Fortunately for the teachers, Californians have a very short memory.
All the teachers need to do is survive for the four-to-five years it takes Californians to forget what they have voted for. Then they can roll out a Proposition or local bond measure scolding voters for not funding education. Techies and other knowledge workers in particular respond very well to this kind of prodding which is why these measures pass reliably every four to five years but tend to fail if done too frequently. The unwise teachers in my town, Los Gatos, recently tried to shake down voters before the buildings promised by the previous bond measure were constructed.
The same is done with transit funding...I can't remember how many times a Measure or Proposition has passed that has promised to "finally" address transit funding...until four years pass and it is time to "finally" address it again.
Do you really think of teachers as a community of people who try to perpetrate scams on the general public? I'm trying to count on one hand all the teachers I know who are sitting fat the money they bilked from the voters, but I'm just not getting very far. Perhaps a more plausible explanation is that education funding measures reoccur repeatedly because public education is chronically underfunded as a standard budget item?
I'm sorry, but my mom made $125,000 pre tax as a teacher every year in NY and retired with a very similar pension payable to her and her husband until death.
I am their son. I am college educated, I make $50,000 per year on average and I've been laid off 3 times over my 6 years of post college employment. I have never been offered a 401k, which is a particularly ineffective retirement tool anyway.
How are teachers underfunded again? Maybe in certain underfunded neighborhoods, but not all. And their employment is pretty secure.
Uh... education is ~52% of California's current enacted budget and ~52% of the proposed budget for the next year. It's the largest item on the largest budget of any state in the US. Prop 98 was passed in 1988 guaranteeing a percentage (~40%) of the state budget be spent on education. How exactly is that "chronically underfunded"?
As for individual teachers "sitting fat [on] the money"... of course they aren't. Average teacher salary in California (according to California Teachers Association) is $78k -- and California is a very expensive place to live. FWIW, the CTA chiefs are making $300-400k+ and CTA controls a $300+ million annual budget. There's definitely plenty of money sloshing around the system, it just doesn't make its way to the teachers.
Teachers and other public workers have definitely created for themselves a bubble where they're insulated from the competition and stresses of the private sector, and they've done that at the public's expense. It's not a scam, but it's not innocuous either.
At the end of the day, tax money is a scarce resource. Money that goes to providing retirements for teachers more comfortable than what people with similar qualifications could get in the private sector is money that doesn't go to school lunches for hungry kids, etc. Teachers use the plight of disadvantaged kids to get more funding for schools. But that funding goes primarily to paying teachers, who are relatively privileged to begin with (being college educated and disproportionately white).
(Which is not to say that everyone shouldn't have a comfortable retirement--I'm all for raising taxes to Norway levels and funding a proper welfare state. But until we have Norway levels of tax dollars rolling in, our current expenditures on public employees is a misallocation of resources.)
I don't think they are trying to perpetrate a scam. But I do know local educators that spiked their pensions by working overtime right before they retired. The vast majority of the local school district budget goes to support pensions, not fix peeling paint or removing weeds which are visible on almost all local school grounds. This isn't an issue of underfunding. This is a problem that has resulted from mis-management.
The systems needed to deal with the social problems outside of schools that create difficulties for schools are chronically underfunded (and often designed poorly, as well), and teachers in many districts have impossible jobs as a result, but education itself isn't underfunded.
But “the schools are broken” is a more mentally manageable idea than “the entire socioeconomic system is broken”.
Its not that one teacher is sitting fat. Its that all teachers both current and retired are receiving paychecks which are not sustainable in the long term.
Consider a scenario where there are two retired teachers for every working teacher. To the working teacher they are underpaid. To the voters they are overpaid. The problem lies in the middle. If you stopped paying retired teachers you could triple the salaries of working teachers. Both parties would be satisfied with this arrangement.
Of course retired teachers would hate this and rightfully so. They were promised a pension and now you're denying it to them.
It calls into question the structure of compensation. Throw their money into a 401k rather than giving them 80-100% pay for the rest of their lives.
Teachers are certainly not underfunded as a budget item. They're 1) well paid[0], and 2) there's no evidence that paying them more results in better outcomes.[1] That's mostly because teachers have almost no effect whatsoever: even the very best only improve student outcomes by a small amount, and the effect fades after a few years.[2]
On the other hand there's evidence that teacher collective bargaining wastes hundreds of billions annually.[3]
Just because they're not conspicuously wealthy does not mean that they're blameless or virtuous or unsuccessful as a special interest group.
