Skyrocketing Executive Pay and the Educational Salary Gap

Superintendent Fat Cat?

Despite the passage of California’s Proposition 30, which holds the state’s education funding steady at 2011-2012 levels, none of the $20 billion that has been slashed from K-12 funding over the past 4 years will be restored. Consequently, school districts will continue to operate on austere budgets, with overcrowded classrooms, reduced course offerings, and reduced numbers of teachers, librarians, nurses and counselors. This has led to a record 188 state school districts at risk of financial collapse. Yet, like the bailed out banks and automobile industry, many districts have managed to find the money to offer their top executives lavish raises.

Perhaps the most notable example is Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)—the nation’s second largest school district—which has struggled with a $2.8 billion deficit over the past five years, while laying off 10,000 teachers. At the same time as LAUSD has cut teachers and services, it has boosted Superintendent John Deasy’s salary from $275,000 to $330,000 (according to the Bay Citizen)—roughly five times the average teacher’s salary. Since 2009, LAUSD has increased its superintendent’s salary 32%.

California Watch has investigated 40 of the largest districts on the state’s financial watch list (those at risk of financial insolvency) and found that more than half have raised their superintendents’ salaries since 2009. For example, Riverside Unified School District raised Superintendent Richard Miller’s pay from $267,208 to $314,963, despite having cut $100 million from its budget since 2008-09. The Lynwood Unified School District raised its superintendent’s pay by roughly 23%, from $200,000 to $245,000, two years ago, even though it has had ongoing budget deficits, including its current deficit of $6.8 million.

While the primary cause of California’s education budget problems has been the declining business, property and income tax rates, overly generous executive pay has added to the problem. In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie capped superintendent salaries and New York is considering similar legislation, the Bay Citizen reported. A superintendent pay cap is not currently under consideration in California.

Proponents of high superintendent pay argue that superintendents are charged with much bigger and more important responsibilities (i.e., protecting and nurturing the “innocents”) than are corporate executives, yet they are paid only a fraction of what CEO’s of similar sized companies are paid. On the other hand, CEO pay has been skyrocketing over the past few decades and is now at its highest level ever relative to the median pay of their employees, contributing to the growing wealth and income gap and declining working and living standards for the majority of Americans.

It is also complete nonsense that executives need or deserve to earn 1,000 times, 100 times or even 2 times more than their employees. This argument is based on the fallacious notion that responsibility for large budgets and large numbers of employees is tougher and more valuable than other occupations. Yet it is the employees who do all the really difficult work. It is the employees who create the profits in private business and the bosses who pocket the difference between the wealth they create and their salaries. Though superintendents do not earn profits from their teachers’ labor, they have far more control over their own working conditions (and consequently less stress) than teachers. It is the teachers who have the most direct influence over the safety and success of the “innocents.” It is the teachers who design creative and engaging curriculum; create positive, nurturing classroom environments; and who communicate with parents about their children’s wellbeing and needs. So if it’s really all about the children, then it is the teachers, not the superintendents, who should be getting the six-figure salaries and 20-30% raises. 

Report Calls for More Teacher Support and Less Testing

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

If California wants to improve student academic performance, it needs to emphasize recruiting, educating and retaining teachers, according to a new report by a state task force, the Los Angeles Times reported on September 9. The task force also rejected making any links between teacher evaluations and students’ standardized test scores.

This latter finding is particularly salient in light of the recent Chicago teachers’ strike, in which the union (CTU) aggressively resisted attempts by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to require a substantial portion of teachers’ evaluations be based on such test scores. Disturbingly, just days before this study was released, the CTA (the state’s largest teachers union) and state legislators agreed on an evaluation “reform” bill that would require student performance data be used to evaluate teachers. The agreement does not exclude the use of student standardized test scores, though it does give local bargaining units the right to collectively bargain what portion of teachers’ evaluations, if any, will be based on the scores, thus opening the way for many more battles like the one in Chicago.

