A website called Value Penguin, which rates things like credit cards and health insurance, has come out with a list of the best cities in which to live and work as a teacher.
The list ranks Detroit, as the third-best large city.
Detroit teachers are puzzled about why their city — best known for crime, perpetually failing auto companies and abandoned buildings — is so high on Value Penguin’s list.
“I’m not sure how that could be,” Detroit public school teacher Tracy Arneau told the Detroit Free Press, after she stopped laughing.
Arneau noted that many Motor City teachers “don’t have supplies.” Reductions to benefits packages could be on the horizon as well.
Steve Conn, a high school teacher and former president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, opined to the Free Press that Detroit’s high ranking is “totally absurd.”
Conn faced internal misconduct charges before the teachers union’s executive board this summer for allegedly affiliating the union with By Any Means Necessary, a radical affirmative action group, without rank-and-file consent. (RELATED: Activists To UMich: Admit Unqualified Students, If They Are Black)
Meanwhile, at Value Penguin, associate editor Andrew Pentis defended Detroit’s high ranking.
The New York-based research outfit based its rankings largely on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics when it designated Detroit as third in the big-city category behind San Diego and Oakland, Calif. (“Big city” is defined as having a population over 500,000.)
“It can be seen as limited in scope because again, we are only looking at certain metrics instead of boots on the ground,” Pentis told the Free Press.
The “human element” is missing, he admitted.
Also missing. it seems, is the fact that an emergency manager has run Detroit Public Schools for over six years now.
Teacher salaries have been frozen since 2012.
At the same time, teachers’ salaries in Detroit are very cushy. State figures show that an average teacher in the Detroit Public Schools has an annual income of $62,112, not including the benefits package.
Median household income in Detroit is $26,325 per year, according to the United Census Bureau. Thus, in a year, a typical teacher in a public school classroom in Detroit makes over 230 percent of the income of an average Detroit household.
In the spring of 2015, teachers at Coleman A. Young Elementary in Detroit sent a letter home with children threatening the little kids with suspension if their parents did not show up to a parent-teacher meeting related to a big Common Core-related standardized test then on the horizon. (RELATED: Detroit Public School To SUSPEND KIDS If Parents Miss Common Core Test Meeting)
Last month, Playboy named Detroit America’s least sexy city.
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