Holy cow. I can't believe this is a thing and that municipalities would agree to this. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should start creating laws to protect the government from making decisions like this.
What else should they do, when the representatives in government have little to no incentive to actually fix these issues?
When you're being underpaid, work a second job along with teaching, and have no savings for retirement because you are underpaid with the guise of a "pension"... you're gonna make a sign, and you're gonna try and get some funding bills passed.
Teachers have to participate in the broken system today, and I think categorizing their efforts to get more funding as a "shakedown" isn't representative of their motivations.
It would be wonderful to have a list of all these propositions including their initial selling points, how much money they raised and where the money actually ended up.
> All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations.
Unfortunately, we haven't figured out how to make teaching career-worthy without collective bargaining. Perhaps the best case study for non-union teaching is the workforce of adjunct teachers at universities. Talk to some adjuncts about their "careers." Disclosure: I was an adjunct for one semester at a big ten university, many years ago.
There is a glut of adjunct candidates with a PhD and a postdoc who can't get TT but there are relatively few with teaching degrees. The oversupply of adjuncts happens because they are the unsuccessful seekers of a much better job -- tenured professor -- but there is no similar situation for teachers. The economic analogy therefore won't fit, because the supply of teachers will respond to price signals more than the supply of adjuncts.
I don’t think unions are necesssry, the less attractive teaching is because of the (false) promise of pensions, the fewer people will be willing to enter the profession - forcing wages to rise.
On second thought, what will probably happen is that they will flee to private schools, the more affluent will lobby for “private school tax deductions” and leave only the worse teachers in public schools and only the less affluent will go to public school.
While this quote makes a good point that the Government is not like other employers, I am not sure what exactly is implied about the role collective bargaining for government employees. The government can't serve as neutral party to moderate negotiations with public sector employees because they are themselves are the employer. Does this imply that public sector employees should be allowed to organize and negotiate for their interests? I think not.
We see this in California. The public employees unions are highly politically active and of course support candidates who will do their bidding.
It's like if private sector unions got to choose the board and executives at their company. While that would doubtless be good for union employees (or at least leaders), it would be quite deleterious to the interests of shareholders.
I think this gets to public sector unions saying (or implying) "we won't vote for you unless you approve a certain amount of $ for X". The politicians then approve the $ as they'll be gone when the money runs out.
California progressives have a sort of "feast the beast" strategy. Provide massive benefits on loan. When those loans come due, raise taxes to pay for them. Repeat until the government fails due to overconsumption.
Why can neither side just follow a sane general strategy of setting taxes and choosing the best benefits to fit under the revenue generated?
It is worse than that: teachers are given paltry salaries with the promise of a nice pension to make up for it. So to the local governments, they can “pay for it later” unless they actually don’t.
Parents are just as culpable as they want a great education for their kids but don’t really want to pay for it, coupled with proposition 13 many schools in california are a mess.
Exactly. Let’s get rid of pensions and let the market sort it out - and this is coming from a teachers kid.
If you get rid of pensions and try to pay the teachers the same amount as you pay them now, there will be a teacher shortage forcing the government to pay more. They will have to raise taxes to cover it but at least all sides will know the true costs.
I don’t think the pension system in my state is too out of whack. It’s only 2% every year worked of your final salary up to 60% (80%?).
> Why can neither side just follow a sane general strategy of setting taxes and choosing the best benefits to fit under the revenue generated?
Why be reasonable when you can get benefits for yourself and have someone else down the road pay for them?
I wonder when this will break though. California has had it comparatively easy with a surging economy (at least in the Bay area), but the next recession will likely send all the pensions even further into the red.
> Why be reasonable when you can get benefits for yourself and have someone else down the road pay for them?
The only reason someone down the road has to pay for them is because the state/municipality reneged on its half of the bargain to actually fund the pension at the time, counting on future earnings to skate by. The teachers unions accepted lower pay raises or frozen wages in exchange for a good pension. Don't blame them for the malfeasance of the counterparty.
Hardly just a California thing; see Social Security. (Which is actually quite easily fixable, if we had the political will). But also posted today was an article about surging bankruptcy filings among the very group (baby boomers) that benefited MOST from a successful economy. Subsequent generations are being saddled with their excesses, and yet we still have a looming crisis.
