Teacher's Unions: WTF? Who can justify them?
- Thread starter Herkmeister
- Start date
They most certainly are.
Have you ever asked yourself what happens when the market doesn't perform to the contact's assumptions?
Current assumption is 7.5%.
Do you know what the fiscal market end was for 2015?
I'll give you a hint. It was much, much less.(actually negative)
Who is going to make up that difference do you suppose?
This is how 48k state workers in Illinois have built over 100 BILLION in pension liabilities.
But...but... It was in the contract.
Idiots agreeing to idiocy can no longer be tolerated.
You really don't know much about this it seems. IPERS isn't in collective bargaining contracts. It is a system set up by the State, established by state law that has a lot of workers in it. A lot of them are non union. Collective bargaining contracts lay out leave, holidays, sick time, and COLA's for perhaps a 1-3 year period for an individual collective bargaining unit. The COLA's fall around 3%.
If your gripe is with IPERS, take it up with the Iowa Legislature, but it has nothing to do with collective bargaining contracts. IPERS is pretty well managed. They do adjust actuarial rates, and sometimes the employees and employers pay more. IPERS is in a lot better shape than a lot of these states. No one held a gun to the legislatures heads in those states.
Quit acting like government is some abstract entity. People get the government they deserve. Iowa has good government.
If your gripe is with IPERS, take it up with the Iowa Legislature, but it has nothing to do with collective bargaining contracts. IPERS is pretty well managed. They do adjust actuarial rates, and sometimes the employees and employers pay more. IPERS is in a lot better shape than a lot of these states. No one held a gun to the legislatures heads in those states.
Quit acting like government is some abstract entity. People get the government they deserve. Iowa has good government.
To clarify I live in Southern California.
You can see the salaries here:
http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=school-districts/riverside/temecula-valley-unified&q=Elementary+&y=
They all make in that range. I suppose a lot of that gets eaten up in housing expense out there but those seem like good wages.
As an ex-California resident I can tell you that teacher pay is in line with the cost of living there for most areas.
I can also tell you that when we moved back to Texas my tax bill was quite a bit less. Texas has no state income tax so my property tax was more than California but a lot less when you combine California state income tax with property taxes.
The issue I have with your thread is your last two sentences.
Everyone that gets state funding feels the same way you do - pay me and take it from someone else. I remember years in the business world I lived in with no raises and no bonuses because it was a bad year. It would be great if we could just pay out the money but that is not the reality.
haven't read the whole thread but IL's pension system is not in a hole because of down turns in the market.
I remember that thread. The point is, if a private school is willing to hire you as a teacher, what business does the state have to determine whether or not you're qualified to be a teacher and interfere with the hire? State occupational licensure makes sense for some occupations (like doctors), but some of the professions that require the blessing of the state seem like nothing but excuses to extract money from people's wallets.
For example: there are many women from the Caribbean in Florida who would like to practice hair braiding as an occupation. But the state requires they get a full-blown cosmetology license in order to braid hair. Ridiculous.
I don't have a problem with teacher salaries, and while I think districts/schools should have the freedom to pay good teachers more than average teachers, I don't care how they decide to divvy it. I have a major problem with how some unions hand out tenure, and that it's nearly impossible for a school to fire an under-performing teacher.
In a normal job, if you don't perform, you get fired. A teacher, on the other hand, responsible for teaching our kids, can teach kids almost nothing and keep their job. This is a much bigger deal in some states than others. In the most extreme case I'm aware of, in NYC, there are "reassignment centers" (also called Rubber Rooms) where teachers are paid to do nothing. Up to 700 teachers at any time who can't be in front of students are paid as regular teachers, get holidays, summer vacation etc. They've been deemed unfit to teach kids (or in many cases accused of misconduct), so they go to these "reassignment centers" and can do anything but school work (surf the net, do sudoku, etc), while they "wait for their disciplinary hearing." A teacher will be there for anywhere from a few months to a few years, and their union contracts don't allow them to be fired.
Yes, teachers unions have run off the rails, and the losers are our kids, good teachers with high potential, and ultimately, all of us.
In a normal job, if you don't perform, you get fired. A teacher, on the other hand, responsible for teaching our kids, can teach kids almost nothing and keep their job. This is a much bigger deal in some states than others. In the most extreme case I'm aware of, in NYC, there are "reassignment centers" (also called Rubber Rooms) where teachers are paid to do nothing. Up to 700 teachers at any time who can't be in front of students are paid as regular teachers, get holidays, summer vacation etc. They've been deemed unfit to teach kids (or in many cases accused of misconduct), so they go to these "reassignment centers" and can do anything but school work (surf the net, do sudoku, etc), while they "wait for their disciplinary hearing." A teacher will be there for anywhere from a few months to a few years, and their union contracts don't allow them to be fired.
