Americans take an average of about two weeks of vacation a year. So they're not really making (say) 55K a year. they are making 55K for 9 months of work, which works out to about $83,000 a year. That strikes me as a fairly decent rate of pay to then add another 50K in non-pay compensation onto. Some probably are making more than they are worth, some are probably making less. but ANOTHER thing the Teachers Unions have effectively controlled is that they have killed any attempt to pay teachers more for performance, so we don't know.
excellent article on why they do that
here
we need to cut lots of things to fix our local and state finances. the biggest ugliest of these things is the unfunded pension and health liabilities of our unionzed public employees. mandated wage hikes above the rate of inflation, politicians currying favor by setting into stone massive benefit hikes that cost no money for years leaving them able to hand off the bill to the next generation, the ugliness of unions willingly denying children an education in order to maintain their political power.
our problem isn't with teacher pay. it's with unrealistic compensation promises hammered out by public unions and weak (or bought) politicians. as a finance matter, we need to move away from the industrial-era package of defined benefits and into the modern era of defined contributions. as a structural (and governance) matter, we need to end the ability of an unelected few to grind governing functions to a halt. in Europe, we saw public sector unions shut down their
nations in response to necessary austerity measures. Make no mistake, that's an attack on representative government. And those who think that somehow it won't happen here are fooling themselves.