> But also posted today was an article about surging bankruptcy filings among the very group (baby boomers) that benefited MOST from a successful economy.
The oldest baby boomers were still fairly early in their working life when the gains from the economy stopped broadly reaching the working class.
The generation who benefitted the most from the long post-WWII economic boom with wide distribution of gains were the Boomers’ parents.
Because public employee unions are the only reliably effective voting bloc in California. Democrats know full well that public employee compensation is a Ponzi schema in the state but won't bite the hand that feeds them.
Because a "starve the beast" strategy, like in Kansas, is a product of conservatives. Though school funding in Kansas was fine, despite the hysteria created by the media. There can NEVER be enough money for schools, per the article:
"Some districts are predicting deficits and many districts are bracing for what’s to come by cutting programs, reducing staff or drawing down their reserves—even though per-pupil funding is at its highest level in three decades and voters recently extended a tax hike on the rich to help pay for schools."
Maybe CA should work on it's illegal immigration problem, which is probably a big drain on the schools. Funny to read about all the economic woes in CA despite it's supposed great economy. In reality it's a dump.
Yet somehow the California economy is massive and thriving. So, apparently you're leaving something out or shading your analysis. I'll wait for peer review of your theory.
So long as public schools are treated as places that exist to provide guaranteed jobs to members of the teachers' unions, do not be surprised to see American students continuing to score lower on international tests than students in countries that spend a lot less per pupil than we do.
What kind of “guaranteed job” are you talking about? As a teacher, I could be let go without cause for my first three years and, subsequently, after two poor performance reviews. Tenure merely requires the district to attempt to coach the teacher before firing them. I’ve seen teachers forced out of the classroom simply because they don’t mesh with the personality of management.
Whatever horror stories about rubber rooms come out of NYC are not indicative of the reality on the ground most places.
How long did it take to fire Mark Berndt? His behavior had been flagged for decades but the school couldn't take action. Why did the school district choose to pay him $40,000 to drop his appeal when he finally was fired? Because even a case where a teacher was found to be feeding semen to blindfolded students, the job protections were so strong that that the district knew it was the cheapest and easiest way out to just pay him off.
I left California 3 years ago, so maybe this has changed, but at that time there were countless stories about "teacher jails" where Los Angeles would send teachers who should have been fired, but the process is so expensive and fraught with appeals and obstructions that it was cheaper and easier to keep them on the payroll - permanently. They would isolate them so they couldn't have contact with students, but they'd go on paying them to go sit in empty offices - for years.
The argument that tenure only adds requirements for coaching sort of whitewashes over the practical challenges presented when a district needs to let a teacher go.
When I read articles such as this, where there are previous commitments that were not sufficiently backed by the committers, I cannot help but feel 1) Government services are ponzi schemes and 2) It seems only just to plunder the wealth of the those who made the commitments in order to hold them to their words.
A potential solution: make school year round, eliminate the unnecessary summer learning loss, and have new teachers pay into social security and a 401k like other workers do. No more separate system, students will perform better, and frankly I think parents will appreciate having more frequent short student vacations through the year rather than one large summer and winter chunk like we do now that causes problems with childcare and nutrition for low-income families. The big reason teachers don't get social security is because they do not work year round so the payout would be a fraction of what teacher pensions pay out - with year round school we no longer need to compensate in this way to make teaching a viable career.
That’s not remotely true. Even a full social security payout wouldn’t come close to the public employee union pension plans - in California it probably wouldn’t be 1/4 of it.
In CA, teacher can retire making ~100k/yr, and get 105% of that as a pension for life. Do you really think one of the most polioactive lobbying groups in the state would let that disappear?
My idea would be that they would not rely entirely on Social Security, they would be funding a 401K alongside some sort of reasonable match from the state instead, much like the deal people in the private sector get.
I did as well, but I do not feel it would be unreasonable to go to school year-round with 2-3 week breaks each season instead. There would still be free time and opportunities for families to travel, but it would not need to occur in a single 2-3 month period like what we do now.
> Why are California teachers paying into a separate pension system rather than Social Security like everyone else?
Lots of state and local public employees nationally don't pay into Social Security (and consequently don't qualify for SS benefits for the earnings while in public employment; these workers also get reduced Social Security benefits if they did qualify based on either other work of their own or as a surviving spouse.)
