To see Florida, a relatively rich state, keeping company at the bottom of the list with the truly impoverished Deep South states is disgraceful.
Clearly, my ranking is superior. It actually followed the precise science of "ranking the best states for teachers." Also, I don't care if UF is a university, that should automatically put them at #1.
Seems political leaning isnt a real factor. I mean our democratic "education governor" must suck too here in NC.
And what about those of us in states with liberal leaders who's rankings still suck? I think this isnt just political.
Jj, this is over the top. When we start to imagine the intentions of those we disagree with it’s easy to ascribe our worst fears. You can probably see it when conservatives refer to liberals as communists or groomers because of some policy they object to. I do agree that there is a wide streak of anti-intellectualism that runs through some corners of the conservative movement and the value of education is often discounted. That is one of the big reasons I left the R party.
26 years dem governor 4 years pub governor. Currently in year 6 of dem governor. The legislature is red currently but was almost all blue for much of that time.
I have indeed retired this year. In addition, two of the best young teachers in my department quit and my principal quit this week to take a job outside of education. Also, one of our best math teachers left to teach in India as part of a missionary program. We’re really starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel. It’s also important to note that the school where I taught is an A school, we send about 30-35 kids to UF every year and have graduates that go to MIT, Georgia Tech, Vandy, etc. Also should remind some of you that the vast majority of students that go to UF (you know the one that you complain about being difficult to get in) are products of Florida public schools.
Here is some feedback from a teacher still in the biz. I moved to Alabama for a pay raise and to work in better schools. We've been planning to move for a while, always thought we would move back to Gainesville when we were done in St Augustine, but figured we may as well broaden our scope if we were going to make a move. At 15 years of experience and a masters degree, Alachua county schools would have paid me $52k/yr. The school district we ended up in has me at $69k/yr (and as a math and science teacher, after my first year in the state, I'm eligible for an annual 10K/yr bonus). The houses we were looking at in Gainesville would have required us to take on about $150k in debt. We paid cash for our house here. Combined with the lower insurance and property taxes, our housing costs will be lower by about $20k a year. A nice little boost to our family budget. Now that I think about it, a bigger boost to our budget than my salary after five years of teaching in Florida.
Those rankings put the most weight (10 points, everything else gets 5 or 2 or 1 points) on starting teacher salary. Florida has higher starting salary than most states. They just don't follow through after that. It would be interesting to see how the rankings would change if starting salary wasn't weighted so heavily.
Great, let’s start with the military to squeeze out its hundreds of billions of dollars of yearly waste and overspending to apply to paying down the national debt. Agreed?
Bad take. Saying anything red is fascist shows as much cognitive dissonance as saying anyone on the left is communist. It’s unproductive and cheapens any real dialog.
And kids finishing their PhD's as well as kids that graduated Cumma Sum Laude and top of their engineering class with 4.0 GPAs.