PLANK JUNE 8, 2012
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In the wake of the failed Wisconsin recall vote we're hearing an awful lot about those spoiled government employees with their flush pay packages and their godawful unions. The worst, of course, are the teachers' unions. They are responsible for everything that's gone wrong in America today. Government leaders urge that they restrain their demands, but in vain.
But according to this June 5 article from the Dallas Morning News, Dallas's incoming superintendent of schools--a government leader, right?-- will enjoy a base salary of $300,000. His chief of staff will make $225,000. His chief of communications (i.e., press agent) will make $185,000. And his "chief of talent and innovation," whatever that is (it's a new position), will make $182,000.
All of these people make more money than the Dallas police chief, who makes do with about $175,000. Meanwhile, those greedy Dallas teachers, who are represented by the American Federation of Teachers, bump along with an average salary of about $56,000. That's nearly 20 percent below the average household income in the U.S. ($67,530).
Being a teacher is back-breakingly difficult work. It is also extremely important work. Being the press agent or innovation chief for the school superintendent is, by comparison, fairly easy, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the hours are much shorter. It's also fairly trivial. Being superintendent or the superintendent's chief of staff is important work, but there's no chance it's as difficult as being a teacher, and I hesitate to say that it's as important. The boss always makes more, and I guess we can't begrudge him that. But for the boss to make more than six times more than the average teacher is freaking outrageous.
"It certainly sends up red flags to the employees and to the taxpayers of this city," Rena Honea, president of the AFT local in Dallas, told me. That's especially true, she noted, at a time when funding for public education is being cut state- and citywide, when teachers' workdays are being extended 45 minutes with no additional pay, and when teachers can't get a contract that extends more than a single year. If current economic circumstances require sacrifices from underpaid Dallas schoolteachers, why the hell don't they require sacrifices from the superintendent and his entourage?
18 comments
Remember air traffic controllers? Those folks who keeps planes from crashing into one another when we fly. And when Reagan fired those air traffic controllers they got no love from Americans. If an air traffic controller can't get any love, why would you expect some bureaucrat working for the Department of Education in some big office building in the state capital to get any love. It's not little Bobby's teacher Americans don't love, its all the rest who are considered superfluous. Like that chief of communications.
- rayward
June 8, 2012 at 2:06pm
Republican priorities, at their most obvious.
- GSpinks
June 8, 2012 at 2:13pm
Ah yes, but Republicans will lump those overpaid superintendents together with actual classroom teachers, because it's convenient to pretend that everyone in education is represented by "teachers unions." Rarely do you hear conservatives note that school administrators, who are indeed grossly overpaid (I am the secretary for a special education "manager" pulling down $120k), are not part of the unions at all -- and in fact, as unionized workers are getting laid off, these managers' salaries are only increasing.
- ekeizer
June 8, 2012 at 2:58pm
It's the bloated CEO-worker salary ratio all over again.
- liberalref
June 8, 2012 at 3:29pm
I'm sorry, but is there actually someone out there who thinks pay is related to how difficult a job is? Teaching is hard, but it's a commodity. Commoditization drives down prices universally. And you think teaching is hard, try being a floor nurse on an active med-surg floor. 12 hour shifts, night shifts, patient overloads, and the ever-present knowledge that mistakes made today can't be made up for tomorrow, because the patient might be dead, or have lost function that can't possible be regained. Yet nurses aren't paid particularly better than teachers, because nurses are also a commodity. Commodities have a couple of interesting properties: First, most of them are high volume items. Holding down the cost of something you use a lot of makes a bigger difference than holding down the cost of something you only use a little of. There may be 10,000+ nurses working at a major tertiary medical center (Mayo clinic, e.g.). Give them all a raise to bring the average salary up from $60K to $70K, and you're out $100m/yr. Give the top 15 managers of the nursing deparment $150K/yr rather than $100K and it costs you less than $1m/yr. Second interesting property: they are by definition fungible. Which means, no individual has bargaining power, and even collectives have less than you might think. It's not that hard in this country to break a union. Third interesting property: A bad commodity jobholder affects less than a bad managerial or executive jobholder. A crappy nurse may kill you, but they can't make the whole hospital inefficient so that many more people are dying unnecessarily year after year. A crappy head of the nursing organization can. I'd love to see the US wage scale compressed upon itself significantly, so that the difference between a hard working nurse or teacher or truck driver or carpenter and the top managers in their fields is much smaller than it is, and I'd love that to go right up the line - CEOs were just as good (and bad) at running companies when they earned 20-40X their average employee age as the are now that it's 400X. There is no excuse for the differentials we see. But even if that happens, it wouldn't be because we use wages to reflect how hard people work, it would be because we come to a social consensus that the multiplier as you climb the commodity to specialty ladder is bigger than we want.
- IowaBeauty
June 8, 2012 at 4:19pm
IowaBeauty - wow!
- Wonderland
June 8, 2012 at 5:52pm
Yes! Terrific post IowaBeauty.
- Sophia
June 8, 2012 at 7:04pm
Also thanks Mr. Noah! I'm glad PATCO came up too. The firing of the air traffic controllers was just wrong. Trying to strip people of their collective bargaining rights, ditto.
- Sophia
June 8, 2012 at 7:05pm
Whoa there, now I agree the staffers salaries are over the top but not the Superintendent, if he doesn't perform he will be gone, and being Superintendent is a far more demanding job than being a school teacher is. At minimum a Super has to have a Doctorate, and beyond that he has to has a skill set across a whole range of areas, from negotiating with school boards, to dealing with individual Principals, to implementing changes in the curriculum...they have to be experts on education and business and politics. It all starts at the top, a corrupt superintendent, or an ineffective one, would be a disaster, wrong principals would be hired, a lousy curriculum would be imposed, there would be graft and featherbedding.