Yes, teachers unions have run off the rails, and the losers are our kids, good teachers with high potential, and ultimately, all of us.
I'm not sure that's the point he's making. A fundamental problem facing Illinois' pension shortfall, outside of pension holidays, is the unrealistic rate of return that its pension funds should have.
Waiting for Superman is the biggest crock of crap on the planet where education is concerned. You want Geoffrey Canada's model in the public schools? Fine - the guy gets paid $750,000 to oversee a few schools. He turned down the position of New York City Schools Chancellor - wonder why?
He kicked out his entire inaugural middle school class as 8th graders because their scores didn't meet expectations, leaving them to scramble to find spots in public schools. HIS schools didn't fail those students according to the great Geoffrey Canada ...THEY failed the school. When questioned about it, Canada flatly lied and said the school was closed.
He claimed a 100% graduation rate based on the number of seniors who graduated. That class of 62 that he was lauding was a class of 97 in 6th grade. That's a drop out rate of 36%, Geoffrey.
His high school classes at Promise Academy I have 15 students with TWO licensed teachers in most classes. With an enrollment of about 130 kids they provide three student advocates for guidance and advice, as well as a social worker, a guidance counselor and a college counselor, and one-on-one tutoring after school. Students get free health care and dental checkups.
Get your legislature to pay for that kind of public system before you start touting that joke of a "documentary".
I didn't actually take away from the movie that you should join one of his schools, but merely that the education system is broken, particularly in regards to teachers unions, and we need to find a way to fix it. Of course there was some bias built in, which is why you don't at the end simply say "yes, that's the answer!"
I don't have a problem with a guy making $750k/yr if he's actually educating students. For NYC, isn't a 36% dropout rate a vast improvement over the public system? Obviously I don't know the circumstances around why students were ejected from his system, but its certainly a possibility he's not a great guy. BTW, the highest paid superintendents in NYC make over $250k, with the highest ever being $657k.
I certainly understand the negative reaction from someone who is on board with teachers unions, but you can't simply come back with "he makes too much money" and "he didn't improve as much as he said he did!" and act like that makes all the facts worth throwing out. Absent in that argument are whether students are learning more and achieving at a higher level. Putting students WAY DOWN the priority list is another fantastic argument against teachers unions.
Is this part even true? It might be true in New York and a few other places, but I struggle to see how this is a national issue. Perhaps we just need to send Terry Branstad to NYC and fix both places. I don't think we should accepts at face value that our public school system is broken nationally just because you can find some bad schools in a few locations. Because by that same standard I can find some great schools which must make the system wonderful.
How many times have you ever seen someones salary given with the benefits added to it. Most of those teachers were in the upper 80's low 90's. I'll assume thats fair pay in SC for someone with a 4 year degree. (does California require their teachers to have masters?)
and who decides "a bad teacher"? A pissed off parent? A parent who doesn't like what the teacher is telling their child as they both attempt to develop thinking skills? These discussions are petty most of the time. Does a teacher who offers "extra credit" deserve more respect from the public than a teacher who doesn't? Does an English teacher working in a minority school with fewer resources and few future college attendees deserve more or less respect than an English teacher working in the more affluent suburbs who has 90% of their grads go on to college? Each and every teaching situation is unique. One size fits all does not work in assessing these folks nor does it work in assigning these folks theres work. Again...teacher's unions are no different than any trade un ion...its job is to PROTECT and ADVANCE their members. It is by nature, an antagonistic system that is constantly abused by the fringes of both sides.
I'm sure some places are much better off than others. I live in VA, where there are no teacher's unions, and the schools still aren't phenomenal, so it's not all the fault of a union. To my knowledge Iowa's teacher's unions are not nearly as damaging as what was referenced for NYC, Chicago, or Milwaukee. I know that when I was in college, academically public school kids generally had to work a little harder to catch up to the expectations of college than did those that went to private schools. That's my own observation, not verified research, and it was also 15 years ago. However, I'm not convinced public schools have gotten better.
Much relies on parental involvement, but doing things like giving teachers "tenure" after 2 years on the job and making them untouchable, which some unions like Milwaukee and Chicago do, is lunacy that should be fixed.
