Dude, your plan sucks. There’s just no other way to put it. It benefits one very, very small subset of teachers who happen to teach in public schools with wealthy parents. Normal workaday parents can’t afford to tip teachers. They’re struggling to put food on the table themselves and many of them make much less than the teachers. It’s a dick move to suggest that these folks should dig out their wallet and hand over cash to their kid’s teachers. But, by all means, your wife should get a gratuity because she has the good luck of teaching in a wealthy school while those other teachers working in the poor schools dealing with tons more social issues and challenging students can suck it. Maybe your wife can drive over to the poor part of town and hand over some of that cash to her colleagues in those schools.
I sincerely appreciate your knowledge and commentary on educational funding in this state and I haven’t read a single thing on the subject that you’ve written on this topic that I disagree with except for this particular item. On this one, you come across as unmoored from the economic realities faced by the vast majority of public school parents.