The Real Price of Education

The standard for collective bargaining should be the median income for all the people -- which is around $30,000 total compensation.

Teacher (government worker) salaries begin above the median -- not including nontaxable fringe benefits (health care, nonworking compensation and retirement) of another $20,000 -- which every government worker gets that is already almost as much as the median.

So with the $50,000 average salary plus other benefits that the taxpayers are paying for, you have a class of people getting twice the median Which puts them in the upper 75%-tile, for a whole class of people -- who then demand extra performance pay to actually do their job, and want guarantees that they can never be fired, and must be supported in the lifestyle they think they are entitled to all their lives -- is really the root problem of the injustices and inequities of contemporary society.

And these very privileged people have the gall to claim they are underappreciated and underpaid and even qualified for food stamps and other assistance, is the reason Hawaii's cost of living is astronomical -- because the cost of people who don't even feel they have to do their jobs because it is their entitlement for life, and not that they have to earn it, means the citizens can expect to pay a lot for nothing.

In the marketplace of ideas (education), it should be highly competitive and the least able forced out to give way to the best and the brightest creating knowledge on the cutting edge -- and not merely institutionalizing the past, as the only way it can ever be -- repeating the mistakes of history over and over again, as though that was an intelligent way to be.

Education has become the symbol of everything that is wrong in society -- defending its own status quo. It needs to be the leading example of how to do things right.