Nationally, this is true of the majority of police, firefighters, and other emergency workers, and a large minority of teachers, and smaller minorities of other public employees.
Many public employees, OTOH, pay into both SS and a public employee pension.
Public employers were originally completely excluded from Social Security, but were permitted (but not required) to participate after 1950.
> unlike firefighters or police officers, most retirees earn modest pensions of about $55,000 a year.
That’s a very misleading statistic - it represents an average service time of about 24 years, barely more than half of a career. Full-career retirees average 105% of their final year’s pay in pension benefits, or about double what’s quoted here.
Hell, I'd love to get out of SS. My money would have much better growth without that ponzi scheme. The problem is letting the government (state or federal) manage you retirement "fund", then wondering why you don't have any.
Readit News
All the teachers need to do is survive for the four-to-five years it takes Californians to forget what they have voted for. Then they can roll out a Proposition or local bond measure scolding voters for not funding education. Techies and other knowledge workers in particular respond very well to this kind of prodding which is why these measures pass reliably every four to five years but tend to fail if done too frequently. The unwise teachers in my town, Los Gatos, recently tried to shake down voters before the buildings promised by the previous bond measure were constructed.
The same is done with transit funding...I can't remember how many times a Measure or Proposition has passed that has promised to "finally" address transit funding...until four years pass and it is time to "finally" address it again.
I am their son. I am college educated, I make $50,000 per year on average and I've been laid off 3 times over my 6 years of post college employment. I have never been offered a 401k, which is a particularly ineffective retirement tool anyway.
How are teachers underfunded again? Maybe in certain underfunded neighborhoods, but not all. And their employment is pretty secure.
As for individual teachers "sitting fat [on] the money"... of course they aren't. Average teacher salary in California (according to California Teachers Association) is $78k -- and California is a very expensive place to live. FWIW, the CTA chiefs are making $300-400k+ and CTA controls a $300+ million annual budget. There's definitely plenty of money sloshing around the system, it just doesn't make its way to the teachers.
Teachers and other public workers have definitely created for themselves a bubble where they're insulated from the competition and stresses of the private sector, and they've done that at the public's expense. It's not a scam, but it's not innocuous either.
At the end of the day, tax money is a scarce resource. Money that goes to providing retirements for teachers more comfortable than what people with similar qualifications could get in the private sector is money that doesn't go to school lunches for hungry kids, etc. Teachers use the plight of disadvantaged kids to get more funding for schools. But that funding goes primarily to paying teachers, who are relatively privileged to begin with (being college educated and disproportionately white).
(Which is not to say that everyone shouldn't have a comfortable retirement--I'm all for raising taxes to Norway levels and funding a proper welfare state. But until we have Norway levels of tax dollars rolling in, our current expenditures on public employees is a misallocation of resources.)
It's not, though.
The systems needed to deal with the social problems outside of schools that create difficulties for schools are chronically underfunded (and often designed poorly, as well), and teachers in many districts have impossible jobs as a result, but education itself isn't underfunded.
But “the schools are broken” is a more mentally manageable idea than “the entire socioeconomic system is broken”.
Consider a scenario where there are two retired teachers for every working teacher. To the working teacher they are underpaid. To the voters they are overpaid. The problem lies in the middle. If you stopped paying retired teachers you could triple the salaries of working teachers. Both parties would be satisfied with this arrangement.
Of course retired teachers would hate this and rightfully so. They were promised a pension and now you're denying it to them.
It calls into question the structure of compensation. Throw their money into a 401k rather than giving them 80-100% pay for the rest of their lives.
On the other hand there's evidence that teacher collective bargaining wastes hundreds of billions annually.[3]
Just because they're not conspicuously wealthy does not mean that they're blameless or virtuous or unsuccessful as a special interest group.
[0] https://www.city-journal.org/html/no-teachers-are-not-underp...
[1] http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~kamurali/papers/Working%20Papers/Do...
[2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/19/teachers-much-more-than...
[3] https://www.nber.org/papers/w24782
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/02/local/la-me-ln-schoo...
When you're being underpaid, work a second job along with teaching, and have no savings for retirement because you are underpaid with the guise of a "pension"... you're gonna make a sign, and you're gonna try and get some funding bills passed.