While the task force’s findings regarding teacher recruitment and training make a lot of sense, the state has been moving in the opposite direction through budget cuts that have forced districts to slash or freeze wages, add furloughs, increase class sizes, decrease benefits, increase workloads, and numerous other “stopgaps.” These may help close budget deficits, but they also reduce the ability to recruit and retain the best quality teachers by deteriorating their working conditions and remuneration.

The Task Force, which was created by Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing, was co-chaired by Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond and included researchers, academics, elected officials, district officials, labor leaders, parents, teachers and principals. Its report repeatedly emphasized that more and better support for teachers was needed throughout their careers, not only to improve their effectiveness, but to decrease attrition and improve recruiting potential. It also called for new laws that would ensure schools have “expert principals who provide support for instruction, time for collaboration and planning, collaborative leadership, reasonable class sizes, a trusting collegial environment and involvement in decision-making at the school.”

Many principals are already doing some of these things. However, the collaboration time is often taken up with unproven snake oil reforms and pet projects of district administrators that are imposed on teachers, rather than allowing teachers themselves to decide how to collaborate. Furthermore, to really be effective, teachers need more than an hour or two per month, which seems to be the norm in the districts that have built-in collaboration time.

Teachers’ Working Conditions are Students’ Learning Conditions

While all of the above factors would dramatically improve the working conditions for teachers, improve their status, and decrease their job stress, they would also vastly improve the quality of education for children. For example, the report called for smaller class sizes, noting this is in the best interests of the students. Fewer students decreases the workload for teachers by decreasing the number of assignments to read and grade, giving them more time to provide meaningful feedback on the ones they do assign. Fewer students allow teachers more time to provide one on one attention to children during class time. Smaller classes are easier to manage, allowing teachers to better monitor and intervene in the case of accidents, injuries, teasing or disruptive behavior, thus improving safety.

Despite these obvious advantages of smaller class sizes, most districts have been increasing class sizes due to budget cuts that have forced them to lay off teachers. Additionally, the task force noted that lower salary school districts had 20% larger class sizes on average than higher salary districts, again highlighting the positive correlation between teachers’ pay and working conditions and students’ learning conditions.

With respect to test scores, the task force was not simply buckling to pressure by teachers unions or the influence of the teachers on the task force. Rather, its report identified studies showing that student test data, when used to evaluate teachers, produce results that “are very unreliable and often inaccurate at the individual teacher level.” Yet when pundits, business leaders, philanthropists and politicians like Obama, Arne Duncan and Rahm Emanuel demand that evaluations include such unreliable or meaningless data, they not only demean teachers and undermine their status as professionals, thus harming districts’ ability to attract and retain the best teachers, but they force districts into the untenable position of having to layoff teachers en masse, thus harming students and districts’ very existence. In Chicago, for example, CTU president Karen Lewis has argued that the new evaluation system Emanuel wants to impose on teachers could result in 6,000 teachers, or 30% of the entire teaching staff, could lose their jobs over the next two years.

Obama’s Plan to Improve Science Education by Overworking Teachers

It is perplexing to many that we continue to have high unemployment and simultaneously have to import foreign workers to fill so many high tech jobs because of the dearth of sufficiently educated domestic workers. There have been numerous attempts to rectify this problem, but they all suffer from similar fallacies such as the myths that our education system is broken or deteriorating or that our teachers are terrible or disinterested or unwilling to persevere in the profession.

Indeed, 30,000 STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teachers leave the profession each year according to Good Education and this, no doubt, takes a terrible toll on the consistency and integrity of STEM programs. However, K-12 education loses thousands of teachers each year from all disciplines, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with the needs and specifics of STEM teaching. For example, over 100,000 teaching jobs have been lost in the last year, while over 300,000 have been lost since 2008, according to Fire Dog Lake, primarily due to budget cuts resulting from declining tax revenue.

Furthermore, significant numbers of teachers from all disciplines quit within their first three years because they were not sufficiently prepared or are no longer willing to deal with the demands, stress and intensity of the job. And, as Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Blog pointed out last year, the attrition rates in other professions are also relatively high and this may actually be a good thing, especially for K-12 education, as it helps weed out those who are ill-prepared or ill-suited for the profession.

