Parade Of Stupid

Stoopid shit we say about teachers:

"Teachers are just glorified babysitters."

So let's pay 'em according to current babysitting rates.
($10/hour x 6 hours) = $60/day
($60/day x 5 days/week) = $300/week
($300/week x 36 weeks) = $10,800/year
($10,800/year x 30 kids) - (30% discount group rate) = $226,800

"My kids never act out at home, I wonder what the teachers are doing wrong in the classroom."

This is most strange.  Maybe if the teachers came to observe you in your home for a few days, they could figure it out.  When's a good time for 30 teachers to drop by your house to get some solid tips on how you go about controlling one or two children?  Or maybe it'd be better if one teacher brought 30 kids to your place and just sat back to watch you work your magic.

And the big one - "We pay those teachers with our hard-earned tax dollars."

Speaking for myself, I pay about $4,200 per year in local taxes (property, sales, car, etc).  I'm not dumb enough to think that all of that money goes to the high school where two of my kids are going this year, so I did a little fairly easy digging, and found out that the school budget total for 2012-13 is about $151 Million, out of a total budget for the whole county of $313 Million.  The arithmetic is pretty simple at the top here.  Schools account for about 48% of what I pay in local taxes - that's $2016.
Now let's pretend the whole $1008 (per kid) goes to "my" high school - what are the basics that I get for my contribution?

• 1260 hours of instruction (for the year) in English, History, a foreign language, Geometry, Algebra, Earth Science, Chorus, Phys Ed, Applied Computer Science, Graphic Design and Marketing, Intro To Psych, etc
• In-school tutoring
• Mentoring, coaching, counseling, etc

(Plus, the joint is clean and safe and well-maintained; the kids get Annual Eye and Hearing tests, and a full time on-sight School Nurse; it has a new turf field, and the building was recently upgraded/updated with a bunch of other new goodies - plus they provide door-to-door transportation every day)

But let's just take the main point here, and further pretend that the whole cost of the school is devoted solely to the teaching of one of my kids for the year.  1260 instruction hours + 20 (or so) tutoring hours = 1280 hours.  Divide that into the 1008 bucks I pay, and suddenly it starts to look like I'm gettin' a pretty good fucking deal at less than 79 cents/hour.

At some point, we have to start to understand that we deserve a much better debate than this endless carping about bad government, unions, taxes; and how everything'll be  peachy if we just apply some common sense and remember how great it all was back when Grandma was girl.

What you really need to remember is that Nostalgia was once classified as mental illness.