Teachers Salary -
January 8, 2010 in HUMOUR
Aren’t you sick of all those overpaid teachers??
Their hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work nine or ten months a year! It’s time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do… baby-sit!
We can get that for less than minimum wage. That is right. I would give them $3.00 dollars an hour and only the hours they worked, not any of that silly planning time.
That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 AM to 4:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch).
Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children.
Now, how many do they teach in a day… maybe 30? So that’s 19.5 X 30 = $585.00 a day. However, remember they only work 180 days a year! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.
Let’s see . . . that’s $585 x 180 = $105,300 per year.
(Hold on! My calculator must need batteries!)
What about those special teachers and the ones with master’s degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage just to be fair, round it off to $7.00 an hour. That would be $7 times 6-1/2 hours times 30 children times 180 days =$245,700.00 per year.
Wait a minute, there is something wrong here!
There sure is, duh!
(Average teacher salary $50,000/180 days = $277per day/30 students = $9.23/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student.) Very inexpensive babysitter and they even educate your kids! Crazy!
Alison Earp said on January 8, 2010
About time someone put this in perspective, Thanks S. Ali
ZenTiger said on January 8, 2010
Good teachers deserve good pay, no issue there. Just to quibble on how costs are worked out though: The entire fee is not just to cover a teachers salary. It has to cover buildings, materials and administrative staff. Then there’s the curriculum design, relief teacher costs and so forth.
Throw in a large bureaucracy supporting it, and we can see why taxpayers have to pump in a significant chunk of tax to provide for education.
I suspect we’d get better value by reducing the government’s total involvement in education. Taxes could go down, and teachers salaries would likely go up. The good ones would command a market premium as they should, so schools attracted students. A much longer conversation than a quick blog comment…
scrubone said on January 11, 2010
Yes, one could use logic like this to all sort of situations.
Most cashiers process transactions far in excess of their wage – should they get paid more?
What about factory workers – their machine might produce tens of thousands of dollars of value a day, yet they might only earn $15/hr as a base rate.