Of course it’s not just about retaining STEM teachers. It is also about attracting them to the profession in the first place. STEM graduates tend to have more remunerative options than humanities and social science graduates, like working for a biotech or software company. To this end, the White House announced last week the creation of an elite STEM Master Teacher Corps, the members of which will serve as models and inspiration for aspiring young STEM teachers, according to the Good Education report.

The Obama plan will begin this year with 50 teachers, expanding to more than 10,000 teachers over the next four years. These "master teachers" would be required to lead professional development and school reform efforts in their schools and districts, create lesson plans and novel strategies to improve their peers’ teaching, and mentor novice teachers to help keep them in the classroom. In exchange for all this extra labor, the “master teachers” will receive a national award recognizing their excellence and a stipend of $20,000 per year.

The Good Education article suggests that while the stipend “might not put them on par with a hot programmer at Google, the compensation will close some of the gap and make their salaries competitive with other careers they might be qualified for.”

Now $20,000 might seem like a substantial sum of money, particularly when many teachers are making only $40,000 per year (or less). However, for a teacher earning $30-40,000 per year base pay, their new salary would hardly be competitive with the IT or Biotech industries. Furthermore, Good’s estimation looks only at the take home pay, not the amount of pay relative to the amount of labor, status and stress.

The typical workload of a teacher includes managing and controlling classrooms of up to 35-40 students while identifying and serving their diverse and unique needs. This, alone, accounts for 5-6 hours (66-80%) of a teacher’s workday. In the remaining time, teachers must design and prepare creative and effective lesson plans; set up labs and projects; read and grade essays, lab reports, exams and other assignments; attend meetings; fill out reams of paper work; satisfy the sometimes contradictory and often overwhelming demands of administrators and local and state ordinances; and regularly communicate with parents. During this time, they have dozens of intense interpersonal interactions, generally with people who are not very good at articulately or respectfully communicating their needs, thus adding stress and frustration to an already overwhelming work day.

Considering these demands, all teachers, regardless of their discipline or location, should be earning six-figures as their base pay, without having to do a lot of extra work, as required by Obama’s STEM plan.

While it is certainly nice to be offered extra money for extra work, $20,000 does not come close to compensating teachers for the amount of work required by Obama’s STEM program. Mentoring novice teachers, alone, could add another 5-10% to a teacher’s already busy workday, especially if it includes frequent observations and meetings to debrief the observations. Curriculum design, too, can be extremely time extensive. Many teachers devote entire summers and/or additional hours after school (without pay) to curriculum design. Likewise, school redesign and reform efforts can eat up weeks or months during the summer, followed by additional daily or weekly labor during the school year.

It should also be pointed out that all this extra work can burn teachers out, taking away attention, patience and focus from their students. Many teachers no doubt have the energy and drive to make this work in the short-term, but the Obama plan calls for a minimum four-year commitment. It is difficult to imagine 10,000 martyrs across the country not only being able to give up so much of their personal lives to the cause of improving STEM education for four or more years, but being able to do it well, without sacrificing the wellbeing of their students and colleagues.

Under the Obama plan, STEM teachers will still to have relatively low status and autonomy (like other teachers), thus contributing to high attrition and difficulty attracting people to profession in the first place. They will continue to be subjected to arbitrary and ill-conceived reforms and legislation (e.g., No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top), attacks on their working conditions and job security (e.g., tenure and evaluation reform), and little to no academic freedom and autonomy in the classroom. They will also continue to be subjected to unreasonable expectations to solve major socioeconomic problems that are beyond their capabilities (like ensuring that low income 9^th graders who are reading at the 2^nd grade level are able to graduate on time ready to enter a four-year university).

This brings up another faulty premise of the Ed Deform movement: Kids aren’t graduating prepared for career and college because of defects with their schools or teachers. In reality, the minority of students who are not graduating on time or who are graduating without the necessary basic skills for career or college are overwhelmingly low income students who started kindergarten far behind their peers in pre-reading and math skills and who fell further behind as they progressed through school, not because of bad schools or teachers, but because their more affluent peers had a host of after-school and summer advantages that were unavailable to them.

