OK, my name is not Steve but since Obama used it for his middle name and polls show that women think it's sexier than my real name, I’ll use it.
I am a straight, white, Anglo-Saxon-Viking middle-aged male. What I am, also, is a public school teacher and I feel irritated over my place in this year’s elections. The reason I'm irritated is because it's useless to be pissed off.
What’s my place?
My economic and health care situation is not front page news. Hey, I get paid from collected taxes and my insurance is provided by a government entity. I am not a small business. If government is hurting for money, I’m told to forget about any cost-of-living increase. In fact, if it’s a contract negotiation year, the government will try to hold down my salary for as many years as possible while cutting any "extra" pay items like stipends for being a department chairperson, coach, club sponsor or after-school tutor. Some of my younger colleagues are simply cut loose. My insurance co-pays go up because the school district stops paying for a particular level of offered coverage, and goes "low," or shops for a cheaper coverage. Standard operational procedures for any local school board, carried out by a superintendent, is to get me to work longer hours with more students in my classroom for the same money with less benefits using last year’s materials. At the same time, I am judged by whether student scores have reached the desired level (not whether their scores have gone up; success is based upon the government’s definition of "proficient."). Despite moaning over economic difficulties, government will spend big bucks on outside consultants to come into the schools and tell employees how to be more efficient, more effective and generally more productive. Imagine that in your job; you should work more, get paid the same, have mediocre benefits, produce more and, if you don’t, the bosses will send in "suits."
I am not used as an example of a "typical American." Despite how one out of every two hundred American adults makes his or her grocery, clothing and mortgage or rent money by teaching, a "typical American" is exemplified by someone who sells something or builds something. I’m not sure if I can be happy about this but the general public doesn’t seem to hold my job in disdain anymore. Now I’m pitied. It’s that or I’m ripped-off; somebody discovered that polls show that teachers are highly trusted so now every clown politician or political operative tries to claim the mantel of "educator." Oh sure, there are plenty of people who still have contempt for teachers. People who have salaries three, four and five times my own question why any college graduate would want to be a teacher unless they were lazy or incompetent. You know who else shows contempt for teachers? Any politician who says teachers ought to be paid more but does nothing about it. Any politician who says teachers can be recruited and put in a classroom without training, support or credentials. Any politician who says that young college graduates can teach for a while before they go off to do the really important things in their lives.
Let me close with the reality of my job, a reality politicians don’t like to face (Have you noticed how few politicians are former teachers? Oh, right, right; there are the ones who were "educators.") What goes on in my classroom is political fodder for how I’m failing, or how I need to get better, or how parents need to have a choice about whether I can do my job or whether they can take their tax money somewhere else. Congress enacted a law to hold me accountable for the educational achievement of young people but based the whole idea of success upon commercially-designed multiple choice tests. Some "reformers" want to take tax money and pay students who do well on those tests. Most seriously-considered "merit pay" proposals are based on whether an individual teacher’s students scored the appropriate magic number while bypassing the teachers who are given the job of teaching the low-achieving students. Oh sure there are merit pay proposals based on growth but they are rarely considered as seriously as models that would affect local real estate values positively.
The fact is that teachers are our society’s last line of defense before law enforcement or military action. We’re not supported; we’re not envied; politicians talk about what we should do but not what they’ll do for us and average Americans, who for twelve years saw us and dealt with us more than they dealt with their parents, expect us to make sure their kids turn out better than they did.
(A P.S. last stab: Hey, has infrastructure, green-jobs economic stimulation caught your fancy? How about insulating the ceilings, installing attic fans and mounting solar panels on top of every school building from California to Texas?)