PA Pundit

SchoolSpending, a blogger who used to serve on a school board, has a fascinating post detailing the problem with public sector unions, and teacher unions in particular.  Noteworthy:

[W]e didn’t negotiate wages or benefits.  We negotiated raises and increases in benefit costs — and how we would account for them.  And folks, that’s the problem.

Teachers deserve to be well paid, but in this economy, it’s hard to define what that means.  College graduates are looking desperately for jobs.  Salaries reflect the numbers of applicants chasing few jobs.  The notion of an underpaid teacher is becoming  outdated — especially when contrasted with unemployed workers.  Teachers do not make hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they do make a very decent salary that is based on 180+ days of 7 hours and 35 minutes of work (that’s the contracted part).   They are paid by a taxing authority, so there is little fear of a pay check not clearing the bank.  Pink slips are virtually non-existent.  There is no mandatory retirement age enforced, and quality is what the individual teacher chooses to deliver.  TE is one of 6 districts in PA that has met the PSEA goal of a $50K starting salary. This starting salary  goes up every single year — and the salary for each teacher goes up every single year (and each salary step seems to increase with every single contract).  Districts (taxpayers)  pay for graduate education that triggers another form of raise for negotiated levels of achievement.  Teachers have a benefit plan that doesn’t resemble anything in the private sector in that the employer (again: taxpayer) pays virtually (and in some cases 100%) all of it.  And no matter what year it is, or how long the contract is, the above comments stay true.  The end of one contract simply  means you start talking about the new raises, and the new, higher starting salaries, and the new “top step” money….but rarely do you add any obligation to the process of teaching.  Sometimes they will add a non-teaching day (or even a teaching day) but that increases the salary and obfuscates the actual raise percentages.   Oh yes — you are tenured after 3 years…so performance isn’t a factor in your salary either.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review raises the warning about the Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System, known as PSERS.

Starting in the 2012-13 school year, when retirements are expected to accelerate, school districts and the state will have to pay an additional $2.5 billion annually into the fund, according to the Association of School Business Officials.

Of course, this is all thanks to the tradition of lavishing public employees with defined-benefit pensions (and then disguising the true cost of these liabilities to taxpayers).  Come hell or high water, taxpayers will be on the hook to ensure these retirees get guaranteed income for life.

Teacher retirement benefits are mandated by law. Courts have ruled they cannot be reduced for current teachers or state employees covered under similar retirement plans.

The Sentinel reports.  Also noted are the 37 states where it is illegal for teachers to strike.  A table listing the states with the highest public school teacher salaries shows no correlation between salary and the right to strike.

You don’t have to be a member of a union to enjoy exceptional compensation as a government employee.  Last month Main Line Suburben Life published details of the top Main Line town and school administrators.  Highlights:

• Tredyffrin/Easttown School District superintendent Daniel Waters had gross compensation in 2008 of $293,192, as well as a car for personal use and reimbursement for all car expenses — including gasoline and insurance!
• Lower Merion School District superintendent Christopher McGinley just signed a five-year contract with a base salary of $195,000 and 3.5% annual raises.
• Radnor School District superintendent Linda Grobman just signed a three year contract for a $194,000 annual salary.
• Radnor Township manager Dave Bashore earned $176,956 in gross pay during 2008, and enjoyed such additional perks as a car for personal use and home loan forgiveness.

Not covered in the article were defined-benefit pensions, which are bound to be equally lavish….

[Update: The Great Valley School District has an excellent watchdog site which reports that their Superintendent Rita Jones had a 2008 salary of $229,851, not counting extreme health benefits, all-expenses-paid car, and some bizarre provisions for "sabbaticals."]

Union negotiators represent a very vocal constituency with very strong interests in maximizing the union’s wins in contract negotiations.  Union workers enjoy a homefield advantage when it comes time to trot out human interest stories for the press and pundits to exploit.  Public boards and administrators, in contrast, represent the relatively poorly organized and unattentive constituency of “taxpayers.”

The prevailing custom is for public union negotiations to proceed in secret.  Fred at School Board Transparency explains how this “gives an immense and entirely unnecessary bargaining advantage to the union.”

The law allows (but does not require) school boards to conceal both how the union is proposing that they spend public money and how the board itself proposes to spend that money. Agreeing not to tell the public anything about this permits a union to prolong negotiations for as long as it wishes and then launch a PR blitz combining tributes to the dedication of teachers with threats of a strike. Unions can open negotiations with outrageous demands — not in the least “cognizant” of anything other than maxing out pay raises — stick with those demands for many months (or else lower them in tiny increments) and then complain that boards “aren’t negotiating.” Transparency is a dagger to the heart of this strategy.

