Assuming your numbers below are correct (and I believe them to be quite inflated), we should not necessarily be paying our teachers more because of the amount we are putting out, we should find out where the hell all that money is going. When we know that and take care of the buracratic financial drain, we can then decide whether we should now increase salary, leave it the same, decrease it or what not. We don't pay the teacher, we pay the taxes, which pays the government which pays the hog that is the school buracracy and they decide what to pay the teachers. If they take 95% off the top and the teachers are still paid adequately, the problem is not the teachers pay, it is what the 95% is being used for. We need to look at the entire picture and fix the system, teachers are but a fraction of the cost. Tom Veldhouse veldy at veldy.net > 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... > _______________________________________________ > tclug-list mailing list > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >