Frozen Assets redux

Better than a year ago now I wrote about Frozen Assets, a report from the Education Sector that took a fairly critical look at teacher pay provisions. It caught my eye because the primary author is Marguerite Roza, a researcher at the University of Washington.

Unlike many reports, though, this one has come back to life via John at the American Federation of Teachers catching Education Sector blogger Kevin Carey in a bit of a pickle where one of his written comments on the narrowing curriculum would seem to invalidate ES' earlier report on teacher wages. It's an interesting discussion from both sides.

Read more here, if any.

The Over Paid Teacher

There’s a lot of people out there who talk about teacher salaries in the abstract—“They’re overpaid! They’re underpaid! They’re paid just right!”, etc. Since teacher salaries are a matter of public record there’s not a whole lot to be argued about there, but what about the other numbers like benefits, retirement, etc.?

On Friday I got my annual statement summarizing all my paychecks for the year. I give you those numbers here so that you can know exactly what it’s like.

• Social security wages: $42,864.02
  
• Wages, tips, other compensation: $35,822.74
  
• Federal income tax withheld: $4,390.32
  
• Social security tax withheld: $2,657.56
  
• Medicare tax withheld: $621.53

That’s basically the information from the W2. The central number is the second, because that was nominally my take home pay after taking out the income tax and social security.

Oh, but there were other deductions:

• L&I: $48.72
  
• Section 125 ME: $4,077.82
  
• Union Dues: $732.64
  
• Retirement: $7,041.28

The total of those deductions is $11,900.46. When you subtract that from the line above it leaves about $24,000, or $2,000 a month.

What’s that Section 125 ME number? That’s what I pay in health insurance out of pocket per year, or about $340 a month. If anyone tells you that all teachers get their health insurance paid for, slap them with a trout. Know too that I voluntarily put far more into my retirement plan than I have to, but on TRS3 if you don’t save for yourself you’re absolutely screwed.

This is my reality. What's yours?

Read more here, if any.

If something isn't controversial, do you need to say it isn't controversial?

Surfing around to take a break from lesson planning I ended up at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation's website, where they've posted their annual list of teacher salaries in Washington State. It lists everybody alphabetically by district; if you were paid by a school, you're in there somewhere.

I get that our salary is a matter of public record; there's a couple of things worth commenting on in their press release, though:

On March 27, 2007, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) updated its complete look at the Washington State Teacher Salaries database. This database allows parents and interested citizens to review the salary and benefits of any teacher or other school employee in Washington State. All information is provided by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

EFF begin this listing 3 years ago as an effort to allow citizens to know exactly how much these “public employees” were being paid.

“These figures go along to dispelling any myths that are out their regarding teacher’s salaries in Washington State,” said Steven Maggi, director of EFF’s Education Reform Center. “We believe that it is important to use actual data when discussing school funding issues. Using actual salary and benefit figures makes the topic of attracting and retaining excellent teachers easier to understand and is not controversial.”

It's a small thing, but why did they put "public employees" in quotes? Are teachers not public employees? I grant that my own biases may well play a role here, but one could easily read that as the EFF being snarky, and what does that do for them?

Then there's that last quote, and it's where the title of the post came from: why do you have to tell us that this isn't controversial? If it's not controversial, shouldn't that fact stand by itself without needing to be said? Perhaps Mr. Maggi's point was that making the real numbers available makes comparison possible in a non-controversial way, but if that's what he was getting at he buried it under some poor sentence structure.

There's also the very real possibility of math hijinx. If I take the average of all the districts M through O, the average total salary of a teacher is about $39,000. The trick is that includes parapros, bus drivers, administrators, etc, artificially raising some classes and lowering others.

What the EFF has given us here is data, but is it useful data?

Read more here, if any.