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1) How to Raise Average Teacher Salaries Without
Spending a Dime. Last week, the American Federation of Teachers released
its teacher salary survey for the 2004-05 school year, and concluded… oh,
heck, you don't need me to tell you what AFT concluded.
So let's move on to an actual stunning revelation that
came out of AFT's research, though I'm still laughing about it, especially
since the union's blog picked that very statistic to highlight. Referring to
the ten-year period 1995 to 2005, the union's researchers compared teachers
to private sector workers:
"For every new real dollar gained in the private sector
in this time, teachers gained only 11 cents. It is unclear what is causing
this trend."
Whoa! Back up, Sparky!
Today, in the State Capitol Rotunda, the California
Federation of Teachers is co-hosting Labor History Week. In a statement
announcing the exhibit, CFT Secretary-Treasurer Dennis Smith informed us: "A
generation of young workers faces employment in big box stores, fast food
restaurants, temp agencies or the outsourcing of their jobs."
And all this time, private sector workers have picked
up nine times the inflation-adjusted increase of teachers! That's a big
box.
So how can we clear up this unclear trend? How does the
establishment of most public school teacher pay differ from that of most
private sector workers? Anyone?
Just slightly change your angle on AFT's arguments. In
its own report, AFT is touting the claim that after 46 years of representing
public school teachers, the unions' accomplishments have been to win members
a wage that is
underpaid by 30 percent, while private sector workers, 92.6 percent of
whom are non-union, received pay raises that were nine times greater in real
terms than teachers received over the past 10 years.
Average salaries are a useful statistic, but using them
without reference to hiring, firing and retiring is politics, not research.
To illustrate, here is my super-secret method to raise the average teacher
salary 30 percent without spending a dime. In fact, you can save your school
system a ton of money. I call it "layoffs." Here's how it works.
Let's say I have five teachers making $60,000 per year,
and five making $30,000 per year. That's an average salary of $45,000. Now I
lay off five teachers, which according to the collective bargaining
agreement must be the five newest teachers. That raises the average salary
to $60,000 – an increase of 33.3 percent! And I cut district costs by 33.3
percent at the same time! Isn't math fun?
The only reasonable way to evaluate increases to
teacher salaries is to compare last year's teachers with the same working
teachers this year. This factors out increases in the overall workforce
(lowers the average) and retirees (lowers the average). It also highlights
in stark relief step-and-column increases along with COLAs and legislative
hikes.
A statistic like that would not only be more accurate,
it might even be more enlightening for everyone, regardless of where you
stand on teacher salaries.
2) Former Emily's List Director Takes Over NEA
Campaigns Department. Three weeks ago, EIA reported on the
reorganization of NEA's government relations department. The department is
now split into two sections, one of which will focus on lobbying activities.
The other, Campaigns and Elections, will – as the name suggests – be more
far-reaching and include issue advocacy and "political threats and
opportunities."
To head this new section, NEA hired Karen White, up
until last January the national political director of
Emily's List. If there were any doubt that NEA plans to run a standard
political advocacy organization out of union headquarters, it was further
diminished with the news that NEA's next new hire for the Campaigns and
Elections department will be a senior fundraiser. Couple this with a renewed
attempt to revive the
NEA Booster Club, and it's clear that NEA members will soon be receiving
the political fundraising direct mail and telemarketing that make the
Republican and Democratic national committees the universally loved
organizations they are today.
3) Movies, Songs and Public Education – A
Multimedia Circus! April is tax time, and when you're a union officer,
that means a lot of hard accounting of the cash you've accumulated. EIA
lends a hand with
April's Video Intercepts (special appearance by Miss Crabtree).
Not to be outdone, NEA Today posted a
selection of seven songs submitted by teachers. "From all over the
country, would-be Sinatras flooded our mailbox with tunes of the teaching
life, laments of NCLB, and odes to curriculum in the classroom," the
introduction reads.
I have a pretty good-sized thesaurus, but I admit to
falling short of an adjective to describe this experience. I'll turn it over
to the Simon Cowell of public education audio, Andrew Rotherham of
Eduwonk.com, whose
knowledge and vocabulary will surely find the right words.
4) Class Size: Two Is a Coincidence. Last week
I ragged on the Contra Costa Times editorial board for ten-year-late
skepticism on California's class size reduction initiative. With the first
crack in the Berlin Wall, a second pickax has appeared, at the
Los Angeles Times editorial board.
As is the usual practice, the board whacked at the same crack, and tried to
make it bigger.
"The decades-old class-size reduction program was a
poorly planned experiment that is no longer useful," the board wrote. "It
ought to end, with the state giving the money to local districts to spend in
whatever ways will best benefit their students."
The Times goes on to list some of the unintended
consequences and costs California schools taxpayers and schools have
undergone. It's a start, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. California's
class size reduction law created an artificial teacher shortage, raised
wages across the board, cost the state tens of billions in construction
bonds, reduced teacher quality, drove veteran inner-city teachers to the
suburbs, raised assistance costs for teachers whose classes were not
reduced, boosted the costs of professional development, and, not
coincidentally, greatly increased the number of CTA members, whose dues and
PAC money helped give us the government and school system the state enjoys
today.
