are school teacher truly underpaid....let's take a look...

i hear constantly that school teachers are highly underpaid. now the state of florida is considering going to a 4 day work week for teachers...to save money. i think this is a highly stupid idea. here's why.

think back to when you were in grade school. you gto 2months of summer vacation. couple of weeks of winter vacation. a week of spring break. lots of holidays. basically you were in school maybe half a year when you total it all up. it was awesome i admit. then think about after school when you got a job. what happened. no summer break ever again. no winter break ever again. very few holidays. no spring break. only a measly week or 2 week of vacation after so mnay years of employment. it's no wonder kids doing so poorly. we set them up for disappointment from the very get go. in my opinion school should be year round with a week off at summer and a week off at winter and only a few holidays off. make it closer to what the real world is like.

anyways...so i did some calculations of how many hours a teacher works in my county based on the school board calendar that show how mnay days teachers are truly working. it shows they spend 1080 hours a year actually working. now this doesn't account for their 2 week paid vacation. nor their numerous paid personal leave days, nor their numerous paid sick leave days. so let's take out their paid 2 weeks of vacation to make it closer to a true full time working man/woman. so they are working 1000 hours a year...not counting all their extra paid off days.

so a true working person who makes around 40k in salary is putting in 50 hour weeks. minus their two weeks paid vacation a year brings us to 2520 hours a year.

so let's say a teacher only makes 20k a year. so if we compared it to the wroking man/woman's salary yeah they appear underpaid..until we look at hours worked. wehn we calculate their wages per hour...not counting benefits or pensions, etc. they are making pre tax....$20.00 an hour. not too shabby, eh? the working man/woman is making based on the same criteria as the teacher....$15.87 an hour. hummm.....interesting huh? seems the teacher is being paid pretty damn well by the hour.

let's take a tenured teacher who makes around 50k a year...and compare them to a full time private employed worker who makes 70k a year. the teacher would make $50.00 an hour. the 70k paid employee would make $27.77 an hour. wow!!! what the f' are these teachers complaining about. if we took that same teacher and took out of the hours worked their personal leave days and medical days that are paid...they would be close to $60 an hour.

are you seeing a pattern here? seems teachers are being paid pretty damn well, and should stop complaining about pay and spend more time teaching. this is not much different than any unionized job. this is what unions do make things plain stupid and then try to twist the facts. this also applise to pretty much all govt employees. they make a good salry and then add the paid vacations, sick days and personal leave days, pensions, and the best medical coverage you can't buy, and it's no wonder we have to keep borrowing money from china to keep things running.

so to cut out all the teacher union nonsense used as a counter arguement...first they get a lunch break...so i took that out of their hours. then they say they are grading papers at home, etc. except they get a paid planning period at school to do this. some choose to chit chat with their buddies rather than grade papers or plan or do any work. then let's discuss their actual teaching work. some do actual teaching and do a great job. no complaints from me. others and this would cover a large protion have kids read their books while they sit and read themselves or do other non teaching stuff. so let's not pretend these teachers are being over worked or underpaid. we are paying the heavily for what they are doing. if they choose to not work a opart time job to match the hours most full time workers have to work..then they can't really sit back and work half the hours a standard full time worker works and complain about being underpaid or over worked, now can they.

i am sick and tired of govt workers making more money and benefits than us private citizens who pay their wages, do. i think we should pay all govt workers minimum wage. one of two things would happen...either we'd only get people who want to make a difference and don't care about money...or minimum wage would go up. either way we wouldn't get any worse service than we do now while paying top dollar for flunkies.