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A Call to Action! (November 2010) |
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By Matt Hotsinpiller
We educators are under siege. Media pundits and politicians are taking aim at our classroom performance, our salaries, our benefits, and our pensions. This round of attacks is particularly disconcerting in both its short-sightedness and its range of sources. Further, we do not seem to be doing much to fight back. This is no time for complacency, nor is it a time to hope that appreciation for the fundamental and essential good work that we do will prevail. We are not battling reason and forethought. Rather, we are battling rhetoric from people seeking to make us scapegoats. We must acknowledge these threats, organize our efforts, and fight back. Please think about the consequences educators, students, and society will face if we tacitly comply with these attacks.
The most obvious assault on our performance comes from The LA Times. On August 27, 2010, NPR’s Morning Edition aired a piece entitled L.A. Times' Teacher Ratings Database Stirs Debate. The Times publishes a database on 6,000 teachers, linking how students have done on standardized tests with teacher performance. While the intent seems to be designed to help parents select the most effective instructors, The Times does not allow for qualitative factors such as gains in intellectual curiosity and critical reasoning, nor for the many variables in a student’s performance that are out of the teacher’s control. This data might be an important component of an overall view of performance, but here it seems a cheap way to lay all of the blame of a system in need of a revamp on teachers. The solution really begins at home. Parents, students, politicians, and educators must all work together for our society to have the educational system our children deserve.
The way The Times has published the data seems narrow at best and tragic at worst. NPR reported, “A.J. Duffy, president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), says he is ‘outraged that The Times would put this out and put people in harm's way.’ ” There is art and science in our classrooms where we instruct and delight. While evaluations are important and people have the right to know how we are doing, this over-simplification is absurd, dangerous, and detracts from our daily task – which is to educate, not to defend against these attacks. We should have debate regarding how to make our system better, and then each of us must do his part as student, parent, teacher, or politician. We must all work together.
Proposed assaults on our salaries and benefits come from various sources, but the most threatening come from our future Governor. Both Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman promise to reduce our benefits and pensions in their attempts to be elected Governor. Here are a few examples:
According to Jerry Brown’s website, he will “return to a rule where ‘final compensation’ is based on the average of the last 3 years of salary, not just the final year.” Further, he promises to “renegotiate current pension formulas…require employees to work longer and to a later age for full retirement benefits.” He also suggests that we contribute 10% to our pensions, up from our current 8.00%.
Here are some of the promises Meg Whitman makes on her website:
New hires will not have defined benefit plans, rather, they will be offered 401(k)-style defined contribution plans. Full pension retirement age will be raised from 55 to 65 years old. She also promises longer vesting periods. Here again, we are a seemingly easy target as sacrificial lambs for those who would mislay financial blame and pander to an uninformed public in hopes of gaining reactionary votes and an unopposed source of funds. We must educate our fellow voters and protect what little financial stability we have.
Reasonable people plan for retirement. When we took our jobs, we agreed to do so with a certain pension in mind. Potshots at our pensions abound. Various business news pundits, such as CNBC’s Larry Kudlow and Fox Business Network’s Brian Sullivan, regularly call for cuts to our pension benefits, often in rhetoric filled diatribes that do not invite the teacher’s point of view. On August 6, 2010 The New York Times ran Ron Lieber’s article, Battle Looms Over Huge Cost of Public Pensions. Mr. Lieber said that our “seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide.”
Mr. Lieber focuses most of his attention on the funding gap in Colorado’s public pension, but he suggests this is merely a case-study for the rest of the country. The solution, according to Mr. Lieber: “If you work for a state or local government, start saving money outside of the pension plan if you haven’t already, because that plan may not last for as long as you need it. And if you’re a government retiree or getting close to the end of your career? Consider what it means to be a citizen in a community.”
So you see, is seems it was not the greed that caused the real estate bubble, nor the fraudulent and ruinous lending practices of mortgage bankers and credit default swaps which fueled the bubble, nor even the ongoing market manipulations of broker banks that caused our country’s financial woes. Apparently, blame lies with the average CalPERS retiree, who collects $2,100 a month. He is only about half as horrible as the average CalSTRS retiree, who collects an average of $4300 per month. We spend over $100,000,000,000 a year fighting in Afghanistan. We are a society who values waging wars in foreign lands over education.
The deck is currently stacked against us, and we must fight back. Please do not just shake your head and say it is not fair. Speak out. Write letters to the publications of your choice and to your politicians. Let’s help voters understand that we should be celebrated rather than vilified, and that teachers are a crucial part of our society’s future. It is fundamentally detrimental to our nation’s fabric to further cheapen the role of the educator. To the contrary, educator’s compensation should make the great minds and hearts of our society seriously consider the noble profession.
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