I am– forgive me for knowing about this, much less bringing it up– kind of really enjoying the Sinead O’Connor/Miley Cyrus thing going on right now.  The first one was just interesting in an intellectual sort of “hey, this happened” kind of way; the second one interests me as a writer.  I knew Sinead O’Connor was kinda fucked up but I wasn’t aware she had a bitchy side and I certainly wasn’t aware that her bitchy side was awesome.  The second letter has this wonderful sort of “Ok, look, we can end this now, but here are my knives if you are foolish” sort of feel to it, as if O’Connor has absorbed Cyrus’ semiliterate trailer trash Twitter response to her initial letter, shrugged, and moved Miley to her mental “destroy” file.  The phrase “you have one last chance” doesn’t appear anywhere in the letter, but it should.  I really hope there’s a third.

I mean, Christ, the line “You could really do with educating yourself, that is if you’re not too busy getting your tits out to read” is art.

I voted to approve the contract, but I’m not terribly happy about it.  Oh, it’s not bad, as they go– we’re getting a small stipend this year basically just for the hell of it and we actually get our first real raise in seven years (two whole percent!) next year, that is assuming we don’t get placed in one of the two lowest evaluation categories.  More money is good.  I like money, even if 2% after having frozen salaries since 2007 is kind of bullshit.  It’s still better than the no-money we’ve been getting on the last several contracts.

The problem is that this round of negotiation really has driven home one important fact for me:  That two percent hike got eaten by inflation years ago.  We are never really getting a raise again, and by “we” in this case I basically mean all of Indiana’s teachers.  I get a yearly pay raise at my fucking minigolf job, people.  The way things used to work, we got yearly step increases until you hit sixteen years of experience and after that you’re depending on actual increases to the pay scale (ie, “raises”) for any further increase in salary.  What this meant is that if you stuck it out long enough eventually everybody made the same amount– sixteen years is a long time, granted, but it leveled you out sooner or later.

Now?  Anyone in my district who makes more money than me right now is going to make more than me forever, and anyone under me– particularly anyone unfortunate enough to have started in the last few years since even step increases became impossible– is going to make less than me forever.  There’s no merit pay of any kind that can increase salary– not that I even think that’s a good idea, mind you– and no bonuses for good performance.  There’s only the stick; you don’t get any raise of any kind if you end up in the lowest two evaluation categories, but it’s not like you get more money if you get a superior ranking.

It’s unfair in a way that I really, really don’t like.  Teaching is already a career with effectively no mobility– a teacher is a teacher is a teacher and while most districts do name team leaders and things like that (a job I’ve held myself on a few occasions) there is no actual salary increase attached to that.  As a teacher, I’ll never be anyone’s boss unless I move to administration– which isn’t teaching.  There’s literally no way to be promoted.  Which means that the fact that there are teachers in my district who not only make ten grand more than me but will make ten grand more than me forever really stick in my craw.  Similarly, I’m mentoring a first-year teacher this year; I make fifteen thousand dollars a year or so more than she does and I will make fifteen thousand dollars a year or so more than her forever, until she wises up and realizes that spending her entire life making $32,000 a year is untenable.  (She gets a raise to $34,000 in 2014-15; the poor schmucks stuck in the bottom two pay steps get a little bump.  But she’ll be stuck there forever.)  Once she realizes that she can make better money and have much less stress in her life doing something else, she’ll be gone, and she’ll be replaced by another 22-year-old making the same $34K that she did until she quit.

Note, also, that while teachers making more than base pay will be quitting a lot, or retiring, they will only be being replaced by teachers making base pay.  Which means that you travel far enough down the road– and I bet it won’t be more than seven or ten years– and something perilously close to all of us will be stuck at that base pay level.  Which people will put up with until they have kids, then they’ll move on to jobs where they’re actually treated like educated professionals, and kiss teaching in a public school district goodbye.

Which is a feature, and not a bug.  This is what they want, and this is what state law is written to do.

I fucking hate Indiana.