We got plenty of responses from our item a few days ago about the abysmal performance of the public schools in New York and the $90,000 paid per teacher.

Several readers pointed out that the out-of-control spending is much worse in New York City.

We did some checking and these readers were right. it turns out that by dividing the total amount spent by the New York City Public School System (as reported in the city’s Financial statements) by the number of students, the per-student spending was a whopping $37,800 per student last year!

How much did NYC’s 73,000 teachers make on average?

The financial statement reports the total salaries for classroom teachers and has a total for employee benefits at just over 50 percent of salaries. So here’s a little back-of-the-envelope calculation: rounding down to the nearest thousand, we find a shocking average total compensation of $144,000!

Remember this is essentially for a nine-months-a-year job.

If you simply gave New York City parents, say, $25,000 a year for the education of each of their kids, they would easily be able to enroll them in far better schools AND the city could give a $10,000 payment per child each year for 12 years (grades 1 – 12).

With interest, this approach would give every kid who graduates a payment of $150,000 to be used to pay for college, vocational school, or to start a business. AND the city would SAVE money.