The Observer's uninformed meh on teacher pay

The Texas Observer remains alive, unpaywalled, ad-free and otherwise mismanaged. I take that back; it has a house ad on the website asking for my suckers to pound a new load of sand down a rathill. It does have a halfway good story on underfunding of schools, but, what makes this unique in a way that a story by the Trib or one of Texas' major metros doesn't cover? 

Answer? Nothing.

First, the "three-legged stool" framing isn't unique. 

And, as for no state income tax? (And, this is a shout-out to the likes of the Trib as wellas the Observer, if or when they go down the same road.) Even if Texas Democrats jefe Gilberto Hinojosa sees his wet dream of a Dem gov overseeing a Dem Lege come true, that ain't changing, unless I'm way mistaken. Besides, Texas is not the only state with no income tax. Florida, with higher incomes and more ritz than Tex-ass, is another. So why bring it up? (In addition, Wyoming, yet another state with no income tax, was the ONLY state to get a AAA rating from US News on school funding equality issues.)

And, beyond THAT? I've blogged before about MSM misframing of teacher pay nationally and other things, like Beto-Bob's pandering stupidity in Muleshoe last year. I'd like to know the dollar amount the teachers cited in detail by the Observer actually make.

Now, old jokes aside, I know that teachers (generally) aren't off most the summer. I do know that, in Merikka, they have benefits in most states that the average John/Jane Doe don't. As in, state retirement system that includes retirement medical insurance. Having extra retirement money, plus not having to work the Medicare safety "net" of tissue paper that many people have to, is a benefit there.

Maybe they can't work from home or do hybrid work, but in rural areas (back to you, Muleshoe Bob), about nobody does.

Other issues? The stats, including the one that the Observer cited not being quite right, and the many others it didn't cite, or made incorrect suggestions about.

As of 2021, Texas was square in the middle of student-teacher ratio, square in the middle of salaries, about right at No. 40 (not just six states lower) on funding, and only 17th-highest on percentage of funding coming from the local level. That comes from some wingnuts, right? Yep, the notorious wingnuts at the National Educational Association.

And, that link and a couple of others came to me with 30 seconds of Googling. 

Would I pay for the Observer if it fully paywalled? Probably not. But, I mentioned paywalls plus advertising. And, until the mag gets over its purity test holiness (and, on management, has an actual publisher, not the Texas Democracy Foundation board of directors), I won't give it money.

And, yes, I am going to hammer this a little bit.