Face it, if teachers truly cared about the students, they’d take a meaningful cut. They’d allow a grandfathered change in their pension contributions. They wouldn’t use scare tactics and hold people’s kids hostage in their negotiations.

Look at the RI case, where teachers were offered $30/hour in overtime to provide tutoring and aid to their underachieving students, and they turned around and demanded $90/hr, and were shocked when they were all fired.

Many (not all) unions seem to have a hard time grasping that a 20% cut is better than a 100% cut.

State aid to education is a non-starter. The cuts are at most 5% from 2008 levels. The cuts from 2009 levels are significantly larger, but that’s because state aid was inflated by a federal grant to the tune of $1b and change.

The biggest expense by far are personnel costs, teachers police, and firefighters (whose benefits border on the obscene, such as paying out for 600+ unused sick days on retirement). Teachers are paid by the state, and police and firefighters are paid by property taxes, which the state then rebates a percentage of back to taxpayers. To a lesser extent the state pays out charity care to hospitals to cover medical care for the poor/uninsured.

So that’s the choice. Either see personnel costs get cut to sustainable levels, or lose all the property tax subsidies, and see property taxes go even higher.

The issue isn’t that the teachers ought to bear the burden of the state’s folly. The unions, at the very least, ought to be abolished. But in order to secure a reliable education system, the means for providing the resources the schools require need to be in the hands of people who can actually deliver. Affordable, unsubsidized education is not a pipe dream, but it would require a substantial reduction in taxes – and there, my friend, is the rub. They don’t care that the money they take seems to vanish into thin air, but they do care very much about taking it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

In a nutshell: automation creates efficiencies in manufacturing at a faster rate than it creates efficiencies in the service sector (a Mozart symphony takes the same amount of time to perform today as it did centuries ago; the building of symphony halls can be accomplished in a fraction of the time).

Inflation is generally an index of the cost of manufactured goods. Those costs go down MUCH faster than service (teaching, waiting tables, doctoring, massage) costs do. Therefore, service will get “more expensive” (actually, it’s getting cheaper more slowly) over time.

The only exception is when new markets — e.g. Indian call centers — are opened up that temporarily cause wages to chase down to untenably low levels. But these are temporary “sugar highs” in service productivity, as even Indian call centers don’t get cheaper as quickly as other sectors of Indian manufacture.

Mrs. Notary Sojac taught in a large metropolitan school system for about fifteen years, and was a member of the union for twelve.

She and many colleagues BEGGED the union over and over to take on the issues of bloated administration, paperwork encroaching on teaching time, micromanagement from the state DOE, and the idiotic “fad of the year” that periodically came down from the superintendent’s office.

NOTHING DOING. Every time the union contract came up for review. it was always and only about (1) dollars and (2) tenure. Other issues? Zip, zero, nada.

She quit the union, quit the public schools a couple of years later. Now she does specialty programs (music and arts) for homeschooling parents, and has never been happier with her work.

I’d like to personally thank Cory and boingboing.net for posting this letter. Regardless of what side of the argument you’re on, please keep in mind that New Jersey is one of the most densely populated urban areas in the United States. There are a lot of kids there.

There are a lot of kids missing out. Both sides ought to be able to sit down and figure out an expedient solution to this crisis.

What can one do? A tax base doesn’t grow faster than (get cheaper more slowly than?) the rate of educational costs. So how will government pay for more-slowly-cheap education when the tax base actually shrinks?

You can cut extraneous programs or cut wages and benefits. If wages and benefits seem rather high (Teachers not even contributing to their healthplan?) then that seems like the way to go.

Governor Christie is asking the NJEA and the school districts for 1) a one-year pay freeze and 2) for teachers to pay 1.5% of their health insurance. I don’t think either request is unreasonable; a great number of us have had to tighten our belts in this state, trying to pay the crushing tax burden now upon us. Let the school districts tighten their belts and make due with the same budgets for next year that they had this year. Frankly, given what I see of my local school district, my tax money is being wasted, and I for one am fed up.

Face it, if firefighters truly cared about putting out fires, they’d take a meaningful cut.

Face it, if police truly cared about stopping crime, they’d take a meaningful cut.

Face it, if garbagemen truly cared about clean neighborhoods, they’d take a meaningful cut.

What’s the difference between teachers and other public servants? Oh yes, a high prevalence of breasts. And a high prevalence of masters degrees. Does that mean they deserve to get paid less?

How about the percentage of each tax dollar spent on education that actually goes to teachers?

Is there any evidence that educational services are getting cheaper over time? I’ve never seen anyone claim that, especially with data to back up the claim.

in short, how much more do you know about, well, everything, that you likely wouldn’t were it not for the internet?

it stands to reason that since access to knowledge is cheaper and faster than ever, that yes, education OUGHT to be costing less, or at least in theory there exists models of education that WOULD cost less.

Education spending has not been growing at the rate of inflation or slightly higher than it. No, education spending, even index on a per-child basis (so as to account for increasing population) has exploded since the 1960s, without any measurable improvement in quality.

Education spending needs to be reduced dramatically, as it’s a major contributor to the bankrupting of our states. And there is overwhelming evidence that huge cuts can be made while increasing quality by abandoning the government monopoly in providing education services.

Indexing spending to inflation plus some amount (as was done in Colorado) is decidedly not the answer.

Just wait until we have robot teachers.

IDK, but teaching was originally the domain of a fairly limited number of highly educated people. Now there are a lot more educated people so the cost (controlling for everything else) has probably gone down a LOT since the days of governesses and tutors.

It’ll go up if there are more kids, better schools, a higher teacher-student ratio, or kids with special needs. Education a domain where we could always improve service — better education for more people.

The costs are hard to measure and easy to justify.