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1) Teacher Glut and Government
Gluttony. It was a long wait, but I knew this day
would come. Back on
November 25, 2002 (Item #6), EIA reported on NEA and U.S. Department of
Education statistics and finished with:
"The U.S. Department of Education, in
its publication Projections of Education Statistics to 2011, predicts
what will happen if current trends continue. In 2011, K-8 public school
enrollment nationwide will be one percent lower than it is today. However,
the same report tells us that at current hiring levels we will have 10
percent more teachers in 2011 than we do today. In raw numbers, it's even
more ridiculous. By 2011, the U.S. government says we will have 309,000
fewer children in public elementary schools, but we will have 184,000
more public elementary school teachers.
"EIA plans to conduct a betting pool:
Name the month and year we see the first story on a 'teacher glut.'"
And last Thursday, almost seven years
later, Heather Hollingsworth of the Associated Press gave us "Teacher
shortage gives way to teacher glut."
Couple this with the debate over the
economic stimulus package's focus on saving educator jobs, and for the
first time in a long time you have people examining education labor as a
specific and worthy issue. So much so, that we already have our first
donnybrook.
In this corner we have
Checker Finn and Frederick Hess, who opened with a right jab:
"It's a fact that employment was an
explicit purpose of stimulus funding - Congress said as much - and with
today's jobless rate over 10 percent, only
a churl would deny the humanitarian value as well as the political appeal of
this. That said, well-run public organizations and private firms are using
the economic crisis to purge weak performers, cherry-pick talent, and
position themselves to be more productive going forward. Turning schools
into a jobs program is a dubious way to tone them up for the 21st century."
Kevin Carey of Education Sector
countered with a left cross:
"Yet Hess and Finn are apparently
perfectly comfortable with misery on a global scale as long it means we can
wash public education in the cleansing fires of austerity."
Finn went for the
quick knockout:
"In response,
Kevin mounts an admirably straightforward, old-fashioned defense of
government spending for its own sake. This includes what strikes us as a
particularly dated defense of Keynesianism, seemingly imagining that
government can and should create jobs at will - in the comfortable certainty
that such makework will pay for itself. Regardless of Kevin's broader
affinity for what might be regarded as Stalinist job creation, two more
concrete considerations really ought to be kept in mind."
But Carey
claimed a low blow:
"Also, and it's weird that this even
needs to be said, there's an obvious difference between the government
creating 'make-work' jobs and saving jobs that already existed. And, just to
be clear, creating 'make-work' jobs is in fact a perfectly reasonable thing
to do - not that that's what the stimulus bill did - when the goal is to
stimulate the economy. That's what got this country out of the Great
Depression after all, the massive government jobs program that was World War
II."
We leave our pugilists trading blows,
and move on to a
revelation from the Heritage Foundation:
"The overall unionization rate between
January and September 2009 stood at 12.4%, unchanged from last year.
However, this difference masks a large difference between unions in the
private and public sectors.
"Union membership has fallen to 7.3% of
private sector workers – the lowest rate since Roosevelt signed the National
Labor Relations Act into law. But it is a completely different story in the
public sector: 37.6% of government employees belong to unions, up almost a
percentage point since last year. Those 7.9 million unionized government
employees are 51% of all union members nationwide. Most union members today
now work for Uncle Sam."
So I scoured the memory banks and found
this from
January 22, 2001 (second item):
"The second story is one that deserves a
lot of attention, not only from union members and researchers, but
economists, sociologists and public policy experts. The most unionized
sector of the entire U.S. economy (at 43.2 percent) is local government - a
category that includes police officers, firefighters, and, of course, public
school employees. Though the released BLS data do not separate these
occupations, a reasonable estimate of the percentage of local public school
employees who belong to unions is somewhere in the 70-80 percent range.
EIA's own research suggests that NEA/AFT membership is growing at roughly
the same rate as the public school employee work force.
"Should present trends continue, we will
see in our lifetimes the total number of public sector union members
overtake the total number of private sector union members. We may also see a
labor force in which public school employees are the only growth
sector in union membership. The implications of such a trend are enormous.
First, we will have a private sector almost devoid of unions, being
regulated by a large plurality of unionized government employees, whose
unions' membership growth will be directly tied to the size of government
itself. For organized labor, it will mean either dragging the NEA into its
structure in order to bolster its failing numbers, or it will mean the
education unions will engulf the AFL-CIO, effectively putting it out of
business and replacing it with a new coalition dominated by the NEA (or,
more likely, by a merged NEA/AFT)."
Now I like playing "aren't I clever?" as
much as the next niche blogger, but when it comes to these education labor
issues, the numbers told the story, not any smartass analysis. Over the last
decade, we hired as many teachers and education employees as we could (or
thought we could) afford.
By law or by choice, most became union members. The situation we're in -
saving jobs we're not certain we should have created in the first place, and
battling a political lobby whose very power and existence demand saving
those jobs - is a predicament that was not only predictable, but inevitable.
This is the
bed we made - and feathered - during the fat years. Now we have to lie in
it.
2) Contract Hits.
Wherein we highlight a contract provision from the current agreement between
the National Education Association and its largest staff union. Article 37,
Section 1, subsection (d) describes the salary schedule through May 2009.
The minimum salary was $29,952. Top of the scale was $123,194. As of June 1,
there was an across-the-board increase of 2%, raising the max to $125,658.
3) Last Week's Intercepts.
EIA's blog,
Intercepts, covered these topics from November 9-16:
* Was
LA "Deportation Flier" Protest Held in Front of Wrong Union Building?
Think purple.
* Charters
and the Virginia Education Association. The subject of a Quote of the
Week responds...
* Charters
and the Virginia Education Association: Round 2. ...prompting a
counter-response from a reader.
* How
to Do It. No limits?
* No
Missouri Compromise. Winner-take-all.
4) Quote of the Week #1.
"Education reform shouldn't be a race." and "We're certainly not opposed to
reform." - California Teachers Association President David Sanchez,
commenting on legislation designed to improve the state's application for
Race to the Top funds. (November 9
San Jose Mercury News)
Quote of the Week #2.
"Honestly, I do 90 percent for the district and 10 percent for the
association." - Davis Education Association President Susan Firmage, who
works full-time for the union, although the district pays half her salary. A
Utah state auditor's report has sparked debate about using public funds to
pay for union release time. (November 13
Deseret News) |
