Education on the Chopping Block
I see that the Wausau School District teacher’s union has voted unanimously for its teachers to drop out of extra-curricular activities. I heard that a 0.5% raise for accredited teachers was on the table. So, a teacher making 40 grand a year would see a pay increase of $200 before taxes. My sense is that a strike is looming.
This is my seventh year in Wisconsin and I must say it’s simply part of the status quo. As a matter of fact, I don’t know a Wisconsin that doesn’t cheat its teachers – it’s been this way since I got here.
Wisconsin bamboozles the teachers and professors and tries to pretend that it’s just good business - cost savings in lean times. Wisconsinites use every form of debased argumentation to pretend that its teachers are deserving of their shoddy treatment. The same old BS clichés are parroted. My two personal favorites are: first, the teachers have it easy because they don’t have to work in the summer. This is of course gibberish because many teachers work on their curricula for their students or are even forced to take extra employment in the summer to make up for their deficient incomes in the academic year. And second, teachers get free healthcare – as if healthcare was a luxury like caviar or expensive cigars? And let me tell you, it’s not free and the teachers’ wages have been steadily eaten away to offset insurance costs.
Governor Doyle is actually threatening to shut down the UW for the winter semester because the system will run out of money a month before spring finals. This would be astonishing if I hadn’t lived through the budget axe of the last six years. The rub has been an unmitigated degeneration of the system as a whole: increased tuition for students compounded with a lower quality of education. Imagine that – in the mighty UW outstanding professors are leaving tenured positions for superior jobs; at Marathon we’ve had a faculty line in math that has repeatedly gone unfilled because no qualified PhDs are willing to work for the entry salary. Intelligent and deserving students are denied access into the UW because they cannot afford the rising costs. Wisconsinites seem to actually believe that since knowledge and wisdom walked the hallowed halls in the past that these virtues are ever-present phenomena. Sadly, no.
With only 1 in 4 acquiring a bachelor’s degree, Wisconsin is not producing the kinds of home-grown minds necessary to compete in the global knowledge economy. What does this mean for you? It means that your kids will not adequately compete for those skilled, better-paying jobs that only highly-educated people can perform. It also means a further diminishment of the revenue base as a whole, which will result in a deteriorated public infrastructure even for those highly educated workers who do find themselves in a competitive position.
Wisconsin is not a rich state. It has fallen to 25th in GDP. It has no oil or natural gas, no mountains, no oceans and its timber and mineral resources are limited. However, Wisconsin has always taken the greatest of pride in that it can educate with the best in the world. The public schools from kindergarten through the university have been the backbone of Wisconsin’s integrity. This is the case no longer. I guess you get what you pay for.
Dino Corvino said:
I am with you Barry. I simply do not understand this sort of thinking. I am sentimental guy, but at the end of the day teachers shape the future. We want them as energized as possible.
This public demonizing of teachers, is amazing. Do you think that they are not seeing the comments made in newspapers and the like?
Hey little Jimmy’s Dad was quoted in the paper saying I should shut up and teach. Great. Jimmy, you don’t get a text book today.
It boggles my mind the state of this country. It is all the same…the shut up-ification of this country.
No dissent.
No support.
No nothing.
Your on your own.
Buy a gun.
October 19th, 2007 at 2:00 pm #
jjknetter said:
I’m completely with both of you here. I’m a sophomore this year at UW-Eau Claire, and on Wednesday we spent the entire 2 hours of one of my English classes discussing all of this budget nonsense. I’ll never understand why education can be the first thing to go, but it’s been that way for a long time.
You can’t get a good job anymore without a college degree. Unfortunately, you can’t go to college without increasingly more money, so if your parents didn’t go (as mine and the parents of many others didn’t), they very likely can’t afford for you to go. I myself am surviving on federal grants and students loans.
Something that got mentioned in my class on Wednesday was the possibility of tuition going up by $800 next semester. I don’t know about my fellow students, but unless my financial aid increases accordingly, I’m not sure I’ll be able to afford it.
Why does the government feel we can get by without decent education programs? Why do they think they can treat teachers badly? Soon enough when my generation is in charge, and none of us have been properly educated, they’ll realize what they did…or what they didn’t do.
October 19th, 2007 at 2:39 pm #
Tom Neal said:
Lots of room on the chopping block. We’re all (except for legislators) seeing dizzying increases in health care / insurance costs and cost of living without commensurate growth in wages to offset. Not even close. We’re in the throes of the American post-post-post-industrial decline, with a long-standing disinvestment in education and quality of life, overwhelming government waste, polarization of the population, loss of demand for skilled labor and the emergence of the teeming service industry underclass, limitless demand on resources, and war to boot. Is it better to be an educator in Iowa or Alabama or Colorado? If it is, arguably it won’t be for long. Just as it’s increasingly difficult to be an American anywhere in America. This is our meager slice of Bye-Bye Miss American Pie. Barry, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger. And maybe understand why many people look at the plight of educators as not so different than their own, yet they may be frustrated at not having tenure, contract negotiations, unions and strikes in their own personal toolbox. Instead, they just have to take it.
