At some point in your life you may have come across a little post about how if we would just pay teachers as if they were babysitters, they would be some of the highest earning professionals in the country.
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 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 (nationwide) 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!
Well now that I’ve lived in my house for a year and have paid my property taxes for the first time, it made me think about this little story.
This story makes me angry because it leaves out the fact that millions of people (like me) every year are paying hundreds or thousands of dollars in taxes for schools, and we don’t even have kids. If we are going to base teacher pay on how much it costs to babysit children like this author suggests, then I should be paying $0 since I am not asking the school district to babysit any kids.
And to clarify, I understand that there is benefit to living in a place where children are educated. I’m just addressing this unknown author who wants to talk about paying for babysitting.
Let’s Do The Math
According to this story, a parent should pay $19.50 per day directly to the teacher for each child they have in school. The story also says teachers work 180 days a year. That means the teacher should be paid $3,510 for each kid during a school year. At 30 kids per class, that comes to $105,300 per year.
Well I was looking at my property taxes for the year, and guess what? It turns out I paid $2,860 to my local public school district over the last 12 months. And my house is probably $75,000 or $100,000 below the median home value in my city. That means a lot of my neighbors are paying something as much or more than that $3,510 amount.
And guess what? I don’t have any kids.
I paid almost $3,000 to my local school district this year not for teaching my kids. Not even for babysitting my kids. I paid that money for other people’s children.
Let’s Look at the Real Numbers
I did some research. The school district where I live employs 675 teachers. The budget for this school district is $125,345,727.
If we were to split up that money evenly among the 675 teachers, each one would earn $185,697 per year. That’s way better than the $105,300 this little story asks for.
However, I realize teachers aren’t the only expense for a school district. Let’s say the district uses half that money (or $62.7 million) to pay for school buildings, utilities, supplies, administrators, etc. That still leaves each teacher making an average of $92,848.
Too bad that number is far from reality. I found one source that says teachers in my school district make an average of $47,888 a year.
I Pay Enough Taxes
This “Pay Teachers Like Babysitters” story makes me angry because it is directed towards the general public, as if people aren’t paying enough in taxes to give teachers good salaries.
I’ve been paying property taxes since I was 19 years old (I wasn’t paying them directly when I rented apartments, but the taxes were definitely built into my rent) and I’ve yet to even think about putting a kid in a public school. I bet I’ve paid anywhere between $15,000 and $30,000 over the last ten years directly to local public schools.
Then I’ll probably have a few kids in public schools for about 15-20 years, and then once my kids graduate and leave the school system, (when I’m around 50 years old) I’ll be paying thousands of dollars to the local school district for another 30 or 40 years without having any children in school.
Before I die I will have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars directly to public schools through taxes. I say that’s enough.
There are also people who never have kids, or those who pay for private schools. Those people will pay all this money without ever having a child spend a day in a public school.
In conclusion, if teachers in my local school district want to get paid more then I would encourage them to ask for a bigger piece of that $125 million pie instead of asking me and all my neighbors (many of whom don’t even have kids in public schools) to pay more taxes.
More Teacher Pay Posts
Here are a few more of my posts on teacher pay. This is an interesting topic for me since my mom, father-in-law, and sister-in-law are all teachers.
Readers: We haven’t touched this subject in a while. How do you feel about teacher pay?
Kevin McKee is an entrepreneur, IT guru, and personal finance leader. In addition to his writing, Kevin is the head of IT at Buildingstars, Co-Founder of Padmission, and organizer of Laravel STL. He is also the creator of www.contributetoopensource.com. When he’s not working, Kevin enjoys podcasting about movies and spending time with his wife and four children.
Here’s the thing about teacher’s salaries. Teaching was never supposed to be a high-paying job. That is why tenure was invented. As a teacher, you make the sacrifice of a lucrative career to help better the lives of children. As your reward, you are guaranteed employment and retirement. That is the balance! There has to be that balance!
When teachers get tenure (so they can never be fired) and get high salaries, then that’s when you get teachers who don’t care about their job. They won’t lose it, and they’re getting paid a ton, so then they stop caring.
Actually, tenure was never created as a form of compensation for lack of salary. It was created as a form of protection for professions that might fear retaliation for making unpopular decisions they believed were right. In this way, it is a method of preserving the ethics of the profession.
For careers such as professors or judges, the only other professions that I know of where tenure exists, this makes perfect sense. For teachers, it makes considerably less sense.
Source: http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1859505,00.html
The main problem is that public schools here in Texas are WAY administration top-heavy. And that problem is getting worse. The schools spend more time and money on screening kids using metal detectors than they do trying to teach them anything. (Which, BTW, would become completely unnecessary if we ditched the fantasy “gun-free” zones. Back when I was in high school, I carried a knife — all four years — and never had an incident with it.)
If you are so inclined, see if you can locate the place where your local school board meets. I’d be willing to bet money they meet in a luxuriously paneled room in a dedicated building, and sit in $500 chairs. If you should ask them about any of that, they will be absolutely appalled at the idea that you might think that was a little over the top.
Which is why a voucher system is a REALLY good idea, and is also why the public schools are violently opposed to anything that might force them into delivering a quality product in order to compete.
