Teachers once again face uncertainty due to California's ongoing budget crisis, but it's hard to feel sorry for people who've had it so good for so long. For example, in Conejo Valley Unified, the average full-time teacher's salary was $67,905 in the 2008-2009 ten-month year, according to Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy.

That's a handsome salary, but it's even better than it looks. The key phrase here is "ten-month year", meaning lots of downtime for our state's teachers.

Teachers also don't quite work 40 hours a week during the school year, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.  It found that full-time teachers worked only about 38.5 hours per week. If we apply that over the ten-month school year, we arrive at 1,540 annual hours, or $44/hour.

That annualizes to $91,520 per year, or more than the average aerospace engineer--that's a lot of money to pay to someone to bore high school students to death with Arthur Miller plays.

Then there's the public employee benefits. While Pepperdine's report doesn't mention specific benefit cost, we can derive the data from other figures the report provides.

Teacher salaries and benefits in Conejo Valley comprised 47.1% of the total operating expenditure, which was $194,799,839 in 2008-2009. That means salaries plus benefits cost taxpayers $91,750,724.

There were 1,009 full-time equivalent teachers making an average salary of $67,905 for an annual total of $68,516,145.  Subtracting salary from the salary plus benefits total leaves us with $23,234,579 in benefits paid to the district's teachers.

The takeaway here is that while I feel sorry for anyone who has their income reduced from cuts, furloughs, or layoffs, our state's budget crisis precludes us from ignoring the realities of how our taxes are spent--and far too little of it is going to help students learn.