An annual salary of $50,000 translates to an annual salary of $50,000. It's fun to play with numbers and try to figure out hourly equivalents, but the pay is what it is. We can have all sorts of arguments about how much time teachers "really" work, how hard the job is, what fair compensation is, and so on, but they're different questions than "is an average Silicon Valley teacher's salary sufficient to cover average housing costs in Silicon Valley in 2018," which seemed to be the original question. The answer is: "no."

(For the record, the average salary for a public school teacher in Santa Clara County is $68K as of July 2018. The average rent for an apartment in Santa Clara County as of September 2018 is $2730, or 48% of that income; for a 1BR only, it's $2471, or 44%, still well over the 2.5x rent-to-income guideline that many rental companies use as a minimum. The median home price in Santa Clara County as of July 2018 is $1.3M, so I'm gonna say we don't really need to look at mortgages, okay? Okay.)

Thank you for making this point clear!

>If the teachers make $24/hr, that means they're working 11.25 hours per day, assuming a 185 day work year.

My apologies, but you have no idea how much work a teacher actually does. A lot of it is indeed done after hours, and yes, 11-hour work day is not atypical. There's lesson planning, endless grading, paperwork, and that's just to start.

But, as the other commenter here said - it all doesn't matter. $50K is $50K, and after all the juggling, a teacher in SV can't even rent an apartment in SV.

All that is to say that the US is really not solving its education problems by throwing money at it, as suggested by a parent comment, when a full-time teacher can't even rent an apartment with their salary in one of the richest and biggest metro areas.