Deanna Martin, writing for the Associated Press, has an article entitled “Schools worried about impact of property tax plan.” In the name of reducing property taxes and in addition to shifting the tax burden to payers of the sales tax, under the General Assembly’s new tax plan, schools will receive $90 million less in funding. To hear Gov. Daniels and state lawmakers tell it, of course, our schools are profligate wasters of money.
But, the fact is, Hoosier commitment to funding its schools has traditionally been pretty tenuous. Initially, the state didn’t fund public schools. Then, when the intent was there, we got into the whole public improvement – canal/highway/railroad debacle. That wrecked the State’s finances for awhile. Then the Civil War gummed things up for awhile. I don’t think we really got a public primary school system going in earnest until the second half of the 19th century. We pay our teachers only grudgingly and give them the same level of respect we give social workers everywhere; which is to say, next to none.
You reap what you sow. Hopefully we won’t be so enamored of short term savings that we ignore long term development.
I know this: Fully 70% if my property tax dollars go to the schools in my district (Fishers/Hamilton SE). That’s one hell of a lot of money, when I consider that I am one of the less affluent here. The schools here are palaces, with hand-laid tile logos, a library with a 30-foot high ceiling, and a host of other extravagances tied to sports.
I have no doubt that the money allocated could be better spent. Heck, just eliminate school buses and plow that money into actual education. That would be a win-win. It’s a lot of money to employ bus drivers and mechanics, to maintain grounds, to fuel the buses, to insure it all. Kids walking to school is a world healthier. That much less diesel fuel burned is that much better for the environment.
There’s waste to be found, for those who want to find it.
I often think the buses are a waste of money. As I drive to work, I often see mom and child sitting at a rural intersection in an idling Ford Expedition, waiting for the bus. I presume they’ve driven less than a block, because the side road is only a block long. The school is within five miles. This is a scene I see two to three times each day. I’m not sure what the impediment is to either a) having the kid stand in the cold like kids did when we were that age, or b) going ahead and using the vehicle for driving the kid to school rather than using it as a heated bus stop.
Part of the impediment, I’m sure, is The Fear. We’ve become much more fearful about the well-being of our kids even though the risks are probably fairly equivalent to those faced by previous generations. However, our perception of risk is greatly increased.
That’s just an aside, though.
The biggest expenditure for any achool district is salaries,so that’s a logical reason why teachers,and tax money that goes to pay their salaries, are always under strong public scrutiny. The reason I retired early was that the state of Illinois,rather than increase taxes for schools offered an early retirement program whereby teachers could retire early and the state would make up the difference to cover the missing years retiring teachers actually didn’t teach. That was too hard to explain to people,so it didnt get much scrutiny,whereas an increase of tax money to school districts would have. So for every, old veteran teacher like myself who retired, my district was able to hire three young just-out-of-college teachers.That was statewide . I always thought illinois had the most razzle-dazzle shell games with public money,but Im finding out that Indiana and probably other states all do the tricky stuff,if only to make the casual observor confused as to what is going on.
In a way I’m on the states side,because scrutiny has never seemed commensurate with the public waste,all tax money taken as a whole.
While talking about school money, don’t forget how things are put into “buckets” for the schools.
That is why you often see a school put in a new “palace” of a building while laying off or barely paying teachers. The state says “THIS money is for buildings, and THIS money is for staff,” etc…
Yup. When my wife was a teacher, there always seemed to be a fair amount available for capital projects and not much available for teachers and other operating costs.
I knew the capital budget was separate from the operating budget, but have never been terribly clear on the extent of the separation or why one seems relatively well-funded while the other does not.
20 years ago, teachers were woefully underpaid. There may be parts of the state in which this is still true, but in general, I don’t believe that teachers are underpaid compared to any other public servants. In Marion county, teachers start at about 30K and top out at close to 80K; the starting salary in Hamilton Co. is slightly higher, but similar.
30K (33K in hamilton county)is a decent amount of money for a 22 year old right out of college; it is not much less than what deputy prosecutors or public defenders start out making – and they tend to bottom out before reaching 80.
