Godless: The Church of Liberalism
Page 18
The only work Senator Chris Dodd has ever done in twenty-five years in the Senate is to try to nationalize kindergarten and prekindergarten child care. It’s somehow cruel and unfair not to federalize all education workers in America. And there are a lot of them—teachers, substitute teachers, assistant teachers, substitute assistant teachers, teachers’
safety instructors, teachers’ pension managers, teachers’ health care providers, teachers of teachers—and we haven’t even gotten to the principals, assistant principals, and superintendents. Democrats won’t rest until we have achieved a national average class size of 1 teacher for every .03 students.
Dodd’s 2001 bill on “childcare” is typical. With a title that sounds suspiciously as though a teacher named it—”Focus on Committed and Underpaid Staff for Children’s Sake Act”—Dodd’s bill spent about two sentences talking about children and the next 90 pages detailing copious benefits packages for public school teachers. In a sentiment born of pure class hatred, teachers are enraged that they often earn less than members of the sweaty working class who probably don’t even hold master’s degrees in “education theory.” Consequently, the Democrats are constantly introducing bills to legislatively proclaim that all teachers are worth more than plumbers, truck drivers, and other professions whose members do not vote for Democrats. Dodd’s bill couldn’t even make it through the “findings” section without long diatribes about the indignity of bus drivers earning more than teachers.
After two very brief references to “the children” at the beginning, the bill gets right to the heart of the matter: increasing the salaries of “child care providers.”
Finding number (3) cites “a growing body of research” showing the value of “well-compensated child care providers.”
Finding number (4) bitterly quotes Department of Labor statistics showing that in 1999, “the average wage for a child care provider was $7.42 per hour,” and the “median wage of a family child care provider in 1999 was $264 weekly, or $13,728 annually.”
These figures apparently include the salaries of teenage babysitters and after-school care at Grandma’s house. One major reason child care providers show up as being paid so little is the large number of liberal Democrat cabinet nominees who pay their nannies off the books. The average teacher’s salary that year was $43,300, compared with $40,100 for other full-time workers—who, I note, don’t get summers off or leave work at 3:00 P.M.
Finding number (5) expresses the class hatred of teachers toward the working class, complaining that “child care providers earn less than bus drivers ($26,460), barbers ($20,970), and janitors ($18,220).” Inexplicably, Derek Jeter’s income from the previous year was not mentioned here. How about this: When the bus drivers’ failure rate of getting kids to school gets up to around 50 percent, which is the teachers’ failure rate of teaching kids, then we can talk about equal pay for teachers and bus drivers.
Finding number (6) complains about “woefully inadequate” health care benefits for child care professionals.
Finding number (7) returns to the important matter of paying “childcare workers” more.
Finding number (8) complains, “Teachers leaving the profession are replaced by staff with less education and formal training in early child development.”
Finding number (9) complains again about teachers’ “low wages and limited benefits.” (This can’t be mentioned often enough!) Finding number (10) says that everyone suffers “the consequences of inadequate compensation” for child care providers, principally the providers, of course, but also—way down on the list—even the children.
The eleventh and final finding praises state programs that increase the “compensation of child care providers” and notes that the states could get better child care providers “by offering financial incentives, including scholarships and compensation increases, that range from $350 to $6,500 annually.”
The cost of the bill that promised to make our fourth-graders as dumb as the French within five years was $5 billion. Every part of Dodd’s Teachers’ Union Wish-List bill was calculated to produce stupid children chock-full of behavioral problems.
The main reason good teachers aren’t paid more is bills like Dodd’s. Educating children is no longer the primary purpose of the public schools. Today their purpose is to employ 2 million people. Back in 1985, Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said, “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.” The public may be confused on this issue, but the teachers’ unions—and the Democrats—are not. If you gave all the money in the United States to the public schools, they would not improve; they would simply cost more. The teachers’ unions are tenaciously committed to expanding their workforce, and paying every teacher the same salary, whether that teacher is world-class and deserves $200,000 a year or is utterly incompetent and deserves to be fired—possibly imprisoned.
Putting children in government schools at younger and younger ages does not help the children; it merely expands teachers’ unions’ membership rolls. As any normal human could tell you—and studies now confirm!—it’s better for a child under five years old to be at home with his mother than in child care, no matter how “stimulating” the environment. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development studied more than 1,300 children in ten different states for seven years and concluded that the more time a child spends in nonparental child care, the more behavioral problems the child will have. Yes, perhaps given a choice between being left alone in a crack house as opposed to Chris Dodd’s pre-K child care, the child care would win. But in most cases, that’s not the choice. The Democrats’ solution is to raise taxes to pay for preschool child care, which will require more mothers to work outside the home to pay the taxes, which will require them to put their children in government child care. Except welfare mothers.
Those are the only women in America who Democrats think should not work.
