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That’s what the state lottery is for, chimp! Or did they lie about that too?
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Nobody cares about teachers. At all. You literally have to attempt to fail to actually fail a HS class. It’s the easiest thing in the world. And nowadays parents blame the teachers the majority of the time if their kids are failing. They never hold their own children accountable. And I know this first hand because my wife has been a teacher her whole career and this is exactly what happens. When I was in school if I ever even had a C my parents would beat my asś. They were intelligent enough to comprehend that it would be my fault, not my teacher’s fault.
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Teacher salary numbers (used two sources that appear to have generally the same numbers):
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/teacher-pay-by-state
Oklahoma #34. So, honestly, not as bad as I thought. And not too much lower than Texas. However, there’s still 33 states in front of it. Which is still not a badge of honor by any stretch.
Here are two sources for education rankings. Teacher pay generally correlates with the rankings (I know, causation does not equal correlation):
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education/prek-12
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Anecdotal, but we visited a school the other day (last year of elementary for our youngest 
), and the principal talked about the difficulty in recruiting enough qualified teachers. She was trying to hire a teacher from Texas who’d have to take a $10,000-$14,000 pay cut to come teach in Tulsa.
Isn’t #34 about right considering cost of living?
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I think this is averaging an administrators salaries which raising the average. I’ll dig into it and see if I can find a breakdown of teacher vs admin pay.
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Teacher pay rate from stillwater public schools. Base is 40,500, 7% goes to retirement.
You won’t make 56K with just a bachelor’s degree until year 28.
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To OSUGrad’s point being a teacher is now a much harder job due to parenting and now politics. The pay is not worth it and that’s being proven by the low numbers of students majoring in education. Couple this with the fact that Asian and Indian cultures highly value education and we as a nation will fall behind
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I don’t know if cost of living should necessarily be a determinant in this conversation, though.
Cost of living drives everything.
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I’d like to bill my clients at a NY rate. Maybe they’ll agree?
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There are doctors, here in Memphis, that I guarantee you it does not apply. Using that profession may be a bit of an extreme, but we pay people based on how good they are.
Additionally, I’d argue that, given the profession (teaching), the standard should be a little above cost of living averages.
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The more important your job is, the less you make. How America goes.
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