JONATHAN COHN JULY 16, 2010
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The fate of the $10 billion edujobs bill, which is meant to prevent more than 100,000 teacher layoffs across the country, remains unclear. Before Congress went on vacation earlier this month, the House passed edujobs as an amendment to a larger spending bill and sent it to the Senate. But, as I wrote at the time, the House agreed to pay for the provision in part by cutting funds from some of Obama’s most vital education reform initiatives, including Race to the Top. The president threatened a veto, and the Department of Education immediately embarked on a push to find the money elsewhere. On Thursday morning, in a conference call with reporters, White House Domestic Policy Adviser Melody Barnes said, “We don't have to make a choice between reform and making sure that teachers will stay in the classroom.”
She’s right. And one obvious alternative would be for teachers to absorb some financial hit themselves. This would minimize the amount of money Congress would need to shell out—and, hopefully, quell the political battle that edujobs has stirred up.
This is already happening in some places. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced in June that he would freeze teachers’ wages for the next two years—and thus preserve 4,400 jobs. Los Angeles initially planned to lay off 3,100 teachers but has slashed 2,445 pink slips, largely by reaching an agreement with the local teachers’ union to take several furlough days over the next two years. But, elsewhere, unions have refused to make similar concessions: In Milwaukee, Cleveland, Chicago, and Flint, Michigan, among other places, unions have rejected proposals for cuts or freezes to teachers’ salaries and benefits, citing contracts guaranteeing that earnings escalate on a set, annual schedule.
Many public employees across the country are agreeing to wage freezes and other concessions in this terrible economy, ensuring that their colleagues can keep their jobs—so why won’t more teachers? Or, more importantly, should they? After all, they already make too little. Way too little. Although educators perform jobs of incredible importance—to children’s lives, to our economy—their pay is terrible. According to the National Education Association, the average teacher salary is just $55,350. In Texas, which has an average salary of $47,157, more than one quarter of teachers have reported working second jobs.
The long-term answer to the teacher salary problem is to change the way educators are paid, evaluated, and, if necessary, dismissed. As I (among many others) have written before, teachers should be paid based on their effectiveness, not just their seniority. Simply raising the salaries of teachers based on the numbers of years they’ve taught does not guarantee that the best educators are valued most. Simultaneously, ineffective teachers should regularly be let go, no matter their experience level. As Marguerite Roza, an education finance expert on leave from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, recently told me, “If you had a teacher evaluation system that regularly exited teachers based on performance, you wouldn’t really need a layoff system.” And, if such a system did prove necessary in a budget crisis, it shouldn’t be the near-universal “last-hired, first-fired” policy that unions cling to now. Under this scheme, junior teachers are given the boot before more senior ones, regardless of their performance in the classroom. Because novice teachers cost less to employ than more senior ones do, this bad policy requires handing out pink slips to more teachers than is necessary.
Of course, you can’t flip a switch and make all of this happen tomorrow. It takes time, which lawmakers don’t have. “By not planning and waiting until the last minute, the only choice you have is layoffs,” Marguerite Roza says. Indeed, unless the Senate finds another, better way to pay for edujobs, the choices may come down to Congress gutting key education reforms to dole out emergency money, districts laying off a bunch of teachers, or unions begrudgingly agreeing to salary concessions. All three are unappealing options.
7 comments
You are considering only teacher pay, not pay + benefits. The median salary for a kindergarten teacher in NYC is $71k. Add in a $12K for health care, and another $15K for employer retirement contribution, and you are looking at $98K/year. In my school district, the average salary + benefits set aside for a teacher is $88K per teacher. On top of that, a teacher has 12 weeks of vacation per year, while most employees in the US have 2, maybe 3. Considering all that time off, that $98K is further adjusted to $120K/year for a normal work year of 49 weeks. When a teacher retires at age 55, they will receive most or all of their salary + health care until they die. Today, that means they have about 30 years of payout of around $75K. To purchase an annuity today that would pay out the same would require $1M in the bank at 6% rates. Effectively, not including the money they have saved away, a teacher that retires at age 55 is a millionaire. The BLS considers a teachers salary to be $34 and hour, which is considerably more than an accountant ($28), architect ($33) and civil engineer ($33). Please, the data is overwhelming. Can we drop the "we don't get paid enough" meme? PS. A school district that is putting away $15K/year for 30 years to fund the $1M annuity is SEVERELY underfunding the teacher's retirement. The value of the teacher's retirement over a 30 year contribution period is over $30K annually. A case can be made that a teacher in NYC is getting paid nearly $140K per year in salary + benefits. The biggest problem with teachers is that they just don't work that much. They work about 200 days a year when they are working, and they only work for 30 years. All told, they work perhaps 6000 days in their entire lifetime. A civil engineer that starts practicing at 22 and retires at 68 while taking only 3 weeks of vacation a year works over 11,000 days in his lifetime. Adn the only retirement he has is his 401K, which is worth far less than the teachers pension.