I’m a public school teacher, and the concept of tenure is foreign to me. Do teachers get tenure in public schools? I thought tenure was just something college professors got.
As a teacher, I’m not looking for more money. I knew what I was getting into when I started teaching, and I feel the trade-offs are worth it. What I do want is less crap! Every year a new government program telling us how to do what we’ve been doing for years. New plans to pay teachers based on how good they are…but the way teacher’s “merit” is determined is by kids’ test scores. So if we teach in lower-income areas or with mostly non-native-English speakers or (heaven forbid) teach kids who just don’t care about their standardized testing, that means WE are bad teachers and deserve even less than we’re making. I just want to teach. I’m find with continuing education and working with other teachers to improve what I’m doing, but the government spends millions of dollars to produce new curriculum (No Child Left Behind, Common Core) and all that happens is the teachers get more grief and the kids get more testing. Frustrating!!
I do believe more money CAN help education, but only if sensible people figure out where to put it. Put another aide in every classroom. Cut class sizes down by 20%. Those are things that would help. Develop another program and new testing that costs millions…not a help!
Tenure has been established for teachers in public schools in all the states I’ve lived in (Michigan, New Jersey, and New York).
Good teachers are definitely not paid enough. When you think about the ripple effect they essentially create by educating 30 students each year who then eventually go on to do good things in the world. Of course, the answer of how to gauge whether a teacher is good or not is a tough nut to crack. Just subjecting students to tests is useless because it just leads to teaching to the test and doesn’t inspire a drive to continue learning outside the class room.
It would be interesting to see some historical data for your district of what the teacher’s pay was in comparison to the overall budget. There is a lot more technology in a class room now than there was 15 years ago. I wonder if budget increases have to be used more for technology upgrades vs increasing the teacher’s pay.
Hi Kevin,
I would like to offer two points for you to keep in mind:
1) I do not believe there is a state in the US where 100% of the property tax goes towards education (it’s more like ~50%, typically, but don’t quote me on that :>). I would encourage you to look it up in your area, just to get an idea of how where exactly that money is going, and how much.
2) You may not have kids now, but I’m guessing you might in the future. Perhaps you would find it more palatable to ‘not’ think of your taxes as paying for a service, but rather as an insurance policy. You pay a little every year to avoid paying ‘a lot’ all at once when you might not be ready for it.
That number is the amount that goes towards my local school district. My total property tax us over $5k for the year.
Great! In that case, I would take it a step further: All tax expenditures are public knowledge, from facility costs, all the way to the individual salaries of specific teachers. I think this type of community awareness is sorely missing in our society. Who knows? You might find something interesting ;>.
There are a lot of municipal, statewide, and federal expenditures that I don’t support. But the truth of the matter is that these expenditures are what differentiates us from other towns, states, and countries. If your municipality spends a good portion of its property taxes on its schools, then I’m willing to bet that it translates into higher property values in your town because it’s a more desirable place to live.
I know that doesn’t make paying taxes much less painful, but whenever it pains me to fork over the dough, I think of all the expenditures I do support with my taxes — like the National Parks and the Smithsonian Museums. Whenever I’m in DC or the Grand Canyon, I think of visiting “my” museums and “my”park.
Haha, that is so stupid, Rebecca. Try visiting “your” museums” and “your” park next time the government throws a fit over not being allowed to steal more money from the taxpayers or borrow us into oblivion.
Also, your example about higher property values does not make sense to me…Wouldn’t you rather save a few THOUSAND dollars per year, than be able to say that you have “higher property values in your town?” What is the benefit of having higher property values? It is a zero sum game…your house will cost more when you buy it, and it will sell for more when you decide to leave that town, but it will have a net neutral effect on you! So, wouldn’t you rather have a few thousand dollars that you can KEEP each year?
Here is something to think about:
The average person moves once every 7 years.
Using Kevin’s example of $2,860 worth of taxes going towards public education per year, after 7 years he will have contributed $20,020 towards his local school district.
That’s a whole lot of coin.
Hey Kevin, one more thing to think about: What about the cost of all those pensions for retired school teachers? My father in law retired at 58 and still receives 60% of his last year’s salary ($110,000 in 2011 in NY state) in the form of his pension. I’m happy for my Father in law, but I can’t help but feel like this is kind of excessive… My concern is that we won’t be able to make good on all these extravagant promises we’ve made to our public sector and union workers. And then when the pension funds run out, the government comes in and bails out these states, cities and businesses that have made terrible financial decisions at an ultimate cost to American taxpayers in states that have enough common sense to keep their financial house in order.
As a teacher, of course I don’t think our pay equates to the amount of education we need to actually obtain a job. However, as a public servant (salaries paid via tax dollars) I can’t justify raising taxes when it wouldn’t necessarily increase salaries. Unfortunately there is so much bureaucracy within school districts, it’s hard to say where all the money goes. Case in point: I work for the second largest school district in the nation and every year they can’t account for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Teachers also haven’t received a raise in 8 years.
I understand your complaint – paying taxes for something you aren’t using right now (or may never), but it’s better to have an educated public, don’t you think? It benefits everyone – parent or non-parent.