The throwing-money-at-it approach to educating children has been tried so often that teachers are now among the highest-paid workers in America, with thousands of teachers—about 20,000—already earning more than $100,000 a year.
Using data from the U.S. Department of Labor on household median earnings, Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder found, “Weekly pay for teachers in 2001 was about the same (within10 percent) as for accountants, biological and life scientists, registered nurses, and editors and reporters, while teachers earned significantly more than social workers and artists.” Of the seven professions Vedder compared, the only ones with higher weekly pay than teachers were lawyers and judges, which, as Vedder said, “one would expect, given that the educational training to become a lawyer is longer and more demanding.”
Of course, only teachers get long summer vacations, “professional development” days, snow days, and every conceivable federal holiday. It appears that the only people who get better compensation than teachers for nine months’ work are professional baseball players. So in order to compare apples and apples, Vedder compared hourly wages as calculated by the National Compensation Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, based on the teachers’ self-reports for how many hours they worked weekly.
First of all, relying on self-reports of how many hours someone works is like relying on teenage boys’ self-reports about how much sex they’re having (90 percent say they have had sex, 60 percent with Pamela Anderson). Nonetheless, comparing hourly wages based on the teachers’ self-reports, Vedder says, “Teachers earned more per hour than architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, statisticians, biological and life scientists, atmospheric and space scientists, registered nurses, physical therapists, university-level foreign-language teachers, librarians, technical writers, musicians, artists, and editors and reporters.” Only lawyers, engineers, and doctors earned more. And a lawyer can’t call in a “substitute lawyer” when he needs a “personal day.” (Plus it’s a lot harder for d
octors, lawyers, and engineers to have sex with their clients.) Judging solely by the amount of time teachers spend writing letters to the editor complaining about how poorly paid they are, teachers seem to have a lot of free time.
A Nexis search of all news documents during the years 2000 to 2005 that included the words “letters to the editor,” “teachers,” “underpaid,” and “overworked” produced 168 documents. The same formulation for other professions produced these results:
doctors ……………………………… 60 documents
lawyers …………………………….. 30 documents
secretaries …………………………. 30 documents
reporters …………………………… 29 documents
firefighters ………………………… 23 documents
marines …………………………….. 15 documents
priests ………………………………… 6 documents
carpenters …………………………… 2 documents
waiters ………………………………….1 document
Of course, we can’t be sure that these were all letters to the editor complaining about the low pay of teachers, marines, firefighters, and so on; they might have all been letters complaining that teachers are “overworked” and “underpaid” compared to marines, firefighters, and others.
In 2002, Bob Chase, the president of the National Education Association (NEA), complained that teachers don’t make as much as engineers ($74,920) or lawyers ($82,712). But I’m thinking, Why stop at engineers and lawyers? Why shouldn’t kindergarten teachers earn as much as Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts? A better benchmark comparison for public school teachers might be private school teachers. Teachers in the private sector earn about 60 percent less than public school teachers.’ And their students actually learn to read.
Comparing hourly earnings still does not quite compare apples and apples or even apples and oranges—more like apples to grapes—because of the massive benefits packages public school teachers receive. Teachers have far more generous pensions than other professional workers, allowing them to retire earlier. In 1995, while the average retirement age for teachers was fifty-nine, for professional workers whose only government pension is Social Security it was al-most sixty-four years old. Despite this, the NEA complains about teachers’ pensions being offset against their Social Security benefits. So in addition to having taxpayers foot the bill for government pensions more generous than Social Security benefits, they also want the teachers to get their full Social Security benefits.
Pop Quiz: If a private sector retiree has to get by on Social Security and a retired public school teacher is entitled to two pensions, which one is hosing the American taxpayer more? Please show your work.
Then there is health insurance. Many public school medical insurance plans still do not require that teachers contribute any payment whatsoever toward the premium—unheard of in the private sector—and woe to the politician who proposes increasing teachers’ co-pay from $5 to $10. Finally, no matter what happens to the rest of the economy, teachers don’t have good years and bad years. Public school teachers have absolute job security, which is also worth something.
According to Vedder’s analysis of the federal data, teachers receive a package of benefits worth more than 26 percent of their salaries, compared with benefits packages worth 17 percent of a salary in the private sector. “All told,” Vedder says, “teachers’ average hourly compensation plus benefits exceeds the average for all professional workers by roughly 10 to 15 percent.”
Congratulations to the teachers’ unions! But do we have to keep hearing about how underpaid, overworked, and underappreciated teachers are? It’s like the “Islam is a religion of peace” mantra—and similarly based in reality. One begins to wonder if schools of education teach anything besides how mistreated teachers are. Everyone simply asserts, as one columnist did in the Los Angeles Times, “Teachers are underpaid.”
The author went on to say that teachers “give it their best and try to make it work.” That must not be easy, considering they have to labor with the knowledge that someone, somewhere earns more per hour than they do. Only an electorate educated in a school system like ours would fall for the argument that teachers aren’t paid enough. Hey—maybe these teachers aren’t so dumb after all.
