 |
| Courtesy of the constitutionclub.org |
The politically correct view is that government employees are grossly underpaid; the trade-off is better benefits, particularly job security. This is particularly true of public school teachers: is there any politician alive whom doesn't pay lip service to the (patently false) assertion that public school teachers are underpaid?
This post is not intended to be anti-public sector; I'm an Air Force brat whose father retired from the military, I have relatives whom are or have worked as civil servants and I once served as a Navy officer, I earned three advanced degrees from public universities, supported by work-study stipends. I spent 5 years working as a full-time professor for 3 state universities.
But let me take on public school teachers for a moment. There are unchallenged assumptions, and the emperor is wearing no clothes. I have cited studies showing that education majors generally have comparably lower achievement scores. Objective criteria (like K-12 achievement scores, graduation rates, etc.) have basically flat-lined (or deteriorated) over the past 20-30 years when Democrats have thrown a huge amount of public treasure at education, ideologically asserting smaller class size would improve above-cited criteria; in fact, other countries spending less money on education and with much larger class sizes have comparably higher scores. Moreover, if you compare apples-to-apples (e.g., public school versus private school compensation, normalize salaries for teacher 9-month work schedule, and factor in tangible cost factors for higher job security and much higher benefits, including defined-benefit pension systems generally not available in the private sector), public schools teachers are doing very well.
I do want to take issue with the idea that the problem with public education is with pay; among other things, money is fungible (i.e., benefits cost money, and public sector benefit packages are not sustainable). In fact, I went on on-site interviews with three Catholic colleges, knowing they would pay up to $20K less than what I would make teaching at a public university. (None of them made me an offer, a sad note for a Catholic whom got his BA from a Catholic college and intended to major in secondary education (math teacher) and study for the priesthood.) There are actors, writers, artists and singers whom struggle to make ends meet, doing whatever it takes to live their dream. When I decided early on in college that I didn't want to become a high school teacher: I wanted to be a college professor, I figured if I became one, I would earn enough to live comfortably, and that was enough. When I saw videos of militant teachers, asserting that their privileged status was really for the benefit of their students, it angered me: it lacked integrity. I could never stand in solidarity with mediocre teachers, all but impossible to fire.
Each time I drew a paycheck in the public sector, I knew it came out of the pockets of hard-working individuals and businesses; I wasn't better than any of them. I swore I would work as hard as I could on their behalf, even if the students didn't realize what I was doing was in their long-term interests. I wasn't going to pass the buck to the next professor; my colleagues may have given up on the kids and handed out computer assignments little more than typing assignments, but I didn't. In terms of university politics, it would have been simply easier to go with the flow: it's not like my pay would have been docked if my former students couldn't compete with graduates from other schools in the job market.
When I was a professor, I had little or no respect for many of my colleagues; I remember at UTEP teaching a database management class which had a data structures prerequisite. Over 90% of the students in my class could not define a single data structure; the instructor UTEP had teaching the data structure class got good student ratings but didn't require a single programming assignment, had a reputation for giving easy marks and used the class to promote his own agenda. A lot of professors in my rapidly changing discipline, MIS, were teaching multiple sections of the same course year after year, with little if any changes in course design or content, while I was changing textbooks, drafting lecture notes in my campus office late at night for the next day, and using state-of-the-art compilers. But many of the public school graduates in my classes believed they had earned the inflated grades they had gotten, were disrespectful, had bad study habits and couldn't write a decent essay if their life depended on it.
In prior posts, I mentioned that I would have handled things differently than Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) did, simply from a pragmatic standpoint. The federal Democrats were fond of saying in 2009 that "elections have consequences" and had no problem shoving a fiscally irresponsible stimulus and so-called health care and finance reform down the throats of the minority.
The problem I had with what the cowardly 14 Wisconsin Democratic state senators did by taking their toys and going home across the border to Illinois when they couldn't get their way because they lacked the votes was the fact that what Walker was doing had everything to do with providing public sector executives in Wisconsin with more tools to contain costs--and public servant compensation is a huge part of the budget. You cannot hold public sector administrators responsible for costs beyond their control. This was never about silencing legitimate public sector employee rights: those are written into state law. If there are gaps in state employee protections under the law, the Democratic senators should have worked constructively in that regard. But crony unionism is NOT in the best interest of Wisconsin taxpayers or their children.
Governor Walker and the Wisconsin state Republicans were willing to do the right long-term thing for the sake of Wisconsin's cities, counties, and state and risk the predictable anger from the public sector unions and their ideological sympathizers. The state senate Democrats could have stayed in Madison and voted for their special interests, even if they lost. If the Democratic city or county executives decide not to use the new flexibility in negotiating the next union contracts, fine. If the Democrats want to use the issue in the next election and reverse the changes, that's the American way. Let them explain to their constituencies why they have to cut essential services so that well-to-do retirees can get their "fair share" of taxpayer money. Let them explain to their blue-collar constituency why public employees in Wisconsin are more equal than private-sector workers and why private-sector workers have trouble finding jobs because other states, like Texas, are more business-friendly in terms of tax and regulatory burden.
