Phil Mendelsohn wrote: > > On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, Troy.A Johnson wrote: > > > >>> kethry at Winternet.com 06/21/01 11:15AM >>> > > >35,000/year to teach our children is definitely way under paid! > > > > And what would be a decent wage for this vocation? > > You don't have kids, do you? How much would a year would we have to pay > *you* to do it full-time? :) > We can play some numbers games: Let's say a teacher has 24 students, and lets say the average funding per child is $11,000. per student per year ($11,000 is what it was two years ago in Mpls. I don't know what it is today but I think I'm safe in betting it isn't less). So, each teacher generates about 24*$11,000 or $264,000 (from the bash command line you can get that by typing expr 24 '*' 11000, to give some linux relevancy here). Let's give the teacher $60,000 for 180 days work (If I had that wage rate I would be making $80,000 for my 240 days work). Figure about 20% overhead for sick leave, insurance, etc..., so the teacher costs about $72,000. That leaves $192,000.00 per classroom for overhead (and it is overhead - we are paying to have our kids taught). It seems pretty apparent we could afford to pay our teachers high salaries at the current funding levels. We could pay reasonable salaries at a significanly lower funding level. I think Liz said she was paying $800 / month for her child to go to a private school. This works out to about $7200/year. This is a lot less than our public schools spend per student. Oh well. Maybe the taxpayers should hire the teacher unions public relations person...