Teachers in Texas writing their wills before classes begin again

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

I prepared an informal will and made sure the right beneficiaries were marked on my retirement accounts and pension during the first week of this whole thing. What took them so long?

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

American teachers are the seventh highest paid in the world - effectively behind the Low Countries and the Germanic countries. Austria and maybe Germany are the only ones where we should be striving to be better than, but it's already close enough. The way to "catch up" is by fixing the Oklahoma/West Virginia problem far more than by further increasing the bloated budgets in Illinois, New York, New Jersey, etc. Texas is paid just fine by global standards.

Including total benefits is essential when comparing "salaries" across careers especially as pensions are increasingly less generous and as private employees barely stick around long enough for any meaningful vestment. The engineer for a private firm often must put tens of thousands of "salary" into savings each year to have the same pension output as the teacher. What people seem to be asking for is to make a job with months off into the highest paid profession with unmatched benefits as California, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and others can hardly handle the existing liabilities.