I culled all those items in the above paragraph from a
story I wrote about class size reduction in 1997. I wasn't prescient or
clever. It was just that obvious. Let's hope the newspapers get out the
pickaxes before the next big wall goes up.
5) Hey Kids, Get Over It and Get to Work. Two
stories from last week prompt me to keep beating a different drum today. The
first was
Greg Toppo's USA Today story on a National Institutes of Health
study of the nation's classrooms. The study itself is on Science
magazine's paid web site, but it apparently has few good things to say about
curriculum, teaching, classroom environment, and classroom practices.
Second was one of the foghorn warning editorials
classroom teachers are exceptionally good at writing. This one was by
Las Vegas high school math teacher Greg Barone, and his in-the-trenches
description makes the NIH study seem like a love letter.
These stories are essential, and are designed to urge
adults into some sort of action. And boy, have we had action by adults.
Education is one of America's most-tinkered-with enterprises -- from a
President and Congress designing school accountability standards, all the
way down to classroom teachers who prefer teaching subjects of personal
interest rather than solving for x.
I don't think these things will be fixed anytime soon,
and I don't believe there ever was a Golden Age of Education. For better or
worse, these are the schools we have. So, it's up to you, kids.
You may find yourself in a lousy school. You will have
some good teachers, some indifferent teachers, and some godawful teachers.
You may get stuck with a disjointed curriculum and an inhospitable classroom
environment. I'm sure Depression-era schools had the same problems. But it's
your education, and ultimately your responsibility to make it work.
It's patently obvious that no adult will suffer job
consequences if you get a crummy education. It's regrettable, but that's the
way it is. If you want a good education, you're going to have to leave the
cave and hunt and gather on your own. That means practicing your capital Bs,
visiting the library, tackling long division, and Googling something other
than Lindsey Lohan.
It sucks, I know. You've got a lifetime of work ahead
of you, and only one chance to be a kid. But you'll want to be on the right
side of the knowledge gap. We're headed for Erasmus' country of the blind,
and it will be best if you have at least one eye.
6) Oakland NEA Affiliate Endorses NCLB Dismantling
Drive. There isn't much chance NEA delegates will alter the union's
basic approach to the No Child Left Behind Act at their convention this
year, but events in California are guaranteeing that the organized drive to
dismantle the law will emerge on the floor of the assembly.
The Oakland Education Association announced it will
join the
Educator Roundtable's petition drive, which rejects union efforts to
reform the law, and advocates getting rid of it. The board of directors of
the San Diego Education Association previously approved a similar measure (Item
#9 here).
The Oakland affiliate is routinely responsible for the
introduction of a host of progressively themed new business items at the NEA
convention, and this particular one will pick up useful support in
California and moral support elsewhere. But as a practical matter, it will
allow a lot of venting without any hope of changing the union's "positive
agenda" for the law.
7) Collier County Support Employees Join Teamsters.
EIA has covered the union infighting within the Collier County Support
Professionals Association since 2003 (see
Item #7 here for all the previous links). What began as a battle between
the union's stewards and its elected officers boiled over into a dispute
with the Florida Education Association and NEA, worked its way through the
state labor relations board, and now has finished (probably) with the
support employees
joining Teamsters Local 79 by a 621-52 vote.
8) NEA: Champions of Zeno. In a scientific
effort to reverse the centuries of disproving of
Zeno's paradox of dichotomy, NEA is close to the mark, by introducing an
infinite series of intermediate steps needed to complete a simple action.
At last summer's convention, NEA delegates approved a
new business item that read: "NEA will create a committee to explore joining
with other associations and organizations interested in public education
with the purpose of creating, using the NEA website, a website dedicated to
defending public education from negative propaganda in the media."
I considered this sufficiently Zeno-esque at the time,
writing, "Do, or do not. There is no 'create a committee to explore.'" But
NEA exceeded expectations. A status report on the item's implementation
reads:
"Planning is underway to identify appropriate NEA staff
to serve on a committee to explore the means by which the NEA website can be
enhanced to provide Association members and other organizations with more
information for defending public education from negative propaganda in the
media."
9) Last Week's Intercepts.
EIA's blog,
Intercepts, covered these topics from March 26-April 2:
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Coming Up from Down Under. Teachers teach. Parents parent.
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State Legislation of the Year. Land of Enchantment.
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With Government Backing, I Could Make It Very Silly. What one British
teachers' union official thinks schools should be teaching.
10)
Quote of the Week.
"You won't be
a distinguished school, you won't be an achieving school, you won't be a
blue-ribbon school." – California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack
O'Connell, describing the "sanctions" schools will face if they fail to meet
state benchmarks. Two-thirds of California schools have yet to reach a
"basic" standard. (March
27 Associated Press) |
