With all the commotion in Wisconsin over teacher benefits and collective bargaining, someone wrote a clever piece about "overpaid" teachers and how we should pay them what they're really worth as babysitters. I can't find the original source, so I'm quoting it here, and if anyone can find an attribution please let me know.
Are you sick of highly paid teachers?
Teachers' hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or 10 months a year! It's time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do - babysit!
We can get that for less than minimum wage.
That's right. Let's give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and plan-- that equals 6 1/2 hours).
Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now how many students do they teach in a day...maybe 30? So that's $19.50 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 needs new batteries).
What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master's degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.
Wait a minute -- there's something wrong here! There sure is!
The average teacher's salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student--a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!) WHAT A DEAL!!!!
The truth is that while teachers do perform very important work, and there are plenty of teachers out there that deserve far more than they make, there is also truth to there being too many teachers in the system that don't deserve what they get. Just like in every other job.
Sadly, I can't go to my employer and demand more money and petition the state legislature to give my employer more money to give to me and campaign for federal politicians that promise to give my employer more money that will benefit me.
I haven't seen a raise for about 2 1/2 years as my employer has been struggling. In fact, I took a 60% pay cut for 5 months last year, and am still off 20% from what I was making. During that entire time, my wife (a public school teacher) has continued to earn more each year thanks to automatic cost of living adjustments. It's not a lot, but it's more than most people in the private sector enjoy, especially in these times of extremely high unemployment and even worse underemployment.
People paid from the tax coffers, regardless of how valuable their contributions are, need to understand that when so many people are making do with less it doesn't look very good to be complaining about losing some benefits. Even if those private sector employees haven't lost their job or suffered a pay cut, the absence of cost of living adjustments in many private sector employment packages means that the same dollars are worth less today than they were last year.
We're all in this together, and government leaders and workers have to start accepting the reality that when tax payers are making do with less, government at every level might just have to do so as well.
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