Teachers have to participate in the broken system today, and I think categorizing their efforts to get more funding as a "shakedown" isn't representative of their motivations.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15445
There is a glut of adjunct candidates with a PhD and a postdoc who can't get TT but there are relatively few with teaching degrees. The oversupply of adjuncts happens because they are the unsuccessful seekers of a much better job -- tenured professor -- but there is no similar situation for teachers. The economic analogy therefore won't fit, because the supply of teachers will respond to price signals more than the supply of adjuncts.
On second thought, what will probably happen is that they will flee to private schools, the more affluent will lobby for “private school tax deductions” and leave only the worse teachers in public schools and only the less affluent will go to public school.
Maybe we can sum this up in 140 characters?
It's like if private sector unions got to choose the board and executives at their company. While that would doubtless be good for union employees (or at least leaders), it would be quite deleterious to the interests of shareholders.
Why can neither side just follow a sane general strategy of setting taxes and choosing the best benefits to fit under the revenue generated?
Parents are just as culpable as they want a great education for their kids but don’t really want to pay for it, coupled with proposition 13 many schools in california are a mess.
If you get rid of pensions and try to pay the teachers the same amount as you pay them now, there will be a teacher shortage forcing the government to pay more. They will have to raise taxes to cover it but at least all sides will know the true costs.
I don’t think the pension system in my state is too out of whack. It’s only 2% every year worked of your final salary up to 60% (80%?).
Why be reasonable when you can get benefits for yourself and have someone else down the road pay for them?
I wonder when this will break though. California has had it comparatively easy with a surging economy (at least in the Bay area), but the next recession will likely send all the pensions even further into the red.
The only reason someone down the road has to pay for them is because the state/municipality reneged on its half of the bargain to actually fund the pension at the time, counting on future earnings to skate by. The teachers unions accepted lower pay raises or frozen wages in exchange for a good pension. Don't blame them for the malfeasance of the counterparty.
The oldest baby boomers were still fairly early in their working life when the gains from the economy stopped broadly reaching the working class.
The generation who benefitted the most from the long post-WWII economic boom with wide distribution of gains were the Boomers’ parents.
What is the easy fix, given political will, for social security?
Why is this just a progressive thing?
"Some districts are predicting deficits and many districts are bracing for what’s to come by cutting programs, reducing staff or drawing down their reserves—even though per-pupil funding is at its highest level in three decades and voters recently extended a tax hike on the rich to help pay for schools."
Maybe CA should work on it's illegal immigration problem, which is probably a big drain on the schools. Funny to read about all the economic woes in CA despite it's supposed great economy. In reality it's a dump.
Deleted Comment
- Thomas Sowell
Whatever horror stories about rubber rooms come out of NYC are not indicative of the reality on the ground most places.
I left California 3 years ago, so maybe this has changed, but at that time there were countless stories about "teacher jails" where Los Angeles would send teachers who should have been fired, but the process is so expensive and fraught with appeals and obstructions that it was cheaper and easier to keep them on the payroll - permanently. They would isolate them so they couldn't have contact with students, but they'd go on paying them to go sit in empty offices - for years.
The argument that tenure only adds requirements for coaching sort of whitewashes over the practical challenges presented when a district needs to let a teacher go.
Deleted Comment
In CA, teacher can retire making ~100k/yr, and get 105% of that as a pension for life. Do you really think one of the most polioactive lobbying groups in the state would let that disappear?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewbiggs/2015/08/28/californ...
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-201509...
Additionally, they don't receive social security benefits.
This seems like the most important sentence in the entire article.
Why are California teachers paying into a separate pension system rather than Social Security like everyone else?
What would it take to decommission STRS for CA teachers?
Lots of state and local public employees nationally don't pay into Social Security (and consequently don't qualify for SS benefits for the earnings while in public employment; these workers also get reduced Social Security benefits if they did qualify based on either other work of their own or as a surviving spouse.)
Nationally, this is true of the majority of police, firefighters, and other emergency workers, and a large minority of teachers, and smaller minorities of other public employees.
Many public employees, OTOH, pay into both SS and a public employee pension.
Public employers were originally completely excluded from Social Security, but were permitted (but not required) to participate after 1950.
That’s a very misleading statistic - it represents an average service time of about 24 years, barely more than half of a career. Full-career retirees average 105% of their final year’s pay in pension benefits, or about double what’s quoted here.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewbiggs/2015/08/28/californ...
Is it?
It sounds like you're not arguing that "most retirees" don't get that amount, but that they don't deserve the amount they get.