Therefore, if we want to see more students graduating prepared for STEM careers or college we need to address both the increasing poverty of our students and the growing societal wealth gap, as well as the declining revenue available to K-12 education, since education funding can help ameliorate some of the negative educational impacts of poverty (e.g., free and reduced lunch and breakfast programs; after school childcare for young children of working parents). A much more effective use of the $100 million the Obama administration plans on spending on his STEM program would be to increase funding for programs like free and reduced lunch, restoring nursing and counselors to the schools, and adding more after-school and summer enrichment programs for low income children.

This, of course, is unlikely. First, virtually no policy maker acknowledges how much poverty affects educational outcomes and none is willing to invest in programs that reduce poverty, let alone tax the wealthy to do so. Furthermore, the STEM push is coming primarily from industry which wants greater control of its future workforce and increased consumption of its products. It’s not about helping children, especially poor children.

In the short-term, increased STEM education means more computers and iPads in the classroom, which means more profits for tech companies. In the long term, even if it does result in companies hiring more domestic employees, it will be primarily the elite upper echelon of public K-12 educated students who reap the benefits of high paying, high status tech jobs, as it is today. Lower income kids who are behind in their academic skills and course work will continue to have lower graduation and college admission rates, higher unemployment, and fewer job opportunities. Having better trained science teachers will not erase the effects of poverty, improve students’ reading from the 2^nd to 11^th grade level, or provide a safe, quiet place for them to study.

Boston Teachers Mock Longer School Day With Stunt Plane

(Modified from image from Flickr, by dustpuppy)

Boston’s mayor, Thomas M. Menino, has accused the Boston Teachers Union (BTU) of engaging in a publicity stunt by flying a plane over City Hall in mockery of the city’s plan to lengthen the teachers’ workday. According to the Boston Herald, the plane carried a banner proclaiming that City Hall would now be open until 6:00 pm (a half-hour longer than it currently is). The union also produced fliers and newspaper ads stating that City Hall’s 720 employees “have agreed to work an extended day without any additional compensation.”

Calling the union’s action a stunt exposes the hypocrisy of Ed Deform efforts. BTU wants to ensure that its members aren’t forced to work longer hours without compensation. This is a reasonable and conservative desire. The longer school day fad (already well under way in Chicago and other cities) could be called a stunt. Supporters argue that it is a necessary “reform” for improving student performance, yet there is little evidence to show that it will improve test scores or other, more meaningful measures of student learning. Furthermore, like all the other reforms du jour, it completely ignores the primary cause of low student achievement: poverty.

There are of course putative benefits to a longer school day. Providing more class time might help some students catch up when they are behind in academic skills like reading and math. Longer class periods can also allow teachers to teach at a more relaxed pace, address student questions more thoroughly, take advantage of “teachable moments,” or go deeper into content. More time in class also means less time to get into trouble at home or on the streets. But an extra 30-60 minutes a day is unlikely to put much of a dent in the achievement gap. It will do nothing, for example, to provide food, housing and healthcare to students who are lacking these things. It cannot reverse the damage caused by malnutrition, iron-deficiency anemia, lead poisoning, exposure to second smoke, and other environmental insults that cause cognitive impairment and learning disabilities for so many lower income children. It will not provide enriching extracurricular activities during summer, like travel abroad, camp, or art classes. It will not reduce absenteeism due to untreated illnesses or provide reading to children when they are infants and toddlers.

Furthermore, it is pedagogically unsound to impose longer work hours on teachers. Longer hours mean that teachers will be more tired, increasing burn out and attrition, while also decreasing the energy they have for helping students in class. They will have less time and energy for grading papers and exams, thus encouraging the use of Scantrons and multiple choice assessments, while decreasing their assignment of essays and lab reports. Teachers will have less time and energy to design, set up and manage complex student-centered activities, labs, and projects.

It is also unreasonable and unfair to impose increased work hours on teachers without their consent or reasonable compensation. It is, in effect, a public sector version of the factory speed up, squeezing more work out of teachers, without a raise, except here there is no tangible increase in profits on the horizon. The mayor has offered a 5% increase over four years—1.25% per year—which is not likely to cover the increased cost of living in that time and which provides nothing for the extra hours of work. The BTU is asking for a 10% increase over the next three years, with no increase in work hours, which would cover the increased cost of living over that time period, plus help recover some of the losses in earning power teachers suffered over the prior three years.