October 19th, 2007 at 3:07 pm #
Jim Rosenberg said:
One of my favorite quotes on this subject is: “If you think the cost of education is high, you should try funding ignorance.” There seem to be a lot of people who are willing to do that.
October 19th, 2007 at 3:12 pm #
jjopek said:
When I moved here from Kansas about 5 years ago, my mom told me I would be getting a better education than what was offered in my home town. After hearing my high school teachers fight for contracts and being impacted by their decline in ambition and motivation to teach, I realized that my fellow classmates and I were getting the short-end of the stick, just as much as the teachers. Things haven’t changed too much. I can understand what Doyle wants, but shouldn’t we just get a budget and then maybe get things worked out better and propose them next year? As Barry said, education is the backbone of Wisconsin, let’s hope it can be a stong one.
October 20th, 2007 at 5:07 pm #
deepintheheart said:
This is an interesting string for several reasons. 1) I began my career as an educator in Wisconsin. 2) I am a product of public and private education in Wisconsin. 3) I am no longer a resident of Wisconsin or an educator.
Teaching started as a decent gig. I enjoyed students. I had a passion for subject. I did not enjoy my colleagues. I did not enjoy the system. The teachers union did not make any sense to me. Only now do I realize that what was at the center of my discontent with the people and the profession is that I did not feel that their was a sense of forward movement. Progessive thought was met with 100 reasons why “that will never work.” While there is plenty of attention given to “innovative educators” in the media, the reality I experienced was one of stagnation and isolation. Tow the line and maybe you will one day reach that point of being untouchable and have the security that you have become a brick of the institution.
In my community, public schools need to compete with private schools to lure the best and the brightest students and athletes. Public schools allow a significant degree of “school choice.” This kind of “free market” means teachers and administrators need to behave as entrepreneurs to a degree that I did not experience is Wisconsin.
October 21st, 2007 at 10:14 am #
joyinthejourney said:
Why is it that whenever there is a budget to be discussed or passed that we suddenly don’t have the money for the most important programs?
Gasp! We have to close libraries, we have to cut teacher salaries, we have to ***double gasp*** close down the local outdoor ice rink.
There is so much PORK in the state and federal budgets for totally unnecessary things. Our minds would spin if we ever ran the accounts payable department in Madison for ten minutes.
Dear legislators–get over yourselves. I would rather see you do nothing at all than indulge yourself in more self-important tasks.
I understand that this may have been a more emotional response than thinking, but sometimes, I get really fed up with the inaction and lack of intelligence in Mad Town.
October 22nd, 2007 at 7:54 am #
tinkertim said:
Well, I guess I see this differently. I can not stand the public school system.
I send my kids to private school, where the teachers are all happy with their pay, or they leave. Never any strike, no threats, just teaching. They are very concerned about pleasing me, in order to keep my children in their school.
I never have to worry about what they are being taught, or what the state is doing with the budget.
Every time I hear about a raise in public school teachers salaries, or another pool opening up, it is very frustrating. I don’t need the public school system eating up even more of my hard earned money to support a bureaucracy that I want nothing to do with.
Tim
October 22nd, 2007 at 7:58 pm #
Andy Sutton said:
I would be very surprised if a strike was looming - it would be suicide for the union. In 1974 the Hortonville School Board made an example of those who choose to illegally strike. Such a brazen move hasn’t been repeated in this state ever since.
Even though the events in Hortonville happened nearly five years before my birth I’ve read everything I can find about it. For those unfamiliar with it, the union decided to illegally strike, the school board fired all of the striking teachers, and a lengthy, nasty legal battle ensued. The US Supreme Court ruled in the school board’s favor and 84 teachers were out of work.
WEAC’s website certainly puts a different twist on the story, but from everything I’ve read few in the community were sympathetic to the teachers’ plight. Even WEAC’s efforts to stage a statewide walkout in support of the Hortonville teachers were a failure; their own membership voted it down by a 4-1 margin.
Will the Wausau Education Association play Russian Roulette with their careers? I’ll lay my money on ‘no.’
October 22nd, 2007 at 10:17 pm #
Barry Liss said:
Well tinkertim,
As much as you would like to opt out of supporting that public school bureaucracy with your hard earned dollars, you and yours can’t escape its effects (well funded or no). You can’t have your own mini-society of privately schooled alphas. You can try with gated communities and security guards. But that wouldn’t really be a community, would it? And between us friend, are you sure you haven’t confused your kids’ school with a Stepford dystopia? Moreover, Plato:
(Socrates) Here, then, is a discovery of new evils, I said, against which the guardians will have to watch, or they will creep into the city unobserved.