$750k for a few schools but the NYC superintendent making 650K is questionable???? NYC schools have 1.1 million students. 135k full time employees and god knows how many part time.
A principal should decide who a bad teacher is, using any method they need to. With a union that's too strong for its own good, that decision is taken out of the principal's hands. The school board/superintendent is responsible to principals in place that can handle that responsibility appropriately.
http://schools.nyc.gov/nr/rdonlyres/eddb658c-be7f-4314-85c0-03f5a00b8a0b/0/salary.pdf
I had no idea they paid so little. I can't imagine being a beginning teacher in NYC starting off.
I had no idea they paid so little. I can't imagine being a beginning teacher in NYC starting off.
$647k was the highest I saw with a quick google search, and it was a guy in Long Island who retired in '09 or '10, that was his last year salary.
Are you and example of someone from pre-education union days? If so, I can understand why they exist.
This is closer to how I view the situation too. Its a local problem in a few places. Ts and Ps for them should be an appropriate response from people outside the area. All this handwringing about the state of the nation's public education system is largely misplaced. It's more of a condemnation of local control than the concept of public education.
Then talk to teachers and find out who they believe are "good" principals and who are not. And, by the by, "administrators" are huge beneficiaries of contract negotiations by teacher's unions. Teacher's unions negotiate the BASE of the education system wages.....and like any and all businesses, private or public, the "management team" fares much better in contracts than the working members do.
Pretty sure all those you mentioned qualify for exemptions the same way other groups do. They don't have a special religion exemption.
You are certainly correct that ANYONE who gets an exemption/deduction/credit is making the rest of us pay more tax to subsidize their exemption.
That's just one reason for subjecting all such exemptions and deductions and credits to brutal scrutiny.
The average citizen subsidizes mansions for the rich, "business dinners" at restaurants they could never afford, vacations (disguised as conferences or training sessions) at fancy resorts they could never afford, and so on.
Which is to say there's lots of BS in the code. And THEN the churches get extra.
Reread that first sentence (yours), please. You really believe this is the correct way to decide whether or not a teacher is "good" or "bad"? Back in the Old West days, they sometimes used vigilantes to dispense "justice."
Oh for god's sake...you want to know who puts students at the bottom of the list? Schools that would kick out an entire class for failing to make the grade. Our public school system IS NOT FAILING! That is a myth promulgated by those who want to get their hands on tax dollars and escape all responsibility.
You take our public schools that MATCH Finland in demographics...guess what? We CRUSH the Finns on international test scores. Best in the world...and It. Isn't. Close. Our public schools serving the 10% to 25% poverty population? Third in the WORLD on international test scores. Our public schools serving the 25% to 50% poverty population? Top ten in the WORLD on international test scores. Our population that's struggling is the one that's consigned to schools serving the 50%+ poverty group. Those schools with a population of 75% or greater living in poverty beat only Mexico.
Do not tell me money doesn't matter...it's a flat lie. But it isn't the money in the schools that makes the difference - it's the money in the homes. It's the kids coming from homes where the parents...or parent...are working two jobs. Coming from homes where there are no books. Coming from homes where there's no conversation between adults and children.
Teacher's unions the problem? Bullshyte. Ninety-five percent of Finland's teachers are UNIONIZED. Money makes the difference. What do you propose we do about that if NOT pour resources into our poorest schools...just like Geoffrey Canada does.
BTW, full disclosure: public employees in NC are barred from belonging to unions for the purposes of collective bargaining. We deal with what the state legislature decides to give...or take away.
Last edited:
Much of my family lives in NC. They are appalled by the GOP government there.
In 1983, to great fafare, the Reagan admin released A Nation At Risk. According to this paper, “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
You can read the thing yourself. It's an assessment of the state of education in the US. But here's your challenge...find the data upon which they base their conclusions. And good luck. It isn't there. Doesn't exist. They looked at test scores from the early 60's to the early 80's and noticed that they dropped and reacted in horror. their "report" became a hammer to smash public education.
Here's the rest of the story. Admiral James Watkins, Reagan’s secretary of energy, commissioned a follow-up in 1989. The researchers were tasked with getting the real data. So they did. They even went so far as to break the data out by socio-economic group. Want to guess what they discovered...much to their surprise?
The scores for EVERY SINGLE GROUP went UP over the twenty years of the study. EVERY SINGLE DEMOGRAPHIC GROUP WAS DOING BETTER!
