Santorum steps in it

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As you may know, I read a lot of news articles. While I don't often write about the participants in the GOP Clown Car, when I saw this article at the LA Times this afternoon, I was moved to respond:

In the nation’s past, he said, “Most presidents homeschooled their children in the White House.… Parents educated their children because it was their responsibility.”

“Yes, the government can help,” he continued, “but the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic.”

He said it is an artifact of the Industrial Revolution, “when people came off the farms where they did homeschool or had a little neighborhood school, and into these big factories … called public schools.”

Let me state for the record that my mother was an English teacher and a librarian. She taught in both public and private schools. Her sister was an elementary school teacher. My father's sister taught math at the local high school in my hometown. I have numerous cousins on both sides of my family who were and are teachers. All of this is irrelevant to Little Ricky's Revisionist history.

A quick check of der Google for "literacy rates in the US over time" brought these results with the very first item being a "National Assessment of Adult Literacy" report from the National Center for Education Statistics. This link goes to a section on Illiteracy from 1870 to 1979 including a table broken out at least partially by race.

The data in this table for the years 1870 to 1930 come from direct questions from the decennial censuses of 1870 to 1930, and are therefore self-reported results. The data for 1947, 1952, 1959, 1969, and 1979 were obtained from sample surveys; they exclude the Armed Forces and inmates of institutions. The statistics for the census years 1940 and 1950 were derived by estimating procedures.

According to that table, in 1870, 20 percent of the overall population was illiterate (11.5 per cent of Whites and 79.9 percent of Blacks and other races). In 1952 (the year I was born) the figures were 2.5 percent overall with 1.8 percent of Whites and 10.2 percent of Blacks and other races. In 1979, those figures were .6 percent of the total population with .4 percent of Whites and 1.6 percent of Blacks and other races. It is directly because of public school education that those figures improved so dramatically over the years.

About a year ago, I wrote a post titled Teachers Are Not the Enemy. In reality, neither are public schools. But public schools are being used as scapegoats for the failings of politicians who refuse to raise taxes for any reasons and who try to force teachers to become miracle workers.

Oh and Ricky? If you dislike public education so very much, you might want to refund the school fees you scammed out of the public school district in Pennsylvania while you were "homeschooling" your children in Virginia.

And because I can:

Unions, Public or Private, Are Not the Problem

Over the last couple of months, we've seen an unprecedented attack on public sector unions across the nation. According to this article from the LA Times via the Sacramento Bee, nearly half of the states are in varying stages of attacking public and private sector unions.

Nearly half of the states are considering legislation to limit public employees' collective bargaining rights. In New Hampshire, the House last week approved a measure that one union leader assailed as "Wisconsin on steroids."

But it's not just budgetary concerns driving Republican officeholders to take on unions, traditionally a strong Democratic ally.

In Maine, the newly elected Republican governor ordered the removal of a mural depicting the state's labor history from a state building because, his spokeswoman said, it portrayed a one-sided message supporting organized labor.

A number of states are considering bills that would limit unions' ability to collect dues from public employees. The Florida House approved a bill to ban dues deductions from government paychecks and require unions to obtain members' permission before using dues for political activity. Similar legislation is under consideration in Kansas. Other bills would eliminate a requirement that workers covered by union contracts pay union dues or fees.

Teachers Are Not the Enemy

Let me say this once again with emphasis - TEACHERS ARE NOT THE ENEMY!.

Yet, everywhere we turn, it seems teachers are the sole source of all the evils and troubles affecting school districts all over the US. And it really makes little difference what the political leanings are of the folks blaming the teachers as it is a seeming article of faith on both sides of the political aisle.

Pardon me, however, if I take the time to point a few things out to folks.

A couple of days ago, I wrote a post "Let's Play With Some Numbers Once Again (Teachers Style)" where I used this site to draw some figures for Wisconsin teaching salaries (it looks like it is through 2008). Using the same chart and some basic arithmetic and division (which I learned thanks to some good teachers pounding it into my thick skull), the average starting salary for new teachers across the fifty states is $30,950 with a high of $39,259 for Connecticut and a low of $24,872 in North Dakota. An average of the fifty state average teacher salaries is $46,227 with a high average being California of $59,825 and a low average of $34,709 in South Dakota. You might notice that both California with their highest average salary of the fifty states is also a high cost of living state (as is Connecticut which has the highest starting salary and the second highest average overall).

Now what do the states and their citizens in the individual school systems receive for these salaries? Well, outside of Detroit, where it looks like the teachers are going to be primed to become mainly baby sitters with class sizes up to 60 students per class, teachers are supposed to guide students to prepare for all that life has to offer, even when they are constrained about some of the things life offers as "inappropriate for young minds." Teachers teach the "3 Rs of Readin,' 'ritin', and 'rithmetic" (has anyone ever wondered about the Epic Fail of that phrase?) while making sure the students are prepared for and pass all the various state level achievement tests that have been brought around by "No Child Left Behind" yet doing so with increasingly larger classes and less funding?

Let's Play With Some Numbers Once Again (Teachers style)

Back in December, I wrote a post "Let's Play With Some Numbers" based upon a mythical minimum wage worker and what that means in the line of taxes versus expenses. Today, I'd like to offer a similar "what if" based on teacher salaries.

Why you may ask?

Well, mainly because of some of the "ZOMG! Teachers get paid! And they receive benefits" gibberish I've seen the last few days concerning the "budget busting unions" and the "highly compensated teachers" of Wisconsin. As a side note, why are the anti-teachers people so adamant on tearing down the teachers and other public sector workers and their benefits? Shouldn't we be trying to raise things up so that folks in the private sector are once again getting reasonable pay and benefits rather than tearing people down to a lower level? Whatever happened to the desire to see folks from all walks celebrated for their work and paid a living wage?

My reference data is from this state-by-state starting salary for teachers, average, and 10 year percentage increase (looks to be from 2008). This site offers median salaries for various grade levels of teachers but I offer it only for further discussion and will use mainly the first link.

My mythical teacher is going to be a graduate of Wisconsin Stevens Point. This person will be a Wisconsin resident so will receive instate tuition. We'll pretend that our mythical teacher lived in a dorm for all four years (though I'd guess most juniors and seniors manage to find off campus housing with all of its attendant costs) and used the meal card. So our mythical student has costs of $6,304 per semester (rounding down), $12,608 a year and a minimum four year cost of $50,432. I'll pretend this student worked and got some help from Mom and Dad and maybe a small scholarship or two but still needed loans for say $30K. I'm sure there are students who financed the whole amount as well as students who had full parental support to students who managed full time jobs as well as full time student loads.

So here we have our mythical Wisconsin Stevens Point graduate starting a career as a teacher with $30K debt and a starting salary of $25,222. We'll assume our new teacher is getting paid twice a month for nine months so will have a pre-tax bi-weekly income of $1,401 (payday on the 15th and the end of the month). Taxes and such will probably pull that down to roughly $1K take home so we'll say $2K per month. We'll put our new teacher in a one bedroom apartment at $400 per month plus utilities which will average another $400 (gas, electric, heat and air conditioning, phone, and cable). I don't know what the loan periods are for student loans now so we'll pretend the loan period for the $30K debt is ten years and with interest our mythical teacher will pay back $45K. This works out to be $375 per month for ten years. And yes, that's for those months when our teacher is not working in the summer. At this point, our teacher has $1,175 of $2K per month for nine months committed without buying any food, clothing, car payments, insurance payments, school supplies or savings to cover the three months with no salary.