- seattleeng
July 18, 2010 at 10:57pm
Seattle, teachers work outside the classroom. Teachers I know are always grading papers on weekends. Teachers I know are always working on curriculum and preparing for classes or attending workshops or meetings on non-school days. Teachers I know receive modest stipends for teaching summer school, coaching sports, or heading clubs. Teachers I know are spending their own money so that they can take courses that will increase their knowledge and effectiveness, and entitle them to greater pay under current compensation regimes that everyone thinks are so awful. Only counting classroom time is like only counting the time a litigator is in court. That time in the classroom, like the time in court, is far more intense than the typical job. You're on stage constantly, and have to perform constantly. So your comparisons are bogus. As for opening up contracts, let's look to the business world, as today's crop of reformers likes to do. Show me an example of where a company agrees to abandon the benefits of an enforceable agreement just because the other party is hard up and would like a favor. The point of a contract is to ensure what's in it. Opening it up is a question of strategy. What about the children? Let's see the state try to open up contracts with any of its vendors for the sake of the children. Wouldn't work? That's right, because those vendors are legally entitled to their agreed price. Teachers, even though their work is important and concerns children, are permitted to look after their compensation and benefits. Yes, teachers are unionized, like cops and fire fighters. Some people don't like unions. But employees shouldn't be punished for taking advantage of everyone's right to collective bargaining. This is actually an easy choice, because "gutting" school reform means gutting the latest school reform fad, which is to obsessively focused on choice (charter schools) and accountability (punishing teachers), to the exclusion of the real issues -- curriculum, standards, goals, and community-wide efforts. So long as "effectiveness" means "effective test prep for lame tests," teachers will rightly rebel, not just for their sake but, yes, for the sake of the children too. And, yes, they'll also rebel against the recent global insistence that they're lazy bums, to the incessant scapegoating.
- JakeH
July 19, 2010 at 2:10am
Everyone works outside the work place. I spend hours on a plane each month on the weekends and evenings. I spend 8-12 nights a month in hotel rooms. I get nothing extra for it. I just finished writing a white paper for work yesterday (saturday) morning. I took business related calls all weekend. I finished an hour of email earlier this evening (Sunday night). I had a business associate over on Saturday night and we talked about work. That's what professionals do: They work outside the office. If you don't like it, then become a checker a walmart. "So long as "effectiveness" means "effective test prep for lame tests," teachers will rightly rebel, not just for their sake but, yes, for the sake of the children too." You act like we have overprepped kids, and the kids all make great scores on tests, but do lousy in everything else. CLUE: The kids are NOT testing well. I'd be elated if my kids came home from school with A's on the math tests because the teachers taught to the test. We could only be so lucky. The only reason teachers are being scapegoated is because we spend 3X more to educate a kid than we did 50 years ago (in today's dollars). And we have worse outcomes.
- seattleeng
July 19, 2010 at 3:14am
seattleeng: What most people mean when they say "paid enough" usually has to do with an ability to pay bills and support a family, rather than whether they have a guaranteed ability to scrape by in old age if they put up with scraping by for several decades beforehand. In any event -- maybe it's just my browser, but when I look at the current statistics on the BLS site, I see a mean wage of $39/hour for civil engineers and a median of about $37. The BLS numbers do not appear to include benefits, but since you cite them, let's look at those. It does not, so far as I can find, report hourly wages for teachers specifically, but does provide a mean of about $24/hour for "education, training, and libraries." Annually, the median for civil engineers is $76,590, compared with a teacher spread of $47k to $52K depending on whether we're talking Kindergarten, elementary, middle school, or secondary school. Only the top 10% hit $75K and above. If those civil engineers are unhappy about their retirement plans, looks like they have an extra $25K a year to sock away under the mattress. Average starting salary for civil engineers is $52K; teachers top out, in the best-paying states (like Alaska and Connecticut), at $39K. Good luck with those student loan debts, new teachers! Also, I'm not sure where you get a retirement age of 55 for teachers; for example, in your own state, according to the Washington DRS website, anything before age 65 is considered "early retirement," with a commensurate reduction in the benefits you envy.
- frippo
July 19, 2010 at 3:24pm
You can read the analysis on the BLS data here, and their methodology for regional comparison: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_50.htm You can read about retirement ages here: http://www.cga.ct.gov/2000/rpt/olr/htm/2000-R-1110.htm Many states allow to retire at any age AFTER 20, 25 or 30 years of service. So, start teaching at 22 in Louisiana, and you are eligible to retire at 42. See comparison here: http://www.cga.ct.gov/2000/rpt/olr/htm/2000-R-1110.htm They key point is this: when teachers compare their salary to other professions, they ignore their retirement plans. Their retirement plans are worth $1M at retirement in a healthy economy, and $2-$3M in a dismal economy like now. If teachers are paid the same amount for a day of work as accountants, engineers and architects per day of work, do you agree they are paid enough? If you agree with this statement, then you are against teachers earning more. In fact, with benefits, teachers are earning more per day of work than the professionals cited.
- seattleeng
July 20, 2010 at 1:51am
You can read the analysis on the BLS data here, and their methodology for regional comparison: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_50.htm You can read about retirement ages here: http://www.cga.ct.gov/2000/rpt/olr/htm/2000-R-1110.htm Many states allow to retire at any age AFTER 20, 25 or 30 years of service. So, start teaching at 22 in Louisiana, and you are eligible to retire at 42. See comparison here: http://www.cga.ct.gov/2000/rpt/olr/htm/2000-R-1110.htm They key point is this: when teachers compare their salary to other professions, they ignore their retirement plans. Their retirement plans are worth $1M at retirement in a healthy economy, and $2-$3M in a dismal economy like now. If teachers are paid the same amount for a day of work as accountants, engineers and architects per day of work, do you agree they are paid enough? If you agree with this statement, then you are against teachers earning more. In fact, with benefits, teachers are earning more per day of work than the professionals cited.
- seattleeng
July 20, 2010 at 1:52am
The website at the rest of the text: See comparison here: http://www.cga.ct.gov/2000/rpt/olr/htm/2000-R-1110.htm They key point is this: when teachers compare their salary to other professions, they ignore their retirement plans. Their retirement plans are worth $1M at retirement in a healthy economy, and $2-$3M in a dismal economy like now. If teachers are paid the same amount for a day of work as accountants, engineers and architects per day of work, do you agree they are paid enough? If you agree with this statement, then you are against teachers earning more. In fact, with benefits, teachers are earning more per day of work than the professionals cited.
- seattleeng
July 20, 2010 at 1:54am