Council Rock School District Is Great Because of Highly Paid Teachers and Very Smart Students

How highly paid? How smart? The information seems not to be forthcoming but consider teachers have 8 to 12 weeks of vacation plus just about all holidays off plus an Easter break, an eight day break over the Christmas holidays and no school from June 18 to September 3rd so they actually teach about 182 days a year. In addition they are limited to five classes per day and about 50 minutes (0.8333 hour) per class so they actually teach a maximum of 758.3 hours per year compared to a fifty (50) week year at eight (8) hours a day which is two thousand (2,000) hours per year that most working people work. Teachers must prepare the lesson for each class which takes a lot of time but once it’s done, it is the sae for each year. A new teacher teaching a class for the first time does not have to prepare a new set of teaching notes because the previous teacher did that so there is actually very little time, work of effort needed to prepare for a new class.

The 758.3 hours of teaching per year compares to the 1912 hours of traditional workers which means teachers work 40% as much as regular workers. The highest paid Council Rock teacher receives about $130,000 a year for 758 hours of teaching. That’s $130,000 divided by 758 hours or $171 an hour . Converting that to a 40 hour 1,912 hour year is $328,000 a year. So yes, the teachers at Council Rock are not only very well paid, they are extremely well paid. Why? A great set of unions are at work behind the scenes  for the teachers compared to no union at all for the school board which usually has a few teachers or ex-teachers on it. In addition, most school board members are not experts or even qualified as human resource advisors so they are sort of at the mercy of the experts who present the school budgets to them for approval and because the topic of teacher compensation is only a part of the expenses for each school year, the teacher salaries usually get approved as presented in the budget. In addition, it is confusing to try to analyse the school budget because the people presenting the budget are not only experts, they have the welfare of the teachers as their top concern so the budget, the salaries, the raises and all of the costs are presented with a very different set of priorities compared to the school board members. There are many unions at an individual school district so the school boards have to negotiate contracts with each one. There is the National Education Association; the Service Employees International Union; The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, perhaps the Teamsters as well as other rather specialized unions, all of which have complex, lengthly written contracts to be analysed, understood and approved by the school board. In addition to highly paid teachers, Council Rock has a lot of very smart students whose parents want the best education for their children. The quality of education is almost impossible to determine so the amount of money paid to the teachers which is rather easy to determine, is used instead. The school board is in the rather impossible position of approving a budget or set of budgets with a lot of the important information being kept from them by experts in keeping information from the school board, the parents, the taxpayers and the media. If the system seems biased it is because the system seems to be more than a little bit biased and perhaps een a touch deceiptful. Here’s an example of the deceit. (Section Removed).

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