teacher pay

I may be a bit off in the projections of this exercise but it illustrates the problem.

I happen to know the rough spending of our parochial school.  80% of the budget is salaries, but deducting janitor, cook, secretary and principal salaries, it leaves teacher salaries about 67-70% of total budget.  The school gets $3600 in tuition and fees per student.  Students who belong to the congregation pay no tuition and they represent 20% of the students.  

So do the math.  If a class has 20 students, 16 of them paying, it garners $57,600.  Then 2/3 of that represents a teacher salary of  $38,300.  Indeed this is about 85% of the Oklahoma average teacher salary of $44,500. 

Turn the problem around do it again if you are a public school teacher.  Oklahoma and federal governments pay about $9000 per student to the public school.  20 students garner $180,000.  If teacher salaries represented 67% of the school’s budget this works out to $120,000 for an average teacher’s pay.  Do you make that much?

This illustrates that teacher salaries are an also-ran in school district expenditures.  We spend a lot of money on sports and activities, busing and on administrative duties.  Combine this with the testing mandates and the lack of freedom to teach and you can see why our public school is doing well to make grade but our parochial school puts out an average 8^th grader with 11.6 grade level skills. I don’t mean to rag on admin too much.  The parents and community demand the games and plays and musical events.  The feds demand the lunches and mainstreamed kids who disrupt class.  The State demands testing for achievement. 

But the bottom line is that teachers would make a lot more money if there was a voucher system paying $9K per student for education to the best school.  And those public schools would revamp to a system much like the 60’s and the parochial schools, thus paying teachers better.