Teachers

For years I've been saying that the reason teachers don't get paid enough is that we've cleverly wrapped it in a soft, comforting blanket of "it's a woman's job." Which means we can say things like I did HERE:

But oh, we tell ourselves, teaching is a higher calling, teachers do it cause they love it! They’d do it for free; they’re thrilled to be getting anything!!! Meanwhile we pay janitors at these schools twice as much – I guess we think of janitors as being an ambitious, money-hungry conniving bunch, so it’s okay to pay them. We applaud Wall Street hotshots who sit at a big desk moving money around on the internet and own three Porsches, but get bent out of shape whenever the people that stay with our children all day, teach them how to read and write, try to teach them right and wrong, protect them and drive them to away games get uppity and demand a real salary. We expect them to do all the above for almost nothing cause that’s the way it always has been (ie has historically been a woman’s job), and then we wonder why we’re getting dumber and dumber every year. It’s not that Johnny can’t read - it’s that instead of becoming teachers, the people who COULD teach Johnny to read took the job of placing those cakes in the urinals since it pays more and you get pissed on less.

By "we" of course I mean "men." And then today it occurred to me to look up the list of Secretary of Education. To whit:

So we let ourselves off the hook for underpaying teachers cause it's a woman's job. And then who do we put up at the top of the field torun things? A man.

Now, I'm not saying a man CAN'T or SHOULDN'T do the job. But 7 out of 9? 7 out of the last 8? REEEally? Hmm. IT's a mystery!!