A lot of people in America have difficult jobs. There are men sleeping in their boots in Afghanistan right now so the rest of us can sleep peacefully at night. There are store owners who haven’t taken a vacation for twenty years. There are entrepreneurs working weekends and risking everything for an idea that will make the world better or safer—or on the other hand might fail and land them in bankruptcy court. (And they don’t get summers off.)
The very fact that teachers have three months off in the summer and can hold other jobs is indignantly cited as further proof that teachers are underpaid. Shelley Potter, president of the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel, told the San Antonio Express-News, “For most teachers, it’s a matter of necessity to work that extra job to make ends meet.” Teachers seem not to realize that everyone else works in the summer, too.
In fact, almost 80 percent of teachers do not take second jobs in the summer. That’s according to a lachrymose op-ed in the New York Times bemoaning the idea that teachers should spend any of their three-month summer vacation working. “One day,” the writers say, teachers are “shaping minds, a moral force in the lives of the young people they teach and know, and in some ways the architects of the future of the nation”—such as by telling students, “Bush is like Hitler”—”The next day they’re serving cocktails and selling plasma TV’s at the mall.” The indignity!
If we’re choosing the most underpaid profession, my pick is doctors. They spend a minimum of seven years in school, with somewhat more rigorous schedules than those of education majors. When they finally graduate from medical school, they will leave with $100,000 to $200,000 of student loan debt. Their reward for all this hard work and deferred gratification is a residency, where they will work up to 120 hours a week, often 36 hours consecutively, for the princely starting salary of $29,000 to $37,000. Finally the big payoff comes—but there are still the student loans to pay off and malpractice insurance premiums of $50,000 to $300,000 per year. Some doctors will clean their own office toilets when they start off just to make ends meet. According to Department of Labor statistics, the mean average salary for doctors ranges from $106,000 a year for podiatrists to $190,000 a year for surgeons. Which isn’t bad—why, it’s nearly as much as a school principal makes in New York City!
Compare the years of training for a doctor with the educational achievements of teachers. As summarized by Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute—who has a Harvard master’s degree in education himself—”Undergraduate education majors typically have lower SAT and ACT scores than other students, and those teachers who have the lowest scores are the most likely to remain in the profession. The lower the quality of the undergraduate institution a person attends, the more likely he or she is to wind up in the teaching profession.” In a 1999 interview, Hoover Institution fellow Thomas Sowell was asked what change in America would give him the greatest satisfaction if he could snap his fingers and make it happen. He answered, “Do away with schools of education and departments of education. Close them down.” The “Mickey Mouse courses that you have to take to enter the field,” he said, were driving away many of the best people from teaching. Sowell also remarked that “the most childish letters I receive in response to my newspaper column come from teachers… . They seem to think that they can simply make up their facts, and that they can psychoanalyze me. They like to tell me, for instance, `You must have had a bad experience of teachers.’“
In 2001, only 60 percent of education students taking the basic teachers’ licensing exam in Virginia were able to pass. The test asked questions like these: Martin Luther King Jr._ (insert the correct choice)
of all races:
a. spoke out passionately
b. spoke out passionate
c. did spoke out passionately
d. has spoke out passionately
e. had spoken out passionate
Anyone who could not answer that question should not be allowed to serve food in a public school much less teach at one, but nearly half the aspiring teachers got it wrong.
Acting quickly to remedy this crisis, the Virginia state board of education lowered the requirements, making it easier to pass while getting the above question wrong.
The same thing happened in Massachusetts in 1998. Fifty-nine percent of candidates for teaching positions failed a basic-skills test geared to eighth-graders. One-third of the test takers couldn’t even pass the basic-skills section. In response, the state education commissioner, Frank W. Haydu III, suggested that the passing grade be lowered from 77 percent to 66 percent. When informed that one-third of applicants flunked the test, he said, “Okay, but that’s still less than half, right?” (Only the last sentence is a joke.) Defenders of the illiterate Massachusetts teachers at FairTest.org presumably illiterate Massachusetts teachers themselves—denounced the exam, claiming there were “major substantive and administrative problems with the test.” According to FairTest, the first “fundamental” defect with the test was that some teachers didn’t grasp that their scores would count and thus were denied—I quote—”due process legal right to adequate time to prepare for a high-stakes exam.” Also, according to FairTest, the company that created the test “has a history of making and selling defective products.” (FairTest enclosed an addendum explaining to their members what the terms history and test meant.) Thus, for example, FairTest says a “study” found that “the exam was `fundamentally flawed’ because of the lack of any demonstrable relationship between test scores and initial teacher competency.” Genuine teacher competency is measured by how capable a teacher is at taking away a fourth-grader’s Bible and passing out condoms.