Reading, Writing & the Wrong Arithmetic

[dgriffin]

Teacher salaries have gone up an average of over 8% a year in New York from 2005-06 to 2007-08. Has your salary averaged that well? Have your investments? What have students gotten in return? In 2007-08, 47% of NY teachers worked in school districts paying teacher salaries exceeding $100,000.

Here's an interesting site, where you can look up your school district's average and top salaries. These numbers are for TEACHERS, not administrators. And I'm not sure if they include extra income such as longevity payments, etc. And don't forget that districts are controlling their salary expenses, not by getting tough with the unions, but by retiring older teachers at 75% or more of their current salary and replacing them with new recruits.

Click here and scroll down the page:

myshortpencil.com/newyorkteachersalaries.htm


New Hartford's top teacher is paid $94,450. If he or she resembles the highest paid teacher in my own district, who I'm pretty sure I can identify, she is married to a fellow teacher and nearing retirement. Soon the two of them will both retire and each receive about 75% of that salary and benefits for the rest of their lives, possibly a long time since they're in their fifties. Her husband's retirement will be a little more, because he was allowed to bring his 4 year hitch in the Army in under his retirement package and add that time to his teaching years. So, after 30 years of summers off and lots of vacation days through the year, the couple will get retirement checks each year totaling about $143,000.
For life.

Pretty nice, but it's a long way from society's intent to educate our children through the use of available young women prior to raising their own families. (I'll probably get comments on that statement, but it was indeed the game plan in years past. Had someone stood up at a town meeting and proposed paying teachers as much as yeoman carpenters and mechanics ... let alone businessmen ... they would have been soundly silenced.

[frankcor]

I just wasted 20 minutes searching with google trying to find an historical chart showing the total amount of NY aid to education over the years. It must be a pretty ugly picture if NY hides that information.

Anyways, the best data I can come up with is this:
2003-2004 -- $14.4 billion
2008-2009 -- $21.3 billion

That's a $6.9 billion increase in 5 years or 48%. What did we get for that increase besides higher teacher salaries?

[bobbbiez]

ZIPPO!

[frankcor]

Right again, Bobbbiez. And now they want to pump more money into education.

[dgriffin]

It occurs to me that Education is the new service industry and will contribute to the next bubble or fake boom. Inflated interest, lots of money, good paying jobs. It's a natural. It will burst when taxpayers either have no more money or have left the state.

It may have been about to burst when the birthrate went down, causing a consequent drop in school enrollments, but a coincidental braying of teachers broke out for smaller class sizes to improve the learning process.