Stop Whining--Teachers Salaries Are A Good Deal!

Here’s an interesting piece by Sittercityspeaks (thanks to Chris at Education Matters for finding it)

If Teachers Were Paid Like Babysitter

Maybe that's all teachers should be until society gets its priorities straight. –cpg (Education Matters)

by sittercityspeaks

We came recently came across a blog by a soon-to-be first-year teacher who was making the point that, despite complaints to the contrary, teachers are NOT overpaid. (Not sure who he’s been talking to, since we rarely hear that claim!) Nonetheless, here’s what he says he would make if teachers were paid like babysitters.

He starts by saying that all of this will be based on the average babysitter rate of $5/hour.

Note: The national average for babysitting is actually $10-12/hour for college-age babysitters. Check out our Rate Calculator to get a much more specific idea about what babysitters in your neighborhood are actually making.

Teacher wage per hour: $5 per hour for each student.
Average number of students per class: 22.
Average number of hours per day a teacher works: 7 hours.
Average number of days per year a teacher works: 180.

Class, let’s pull out our calculators.

Remember this? The calculator from hell.

The blogger continues…

22 students at $5 per hour = $110 per hour.
$110 per hour multiplied 7 hours a day = $770 per day.
$770 per day multiplied 180 days a year = $138,600.

He also argues that on top of this, most teachers put in an extra “three to four hours a day preparing, assessing, tutoring and participating in extracurricular events to ensure the success of their students.” Based on that, plus the fact that the average rate of babysitters is around $10/hour, his calculator should actually be well more than doubled… in the high $300,000s.

How’s THAT for a starting salary?

Working Class Hostility Toward Jersey & Philly Teachers

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey has been trying cut teacher salaries and benefits (like many other governors) in order to balance his bloated budget. He has been filmed telling teachers to quit if they don’t like their pay. He has derided teachers for getting employer-paid health benefits, and called teachers unions disgraceful.

Which Side Are You On?

There are currently 19 school districts in South Jersey, and another 13 in the suburbs north and west of Philadelphia, that are in contract disputes. While teachers fight to hold onto their salaries and benefits, parents and taxpayers are getting riled into a lynch mob mentality against teachers. While it is understandable and justifiable that people are angry about their own financial insecurity and the gutting of their schools, it is misdirected anger when it is placed on teachers, rather than the rich and corporations who refuse to pay their fair share of taxes, or at the banks and financial institutions that created the recession and then received trillions of taxpayer dollars to be bailed out.

Teachers, like all workers, should be compensated fairly and sufficiently to live comfortably in the communities in which they teach. Everyone should get health care and be able to afford food and housing. Anyone who does not have this level of material security is getting screwed, by the bosses and the rich, not by other workers. Rather than attacking fellow workers and denying their right to a decent and secure life, we need to remember that all workers have far more in common with each other than we do with the bosses.

Don’t scab for the bosses,
Don’t listen to their lies.
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance,
Unless we organize.

Which Side Are You On (Listen to Billy Bragg)

Cut Teacher Salaries and Lose The Best Teachers

Interestingly, even executive teacher-basher Barack Obama believes teachers should be paid a decent wage. In the Audacity of Hope he wrote that, “there is no reason why an experienced, highly-qualified teacher shouldn’t earn $100,000,” although he did tie this to a weakening of tenure protections. While Obama would like to give administrators greater authority to fire teachers and weaken teacher authority and independence, he does at least recognize the relationship between adequate remuneration and the ability to recruit and retain the best quality teachers.

Despite the president’s good intentions, teacher pay generally lags well behind comparable jobs, which is one reason why it is so hard to recruit good teachers. The Economic Policy Institute wrote that teacher pay lagged 15% behind similar jobs, and that the gap has been widening. When I left the lab to become a science teacher, I took a 15% pay cut.