He also offers a striking analogue:

Suppose that a school board in the newspaper’s area announces that it plans to put artificial turf on its athletic fields. The district negotiates with a sole-source contractor about materials and costs and promises to announce the results on the night of a board vote on the contract. (Meanwhile spokespeople for both the board and the contractor assure reporters that talks are “going well.”) It’s hard to believe that any self-respecting editor would shrug and say, “Well, I guess that’s how things are done.” Why apply a different standard to decisions that affect every family in a district, decide in advance the feasibility of plans to improve educational quality and cost many, many times more than laying down Astroturf?

Earlier this month the Wall Street Journal devoted an editorial to the astonishing news that Pennsylvania’s government was discussing a bailout of the Philadelphia newspapers.

Taxpayer cash is going to rescue so many people these days that it is hard to sort the truly awful ideas from the merely terrible. Then we heard the doozy out of Pennsylvania, where Governor Ed Rendell has discussed a state bailout of the company that owns a pair of Philadelphia newspapers, the Inquirer and the Daily News.

[Rendell spokesman Chuck] Ardo told us the state has an interest in saving the paper to protect jobs as well as a free press. Newspapers are “the lifeblood of democracy,” he says. But newspapers aren’t the lifeblood of anything if they are merely an adjunct of the state. Independent journalism is valuable, but only if it is truly independent. A newspaper that is bankrolled by the state, even if it’s only a loan, is going to have a strong interest in not criticizing the state. Perhaps this is one of Mr. Rendell’s goals, since like all politicians he prefers a favorable press.

Brian Tierney, President and CEO of the papers, had his rebuttal printed this weekend, but to my ear he only made the affair look even worse:

[T]he overwhelming majority of our employees who would benefit from such economic development money have no influence on the editorial content of our newspapers and online properties. They are drivers, distributors, pressmen, advertising salespeople, mailers and paper handlers. These are all valuable, good jobs which our company wants to preserve.

Apparently Tierney is not familiar with the premises of capitalism and limited government.  When the free market no longer supports a company’s product, the company’s jobs are by definition not valuable.  A bankrupt company is supposed to go out of business, and its workers are supposed to find good new jobs that the market does value.

Hey Brian: There’s a political philosophy in which government both controls the media and chooses which goods and services are produced.  We don’t practice it in this country, but if you hurry you still might be able to enjoy it in North Korea….

State Representative Sam Rohrer is circulating an excellent resolution putting the federal government on notice that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania will no longer tolerate infringement of its sovereignty, and calling on the federal government to respect the U.S. Constitution’s plain restraint on its power.

The resolution is worth reading in full: At just two pages in length it is a potent reminder of the principles of federalism and limited government on which this country was founded.

All PA citizens should encourage their representatives to co-sponsor this resolution.

An excellent new blog is digging into the finances and contracts of the Tredyffrin/Easttown school district.  The figures exposed here should outrage the taxpayers.

The new teacher’s contract, just recently finalized, gives a 4 year raise of at least 17.7% — and as much as 36.8% — to new teachers!  As this blogger asks, “Do you know ANYONE in industry that will get that kind of [guaranteed] raise over 4 years?”

Also noted is the fact that employees of the public schools enjoy uncapped and taxpayer-guaranteed pensions.

And don’t forget the job security that government employees enjoy: At a time when unemployment is breaking records, the unemployment rates of government workers are under 3%.

Government employees have managed to insulate themselves from the real world with our tax dollars.

Under current law public school teachers can go on strike without losing any money.  Meanwhile, parents have to bear the costs of emergency childcare when teachers go on strike.  Simon Campbell explains:

Teachers don’t get paid while they are out on strike, but they get to make either 100% of salary for the year, or close to it, due to the requirement in law for students to still get 180 academic days completed by either June 15 or June 30 at the latest.

I say “or close to it” because technically, striking teachers might lose a few workshop days of pay since the union contract is for 192 days not 180 days.  But it is at the union’s discretion as to whether or not they strike for every last day possible.  So they could still end up with 100% of pay in a number of different scenarios.

Teacher unions derive an unfair advantage from this ability to impose striking costs unilaterally on parents.  Most other unions face two less palatable alternatives: Tax their members to create a “strike fund” to pay striking workers, or else the workers give up their wages for the duration of a strike.

The Pennsylvania Department of Revenue book REV-717 contains forty pages of rules and what is taxed and how much when sold in Pennsylvania. One of my favorites: Non-flavored bottled water is not taxable, but if it’s flavored it’s taxable – unless it contains at least 25% juice, in which case it’s not!

In his new book An Army of Davids, Glenn Reynolds offers some thought-provoking commentary on the power of blogs. (more…)

There's a must-read article by Brian Anderson in the Winter 2006 City Journal that explained the dangers of FEC regulation of blogs. (more…)