By all means, if there are counties still paying starting teachers 22, it’s important to bump up their salaries. But I think that what our marion and Hamilton county teachers make is a fair wage – they aren’t overpaid, but they’re certainly not underpaid either.
Peter, the difference between a deputy prosecutor and a teacher is that a deputy prosecutor, if he/she so desires, can transition in to a higher paying position after a few years and can make up for lost time. A teacher, unless choosing to go into administration, really doesn’t have much opportunity for a big jump in income. It’s all about supply and demand. Low-paying deputy prosecutor jobs are coveted because of the valuable courtroom experience that can be applied in a future, more lucrative job in private practice. A decision to become a teacher is essentially a permanent decision to have fair-to-middling income. Choosing to become a deputy prosecutor isn’t necessarily the same.
Adequate funding is needed – but the lack of correlation between per student spending and achievement suggests that other factors are at least as important.
I don’t think the question is so much what teachers make in comparison to other public servants; rather, it’s what they make in comparison to other professionals.
There a few questions embedded in that, of course:
1) Would it be beneficial to our communities to have teachers who were as highly trained and as highly skilled as doctors, lawyers, engineers, corporate executives, etc.?
2) How much would we have to pay to attract teachers with that level of skill and training?
3) Would the cost outweigh the benefit?
4) Regardless of the potential benefit, could our communities afford the investment?
John M.:
The average salary in Indiana is $36,000. Teachers are starting out, at age 22 (or whenever they graduate) already making close to the average salary, and for most of their career they are comfortably above the average salary in Indiana. So a decision to become a teacher is really a decision to make an above average salary. It is also a decision to choose a job with an above average amount of time off and with an unusual amount of job security. And teachers *do* have the opportunity to go into administration, if they choose to do so.
In my experience, people don’t turn down better paying jobs to get deputy prosecutor jobs; people take them because they are either interested in that area or because they’ve graduated from law school and that was the only job available. I don’t think that there is a particular job market advantage in having been a former deputy prosecutor (unless you are seeking to be an analyst on TV, in which case it is almost required).
Doug:
Discussions of teacher’s salaries almost always invoke the term “professional,” typically in a syllogism like this: (1) Doctors are professionals. (2) Teachers are professionals. Therefore (3) Teachers should earn what doctors make. This isn’t a very helpful way of establishing what salaries should be, since all it really does is find *one* commonality between doctors and teachers and state that *this* commonality justifies increasing teacher salaries. Although social workers and the assistant managers at Enterprise car rental are also professionals – it’s not really a very specific term.
The reason I focused on the salaries of public servants is because, well, that’s what teachers are. Teachers are free, I suppose, to open a private school and charge whatever they want – but aside from doing that and I don’t think it is at all realistic to assume that they can (or should) earn what private sector business professionals earn. I don’t have the impression, though, that private schools pay significantly more than public schools; I know that many pay less.
The cost-benefit question is more interesting – one can talk forever about whether particular salaries are *fair,* but that never leads anyplace useful (i.e., everyone is underpaid except for football players). But the question of whether there would there be a noticeable result if we, say, gave teachers a 20k bump across the pay scale (starting at 50 and ending at 100), but limited the profession to the top 30% or so of students.
I have a hard time seeing how this would help with the dropout problem that IPS has. I’m not sure that there is anything that anyone associated with the school can do about that problem, though. Having top 30% teachers would probably help the better students do better, simply because you can offer more challenging courses and perhaps a more intellectual environment. I’m not sure what would happen to students in the middle.
It does seem that in order to really benefit from having the top-30 teachers you would need to change how the school operates to give the teachers more autonomy, though.
Doug, I thought that teachers already were as trained as least as much as most engineers and execs.
Usually, what drives price is the “worker shortage”. Health care and IT have had “shortages” where salaries went high because there were not enough workers. Now the same is being said for geologists for oil.
Why don’t we have a teacher shortage? Is it that most teachers consider the pay fair considering the “feel good” and other benefits of being a teacher?
Or, is it as you suggest that we are hiring sub-par teachers at a Wal-Mart price, and that we would have to pay much more to get better teachers?