What evils?
Wealth, I said, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury, and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent. (110)
Plato. The Republic and Other Works. Translator: Benjamin Jowett. New York: Anchor Books, 1989.
Plato wasn’t describing your luxury or indolence, was he tinkertim? I mean that whole thing about:
“I send my kids to private school, where the teachers are all happy with their pay, or they leave. Never any strike, no threats, just teaching. They are very concerned about pleasing me, in order to keep my children in their school.I never have to worry about what they are being taught, or what the state is doing with the budget.”
One might almost think that you have just called your relationship with your kids’ school effortless. You describe their teachers as sycophantic servants and celebrate your personal distance from the scholastic curriculum. Does that sound healthy to you?
Barry
October 22nd, 2007 at 10:19 pm #
Dino Corvino said:
I think it is great that Andy Sutton has shown up. Andy is a member of a local school board, and I find it interesting that he is here.
Thanks Andy.
October 22nd, 2007 at 10:43 pm #
tinkertim said:
Barry,
Nice rant.
I am very involved in my children’s education, and there is no distance between me and the scholastic curriculum. That is exactly why my children are there. You see, Barry, the teacher’s at my children’s school are neither sycophantic servants of the state, nor the union. They are beholden to me, the parent. I view that as a good thing.
An evil creeping into our city is people relying on government to supply their every need. From education to health care and everything in between. And I, the taxpayer, can fund it all, want it or not. When citizens begin to vote themselves largess from the public coffers, freedom is in jeopardy. That, Barry, isn’t healthy.
Until we have your socialist “dystopia” (death of paradise), you keep twisting Plato and launching personal attacks when people disagree with you. What are you? A public school teacher?
October 22nd, 2007 at 11:24 pm #
barrydliss said:
tinkertim,
I appreciate the skill with which you wield the written word. We wouldn’t want to develop the bad habit of claiming that everyone who disagrees with us is on a ‘rant’. Would we? I am refraining from ad hominem attacks and attempting to generate arguments based on what you said tinkertim. I am pleased to hear of your involvement at your kid’s school. I am sure the teachers are excellent. I am concerned that you use the word ‘beholden’ to describe their relationship to you. Beholden means indebted - do you feel that way - a certain ownership of the teachers? I think it would be preferable to say that the teachers were accountable.
I think you are correct when you say “An evil creeping into our city is people relying on government to supply their every need.” That would be the want of self-reliance, the sin of sloth - it’s undeniably present and you are right to assert so. I feel obligated to point out my friend that greed and pride are also sins - and clear evils in our fair city.
That’s no twist of Plato tinkertim, but rather his essence. If the guardian class seeks its own material gain and rearranges the laws to benefit their private interests at the expense of the artisans and soldiers, the state falls into ruin. Sound familiar?
My vocation isn’t relevant. In any case, I sign my name to my comments and stand behind them.
Barry Liss
October 23rd, 2007 at 7:29 am #
Tom Neal said:
We have a little back and forth with tinker and barry here … and I like it. Observations: barry is gifted with excellent insight, yet is prone to flights of drama and reliance on the curveball, but is not an attacker in the belligerent sense; tinker is firm in his defense of his personal choice re: schooling, but lets his disdain for public schooling obscure his wider social view (i.e. What about the significant portion of the population who may not have the wherewithal to afford private schooling?). The “haves” and the “have nots” … the 2 inescapable elements of any social equation … how to accommodate the needs, desires and rights of both? My advice: barry, the educating “class” needs to accept their fair share of the general social burden and not demand immunity from others’ reality. tinker, there are plenty of anti-govt separatists living in cabins in Idaho, isolated from the reality of their fellow citizens and seeking to avoid their share of the burden. Citizenship comes with rights and burdens … enjoy your rights and try to help lessen our social burden without it being at the expense of those “have nots” out there. And if you call me a ’socialist” I’ll say “maybe a little bit” but I’m also a big fan of the whole “fair play” and “pulling for the underdog” that we Americans like to think we’re famous for.
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:26 am #
outdrgrl133 said:
Barry,
I agree with your statements. I myself am having to go through the process of earning a degree in education. Not only does education affect me as a college student, but also as a future teacher.
As you stated, Wisconsin prides itself in great education. As a high school student, I went through several standardized tests that our teachers would actually prepare us for in order for us to be among the nation’s best schools.
Why, then, do people not see the connection that good teachers equal engaged students? Furthermore, students who pursue a college degree may just have a piece of paper, but let’s face it that alone can give a strong advantage over other competitors.
