This started out as a long comment on
davidsirota's excellent diary
Debating A Pathological Liar on CNBC with some interesting replies and I thought it merited the wider exposure of a diary. I was channel surfing and saw John Stossel on C-Span, I think it was, where I guess he was plugging his crap to a captive audience. I couldn't watch it more than a couple of minutes--because that's when he took on the "teachers are underpaid myth." I think John Stossel is a myth. Walk with me a moment ...
As I recall, Stossel used two bits of "untelligence" to make his point: That teachers get the summers off and that there are something like three applicants for every teacher position.
Ipso facto, teachers are not underpaid.
Stossel's point about summers off is one I have heard for years. Yes, it's a fairly decent argument. But we're really only talking about a couple of months, since the teachers stay later and come earlier than students. So, that's maybe 2/12 or 1/6 that we can factor up a teacher's pay. That's 16.7%, or roughly the size of a moderately high tip for a waitress or cabdriver. Not exactly Ken Lay money, is it? And you can't layer those spring and winter holiday breaks over it since they tend to make teachers' vacation time roughly at par with other white-collar workers.
Lisa, a real worker in public education (unlike John Stossel who just criticizes them on TV), has a different take on it:
I have two weeks left in my official work year [Crusty's note: this comment was posted at least one week after most kids have finished school.]. If I didn't have a few weeks off before returning, I would quit my job. This work is very taxing. It doesn't end. It takes your brain, your body, and your heart to do it right, and without a chance to recharge, the good ones would burn out very quickly.
Lisa is what we lawyers (I'm a lawyer) call "in loco parentis." That means on any given school day she and her colleagues stand in my wife's and my shoes, spending more waking hours with our children than we do at home, and by and large, they've done a damn fine job. Not all teachers are great, some aren't even good, but I'd much rather go to a reunion of all of my children's' past teachers than my whole family (both sides).
Even so, the "Stossel myth" about a few additional weeks off totally ignores the fact that relative to the general population, growth in teachers' wages over the years has been stymied by local property tax "reform" that has not allowed school budgets to enjoy the appreciation in the local real estate that is the source of funds. My property values zinged up ridiculously, as did my taxes. OK I can live with that, but the teachers in my district during this time got something like a 4% OR 5% raise spread over a full three-year contract because of the boa-constrictor effect of an unwise cap passed as a local referendum years ago. As low as inflation has been, folks, that will barely even keep pace and doesn't take into account anything more than cost-of-living--and that's NOT what a raise is supposed to do!
In terms of real numbers, I'd have to conclude that teachers in particular have lagged behind other local government workers in wage growth, and further behind white-collar workers in general, simply because much of the property tax reform of the 80s and 90s was targeted at school districts since that's the easiest "one-issue campaign" a local rightie nutbar can win.
The idea that teachers are not underpaid because there are more applicants for a teacher's job than there are jobs is also just plain stupid besides being completely irrelevant. There are more applicants for just about every job than there are jobs available (except maybe for what Norm MacDonald wisely cited a few years back as America's Worst Job: Assistant Crack Whore). Many people want to be teachers very much--everyone on this site has at least one teacher that they role-modeled to an extent or we wouldn't be smart enough to see through the smoke, but if anything, that's a factor that keeps teacher salaries artificially low. I don't believe there is a mathematical relationship anyway, however, because the number Stossel gave is not large enough to indicate a true supply and demand issue when compared to other job seekers--witness the thousands who show up for 300 jobs when a new Home Depot opens. Since turnout for firefighter and police jobs is even higher than teacher jobs, elouise wondered if he argues that firefighters and police are overpaid? "Other people's misfortunes are one big source of material to this jokester," she says, spot-on as usual.
Even if I didn't remember correctly and the ratio is slightly higher, Stossel's arguments remain the worst kind of non-factual conjecture. On the idea of any kind of oversupply, for example, oxley offered, "this is simply not true in math and physics, the fundamentals that underlie all of the sciences," adding "you can't find math and physics high school teachers because they get better pay elsewhere." I replied that I recall Bush saying something in the 2006 State of the Union address about adding maybe 50,000 math and science teachers but that this would be a drop in the bucket. I was curious, so I went back to see exactly what Bush did say. Here's what Bush actually said in his SOTU:
Tonight I propose to train 70,000 high school teachers to lead advanced-placement courses in math and science, bring 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms, and give early help to students who struggle with math, so they have a better chance at good, high-wage jobs.
I started thinking, in a country of 300,000,000, the total figure of 100,000 of anything except maybe major league athletes isn't even a rounding error. Besides, we all know Bush lies through his teeth in the SOTU, so while I'll credit his identification of the problem; his proposed solution has all the credibility of a Hollywood engagement. Even if Bush wants to do this, proposals at this stage of his presidency are for his successor to deliver upon, and it's only going to happen with a Democrat in the White House.
Stossel's theory of a 3:1 applicant-to-job ratio proving anything whatsoever besides the ratio of applicants-to-jobs is just not credible. It's simply not enough bodies to be the measure of scarcity that Stossel uses to "bootstrap" into his idea that teacher salaries are just fine, thank you very much, nor is that approach even a valid correlation--it's a wild-ass guess! Nor does it respond to Bush's own claim that we are at least 70,000 math and science teachers short and that the ones we have need "30,000 professionals" to bring them along somehow--which is still not adequate to compete globally. But this is all next level analysis, something Stossel won't reach because as we will learn if we haven't by now, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck Stossel sees a hamster.
Another point I want to make is that a lot, I mean A LOT of teachers I have met recently came from other walks of life (business, engineering, etc.) where they lost their jobs and picked up a teaching certificate because it's something that is much more attainable for college grads than other programs that might require major re-education. I'm not trying to be demeaning here, but as an attorney, I could become certified as a teacher much more easily than I could become, say, a marine biologist at this stage of my life. So, if there is oversupply (a point I won't concede), some is the result of job loss in other more lucrative areas, which means at least some teachers are experiencing serious wage loss--I'd like to hear how Stossel rationalizes that dynamic.
Finally, add the fractured and fractious "No Child Left Behind" requirements on top of it all--centralized, out-of-touch, Washington bureaucrats running roughshod over local administrators at their worst--and we've only made the jobs of teachers more difficult and more risky without anything in return, except the threat that their school may be closed because it has too many learning-disabled children to make a point on an arbitrary numerical achievement curve. Suddenly, these teachers, at schools that have been highly regarded for years, are working at institutions under fire for being "under-performing." Which, of course, is only "cured" by more work and more requirements imposed by administrators.
Why, however, would John Stossel take such indefensible positions? One theory came from justrock who says, "Stossel hates public education" and whose insightful comment I repeat here in full:
I saw him on his own show blathering nonsense about the economic benefits of turning our public schools over to private "education" corporations. It was appalling. Stossel's arguments are crafted from greed and stinginess, which is why they are easy to make and sounds good on the surface. I can think of a million "reasons" why I should keep my paycheck in my pocket, but only one reason why I should give it to my landlord. Of course that reason is that he will throw me out if I don't pay the rent. But people like Stossel never take their arguments out to their real conclusions. And the not so smart people that listen to him don't have to brainpower to do it for themselves.
Teachers are, first and foremost, UNDERVALUED relative to the importance of their role in our society and secondarily are GOVERNMENT WORKERS in an age of relentless right-wing attacks on government which both combine to make them UNDERPAID.
And those, Mr. Stossel, are the relevant facts, reasonable suppositions and a logical conclusion. I've used up a lot of electrons here on one "Stossel myth" but if he's so wildly off the mark on this one, why should anyone bother about the rest of his junk?