Here's what's in the report: on nearly every measure employed in the survey, a steady or slightly improving trend was identified in public education over the course of the twenty years assessed in A Nation At Risk. Overall, the high school completion rate in the U.S. at 85 percent ranked as one of the highest in the world. The dropout rate was inflated by a growing immigrant school population. SAT results often reported as falling did so not because of decreasing student performance but because of increased participation from students in the lower percentiles - in other words, even though their overall scores were going up, their increased participation brought the average score down. One quarter of young people achieved a bachelor’s degree. Spending on education, far from sky-rocketing, had risen by 30 percent over the course of the study and most of this money had gone into special education programs, not the “regular” classroom.
The Reagan-initiated Sandia Report DID find a continuing achievement gap between blacks and whites. It also suggested that a cycle of low esteem among educators - who had been hammered for nearly a decade with the NAR study - posed a threat to future educational progress. Additionally, it reported on a lack of training in the workplace when compared to countries such as Japan and Germany that threatened educational progress.
So what did the Bush admin do with this startling and affirmative information? Guess. A huge celebration, surely!! Come on...you've heard of A Nation At Risk. Ever heard of the 1991 Sandia Report? No? The Bush admin sat on it. It wasn't published until 1993 with little fanfare. The researchers at the time claim they were threatened with a cut-off of federal money if they publicized it. Be that as it may...it's immaterial. The nation at risk was a manufactured crisis that NEVER EXISTED.
You can read the thing yourself. It's an assessment of the state of education in the US. But here's your challenge...find the data upon which they base their conclusions. And good luck. It isn't there. Doesn't exist. They looked at test scores from the early 60's to the early 80's and noticed that they dropped and reacted in horror. their "report" became a hammer to smash public education.
Here's the rest of the story. Admiral James Watkins, Reagan’s secretary of energy, commissioned a follow-up in 1989. The researchers were tasked with getting the real data. So they did. They even went so far as to break the data out by socio-economic group. Want to guess what they discovered...much to their surprise?
The scores for EVERY SINGLE GROUP went UP over the twenty years of the study. EVERY SINGLE DEMOGRAPHIC GROUP WAS DOING BETTER!
Here's what's in the report: on nearly every measure employed in the survey, a steady or slightly improving trend was identified in public education over the course of the twenty years assessed in A Nation At Risk. Overall, the high school completion rate in the U.S. at 85 percent ranked as one of the highest in the world. The dropout rate was inflated by a growing immigrant school population. SAT results often reported as falling did so not because of decreasing student performance but because of increased participation from students in the lower percentiles - in other words, even though their overall scores were going up, their increased participation brought the average score down. One quarter of young people achieved a bachelor’s degree. Spending on education, far from sky-rocketing, had risen by 30 percent over the course of the study and most of this money had gone into special education programs, not the “regular” classroom.
The Reagan-initiated Sandia Report DID find a continuing achievement gap between blacks and whites. It also suggested that a cycle of low esteem among educators - who had been hammered for nearly a decade with the NAR study - posed a threat to future educational progress. Additionally, it reported on a lack of training in the workplace when compared to countries such as Japan and Germany that threatened educational progress.
So what did the Bush admin do with this startling and affirmative information? Guess. A huge celebration, surely!! Come on...you've heard of A Nation At Risk. Ever heard of the 1991 Sandia Report? No? The Bush admin sat on it. It wasn't published until 1993 with little fanfare. The researchers at the time claim they were threatened with a cut-off of federal money if they publicized it. Be that as it may...it's immaterial. The nation at risk was a manufactured crisis that NEVER EXISTED.
Last edited:
Unfortunately, they've redrawn the lines in such a way that it will be nearly impossible to unseat their majority. The best we can hope for is to reduce their numbers below the veto-proof level and elect Cooper to hold the line.
Ok, that makes more sense then. Not sure what the cost of living there is but I'd bet that 110k probably has the buying power of a 40-50k salary in Iowa. I'm betting that number also includes her insurance and benefits too, so her take home pay is probably more in the range of 80k. That sounds about right salary wise, but that's no excuse for her being a poor teacher. Her administrators need to do a better job of evaluating her and making interventions.
Someday tarheel, the worm will turn nd the GOP run states will become Democratic and they (the GOPers) will claim "FOUL!" Mark my words. The sun doesn't shine on the same dogs rump every day. (My favorite Haydenism)
If this is all you think teachers do and that a sixth grader could do it then you are really not a very smart person.