- blackton
June 8, 2012 at 7:16pm
Superintendents definitely have a hard row to hoe, & they tend to have a short life at the top. I can't quote the current stats, but from what I've seen sups, most often, they can only last a few years before they find themselves on the outs with their local board. Then they're gone. You have to be, IMHO, a glutton for punishment to want that job, & have a great capacity for working endless hours, attending meetings long into the night, several nights a week, after a long day of dealing with knotty problems. It is a job which calls for well-developed political skills, in addition to knowing the details of funding, budgets, personnel, curriculum, etc. . I've heard a lot of teachers complain about the fact that the superintendent made more than double what the did, but never found that to at all convincing. Teachers have a cush job, by comparison.
- Haole45
June 9, 2012 at 12:01am
I agree that Iowa Beauty's post is magnificent, but Haole45's comment is excellent also. Kahn's law #37: YOUR JOB is much more difficult than anyone appreciates; my job is pretty difficult; his or her job is a piece of cake and grossly overpaid. Besides, all children should be home-schooled, so they can learn that evolution is a myth and that Jesus is the Son of God. Think how much money we would save. It's the American way.
- skahn
June 9, 2012 at 1:12am
Great comments: who is "the union" really representing here? Dollars to donuts that those Superintendents etc came up through the education bureaucracy, probably themselves union members or even organizers at some point in their careers (okay, maybe brief and early). This is the same old problem: when you get a highly politicized system, organization and credentials count. We can define "public employee unions" pretty broadly these days. And we should.
- Robert Powell
June 9, 2012 at 8:55am
A kind word for Public Employee Unions is that their Boss is overpaid? Hmmm.... WSJ Ran an editorial in a similar vein yesterday, but it was Legislators, not Administrators. Teachers don't have it that bad. Think of your Gym Teacher, are they really working that hard? They get paid for coaching, so they are actually making more money. And to argue that their salary is below the Median Household Income is really incredulous. So the single teacher isn't making quiet as much as the Husband & Wfire heading off to work each day. I think you will find a few teachers married to fellow teachers, how about them making 80% more than the median household. Are they really worth twice everyone else? Silliness here.
- CRS9TNR
June 9, 2012 at 12:32pm
For heaven's sake. I do not understand these attacks on teachers. The future of the nation rests on the shoulders of our teachers. When have we become a nation which disparages education, wisdom and the skill it takes to teach - particularly in systems confronting poverty, violence, crumbling infrastructure?
- Sophia
June 9, 2012 at 2:57pm
Just to be clear, I do not mean to disparage or demean teachers, as a class (after all, my wife is one, & she would surely dispaarage me if she thought I were doing the same to her, or her fellow teachers, in general. And, at my age, I can handle no more disparagement than I have already suffered.) Teachers are sometimes good, & sometimes bad; when they're good, they can be really good. When they're bad, they can really suck. I personally have a case of profound ambivalence toward the union(s) which represent s) teachers. I understand the history which lead to unionization of the majority of teachers, & why teachers beliieve they need the protection unions afford them. On the other hand, I've witnessed how difficult. how frustrating, it can be for the administration in any particular school to rid itself of a demonstrably incompetent teacher, even in the case of one clearly within the probationary period defined by the contrat between the union and the district. I generally love teachers & what they do (especially mine (= :^ )) But it's too hard to flush out the bad ones, I do believe.
- Haole45
June 10, 2012 at 1:07am
It is absurd to assert that anyone here is disparaging "education, wisdom, and the skill it takes to teach". The problem is not teachers, or even teachers' pay and benefits packages. It's the system that will sacrifice gifted performers with less seniority in order to protect people who are indistinguishable from the kind of unaccountable bureaucrats who destroyed entire societies under socialism. It's exactly because "the future of the nation rests on the shoulders of our teachers" that we need real reform, which we're not going to get if the current national teachers' unions can help it.
- Robert Powell
June 10, 2012 at 9:08am
It is clear that some commenters here are far more concerned about the welfare of teachers than they are of students. Two who do not at all fit in this category are Haole and RP, and I commend them for their fine comments.
- liberalref
June 10, 2012 at 2:23pm
I think another thing that needs to be looked at is what salaries are needed to attract quality applicants. For a long time I thought public schools administrators were overpaid, but after having a few years of direct experience observing a few good administrators I'm convinced they could be making much more money in the private sector. The Principal of my daughter's school (a Chicago Public Elementary School) directly manages 40 teachers, 2 maintenance guys, a lunchroom staff of 5, afterschool staff of 12 or so, and deals directly with about 1,000 parents. He's dealing with a building that is over 100 years old and prioritizing what repairs need to be made, he's dealing with a variety of parents groups all pushing different agendas (as well as a group of 20-30 crazy individual parents), navigating the directives and politics of head office, deals with fundraising, is responsible for all accounting of the budget, and has to manage all of the reporting of test scores and execution of "education strategies" and goal setting that is handed down to him each year. He also has an administrative support staff of 2 (Vice Principal and office admin). He is mid-career (just over 20 years in the system) with 2 advanced degrees and makes a bit over $100,000/yr. If he was managing that number of people and that variety of concerns for any private business his salary would likely be double what it is. I don't know why anyone would choose to become a public school administrator.
- Attrill
June 10, 2012 at 11:19pm