How do we expect to continue this excellence without funding our teachers and schools?
Katie Holden
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:37 am #
dnttreadonme83 said:
Barry, in regard to your ideas about the state of education especially in Wisconsin, I agree with your statements. Too many times people believe that teachers are over payed or even over appreciated. With the summers abd breaks off and good benefits, people think that they are not worthy of all that they are given. But that is far from the truth. In many cases, especially elementary schools, teachers are the parents for some of the students because they don’t have any guidance on the home front. They are soley responsible for the intelligence growth and thirst for knowledge that is important in a child’s life. They are in many cases put in the situation where they are the ones in a child’s life that teach them about normal functions of a human such as social conduct and things they need to have in order to “survive” in the real world. For teachers, it is not ALL about teaching. At the high school level there are kids that hate going to school. Students that barely go and really don’t have much hope in their lives. A teacher many times inspires a student to strive for something better than what they have been exposed to for their life. Teachers sometimes see their students for more time throughout the day than a parent sees their child, now how is that not important in the development of a child? As, I look into the Horace Mann parking lot across the street, I see vehicles that are probably worth on average around $8,000. If they get payed so much money, would some choose to flaunt it? The people that speak out and say these things about how over payed teachers are and that they do not deserve that much money or privledge have probably not gone to school as long as their peers, because they have no idea of the true value of educators in this era.
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:49 am #
dnttreadonme83 said:
After reading through all of the comments I felt another need to post. Private school or public school, contracts or not, unions or not, they are teachers. Teachers in my opinions are underrated (like I had stated before in my other post). But who I am to say something, I am just a poor college student right? The problem here is, is that a private school should not be held on a higher pedistal than public schools. You were fortunate in your life either through luck or careful financial planning to pay for your child’s or childrens education. But who are you to say that the other kids and the “other” teachers don’t deserve the same treatment? Do I consider me self so completely unfortunate that I wasn’t able to attend a private school? No way. Education is the same, it doesn’t matter how educated or prestigious the teachers or instructors are, it matters how they teach in the classroom and how they inspire the student. I could say many things about how the students in my class from other schools, especially private, graduated from high school and totally crashed and burned, but it wouldn’t be fair. All I am trying to get across here is that a teacher is a teacher, they are underrated and underpayed, but the important thing is, is that your child gets a good education,and if they do receive a good education, does it really matter where it comes from?
Ben Krahn
October 25th, 2007 at 5:47 pm #
Dino Corvino said:
Good job Ben.
Thanks for coming to Citizen Wausau
October 25th, 2007 at 6:29 pm #
kuntk9163 said:
I definitely agree with what Tom Neal had to say about children from underprivelaged homes (”What about the significant portion of the population who may not have the wherewithal to afford private schooling?”) Enough cannot be said for children who deserve the right to learn from enthusiastic and well-rewarded teachers. VERY few parents can afford to send their children to private schools; even many middle class parents find it harder to pay for private education than lower income families, because of the lack of financial support for this socioeconomic faction. Further, there are children in our community unfortunate enough to have parents who honestly do not care what type of education their children recieve; if the community does not care for their fundamental need to get a decent education, they will later pay for this by dealing with the type of uneducated, uncared for adult they will grow into. Teachers are one of our society’s only current people-groups who can help kids from all backgrounds develop into healthy, educated, and active citizens. They deserve more support and pay than they will ever be given.
November 26th, 2007 at 2:30 pm #
kuntk9163 said:
(Oops… I forgot to sign my name.)
Katie Kuntz
November 26th, 2007 at 2:31 pm #
lindsayk31 said:
I must say, I agree with Ben. Most people don’t seem to realize how valuable teachers are. I can remember when I was in middle school riding the bus past my school one morning and seeing the majority of my teachers rallying out front. They were carrying signs that said things about being underpaid and how they did not deserve a salary cap. I also know of people that are educators, in both public and private school systems, that have to work extra jobs in addition to their everyday teaching. How is that fair? I don’t know of many other careers that require a supplement income from one person. I understand that many families have people with two separate jobs, but I’m talking about each person having their own job, and yet having to take on an additional part-time job as well.
As far, as the UW school system. I am currently going to school through UWMC, and some of the main reasons I have chosen to attend here is because it offered what I was going to school for, and was affordable. A couple of people I know though, had started attending college, only to be overwhelmed by the cost, and had to drop out to earn more money to cover the previous cost and try to save up more money for future costs. So I’ve had experience with the rising costs of attendance. I hope that more people will take an interest in this discussion. It’s something that needs to be pushed to the forefront, and soon.
Lindsay Kyhos
November 27th, 2007 at 4:29 pm #