Posted on 09/01/2011 7:30:31 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
And you can pay a $2/hr. man $10/hr., but he'll still be a $2/hr. man.
Old wisdom from when $10/hr. was a lot of money.
Some people say that we should be paying teachers what they are worth, but that won’t work because teachers have to eat the same as everyone else.
ditto.
Problem with that is that if you are getting $2/hr per kid, the school would have to get $10/hr. per kid to pay all the overhead.
I have a relative who tried to do just that and she nearly got fired for her efforts. She's now on "probation" and doesn't know if she'll get a contract next year. Union "educators don't give a damn about students or teaching. They're only interested in their own salaries, benefits, vacation time, job rules and retirement funds. Teachers who actually try to do their jobs are punished.
I would not necessarily object to that IF...
1) The teachers were competent and could do their job
2) There were no barriers to firing teachers who are found to be incompetent and cannot do the job.
How about a property tax rebate/exemption for home schoolers or those without children?
Washington state has a teacher contract where the teachers work 168 days a year; this does NOT include personal days off (10) or sick leave. So, let's do a little math, shall we?
365 days a year, 104 days for weekends = 261 days. The average worker gets 10 Holidays, 5 sick days, and 10 vacation days. This means the average american works 236 days a year.
So teachers work 168 days, and everyone else works 236 days (not counting the Personal Days on teachers). 168/236 = 71%, or stated another way - teachers work ~29% fewer days than anyone else. They also have tenure (who else has such a wonderful 'gift'?), they are elgible to retirement programs no one else is elgible to get, they have pensions, and in many cases - far better medical insurance than the average consumer has access to.
When is the last time you heard a retail manager whine about his hours and pay? How about the engineer, who works far more hours, with far more stress; only to be laid off? Care to compare the difficulty of engineering ciriculmn to teachers?
Yet, we hear nothing but incessant whining from Teachers.
Finally, look at the output. How has the 'product' that teachers have produced tracked? Are they doing a better job, or is their quality continuously going down? If an engineer had 1 semester with his quality dropping - he'd be fired; let alone decades of continuous decline.
$2 an hour per student X 25 students per class = $50 an hour.
$50 an hour times a 6 hours of actual teaching time = $300 a day.
$300 a day times 160 day school year = $48,000
Are you Ok with that or would it be a better idea to be a math teacher? Just having a bit of fun with you.
I’m sure you are a wonderful English teacher.
If a teacher is competent, if his/her students actually succeed, progress according to high standards, get into college, become productive citizens ...yes.
If they continue to churn out illiterates who are pregnant before high school is over, can’t crack a book, barely read ...well, no.
For the most part what we have is the latter — so honestly, these teachers need to be fired first and their lifelong bennies ended. Then we can begin to determine who is actually successful and reward them accordingly.
But that’s not the system we have now.
Get rid of the NEA, reduce the strength of public school employee unions involvment is curriculum, end the policy of allowing people who work in cubicles in some government office to control curriculum decisions while giving parents more control, revamp tenure such that is isn’t obtained after just two years, but has a minimum of 5 years to acquisition (10 years would be better), change the laws that allow publishers to force school districts to purchase new text books every couple of years (a huge drain on school district budgets), and there will be enough money to increase teacher pay for those who perform well.
THEN they would be paid like engineers
.
Compared to childcare, you get a subsidized deal having your kids in school.
Sorry, you are correct. I stand corrected.
There have been NO NO NO studies done that prove teachers in a typical institutional-type school teach anything at all!!! It is UNKNOWN how much the parent contributes to a child learning to read and how much is due to any classroom instruction.
I have an e-mail from a professor of education at Stanford that explains this. If you would like I will send it to you via freepmail.
When teachers know as much as engineers, they should be paid as much. Thisk differential equations, strength of materials, thermodynamics, dynamics, etc.
Only if we had the Federal Gov't grant hundreds of thousands of H1-B visa's to bring in additional 'teachers' to help keep the wages low.
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