Month: February 2011

Are you sick of highly paid teachers?

~ Tara Sitser ~ Leave a comment

I couldn’t have said it better so I’m quoting a recent post by Meredith Menden:

“Teachers’ hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or10 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 $3.00 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

(nation wide) 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!!!!

Make a teacher smile; repost this to show appreciation for all educators.

Update: I’m glad that many people have shown their support for teachers by reposting this note, but I am not the original author. I received this as an anonymous chain letter email, and I wanted to share it to support the public workers of Wisconsin.”

A Chance for Publicly Funded Campaigns in California

~ Tara Sitser ~ Leave a comment

Are you aware that most of our elected officials spend 1/3 of their day fund-raising for their next election instead of doing the people’s business?

Most of our economic and social justice problems can be traced to corporate donations buying our politicians and civic leaders. Money from special interests corrupts the system and drives up the cost of winning an election making it virtually impossible to run for office without huge sums of money from large corporate donors.

On March 8 California has an opportunity to level the playing field by passing Measure H. Public funding is a system that is working in 8 states and has a proven track record of removing the conflict of interest that exists when politicians are beholden to the corporate donors that support their campaigns.

Measure H will allow those elected officials who opt to use public funds to actually do their jobs instead of spending 30% of their time fund-raising for their next election.

Please read about Measure H and do what you can to support its passage. The Yes on H web site will answer all your questions.

http://www.yesfairelections.org/