Tipsheet

NM Rep. Teresa Fernandez Gets Schooled After Saying Teachers Work Harder Than Elon Musk

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  November 20, 2025 11:00 AM

There are many good teachers out there. This writer knows many teachers and loves one in particular. But there are also many bad teachers, and it shows in test scores and the decline in the quality of American education.

COVID and "remote learning" made those problems known to the public for the first time and things haven't improved in the half-decade since. But for Democratic Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (NM-03), teachers can do no wrong and the problem with everything is Elon Musk.

Why? Because Musk, thanks to his innovative hard work at Tesla, SpaceX, X, and elsewhere, has a lot of money and makes more than all U.S. elementary school teachers combined.

The assertion itself isn't accurate. Musk's wealth isn't income. It's largely tied up in his companies and other assets, but we wouldn't expect Rep. Fernandez to understand that.

Someone who worked for Musk said the man works seven days a week, often long hours.

"Usually around 2 am, he’d go take a nap for a couple hours in the office and then repeat the same schedule again the next day with a different set of companies, 7 days a week," Chris wrote.

Teachers, because of the school schedule, have summers off. They also get time off during the year for holidays, parent-teacher conferences, and even election days.

On top of all that, the state of American education is, in a word, abysmal.

Reading and math scores showed significant declines for students in multiple grade levels, especially from 2022 to 2024. High school seniors' reading and math scores were the lowest since the beginning of the current assessments, and 2022 reading scores for 13-year-olds were the lowest in more than 30 years, while math scores were the lowest since 2005.

The achievement gap is also widening, with lower-performing students lagging even further behind.

In September, The New York Times reported that the significant declines are now impacting both the college and labor markets.

“My students now, they leave high school and don’t have the capacity to read a lengthy 25-page article. They don’t know what to do with it,” said Deepak Sarma, a humanities professor at Case Western Reserve University, where the average reported SAT score is between 1440 and 1520. Dr. Sarma recently counseled a student daunted by a dense academic article, suggesting basic tactics like printing it out in order to highlight and underline key passages.

...

Fundamental reading and math skills are needed for a wide range of jobs, employers and industry leaders said, from health care workers calculating medication dosage and documenting patient care to truck drivers navigating the nation’s highways.

“There is a lot of math that you don’t necessarily think about,” said Lindsey Trent, president of the Next Generation in Trucking Association, a trade group, who said that even entry-level drivers must be able to calculate weight distributions on their trucks and estimate mileage without exceeding federal limits for hours on the road.

Randall Stephenson, who was the chief executive of AT&T from 2007 until 2020, said that during his tenure, the company screened candidates for math and other basic skills, which often required going through a large pool of candidates to make a single hire.

And, of course, "work ethic" and "hard work" should not be the metrics here. Some teachers work very hard at indoctrinating their students into Leftist nonsense. What matters is whether or not these teachers are good at what they do. It appears many of them are not.

Elon Musk is. That's why he's a billionaire.