ARE WE GETTING OUR MONEY'S WORTH FROM PUBLIC SCHOOLS?

My wife recently opened our property tax bill for the year, and imagine our surprise when we saw that the portion identified as school taxes was in the amount of $900. Now I live in a fairly large county here in northeast Florida, and it has some of the worst schools in the state, leaving me wondering just what I'm getting for my money. Obviously, not much. So therefore, I think it very safe to say that the answer to the question, at least from my perspective, would be a very resounding NO! Which brings me to a new study that has recently been released by the American Enterprise Institute together with The Heritage Foundation. What study apparently shows, at least at face value, is that when you compare public school teachers to private-sector, non-teacher workers with similar educational backgrounds and work experience, using standard comparison techniques, the two groups come out about equal. But having said that, Hertiage’s Jason Richwine, who co-authored the report with AEI resident scholar Andrew Biggs, seems to think that where public school teachers are involved, more analytics should come into play when evaluating what their compensation actually is. This includes comparing not only wages but benefits and what the authors call “fringe benefits.” When you weigh all the factors that Richwine and Biggs take into account when comparing public school teachers and non-teacher private workers, teachers win making 52 percent more. The report authors equate this to $120 billion overcharged to tax payers each year.

Here are just a few of the highlights from the Richwine and Biggs report: 1) Public school teachers earn less wages compared to non-teachers for the similar level of education they have received. 2) There is no wage gap between the two groups when they are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education. 3) Public school teachers earn more than private school teachers, when both schools compared are secular and follow the standard curriculum. And finally, 4) Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching get a pay raise of about 9 percent. Teachers who switch to non-teacher jobs have decreased wages by 3 percent. And a summary of the study clearly shows that with the factoring in of certain measures in addition to wages (i.e., fringe benefits), when comparing public school teachers with private, non-teacher workers of similar education and experience, teachers make more. The authors of the reports equate this to 52 percent more in wages costing up to $120 billion per year. And I'm sure it can go without saying that in responding to this reports, the American Federation Of Teachers made the claim that the assertions made in the study are of poor reasoning and should get a “flunking grade.” This is the sort of idiotic response we can expect from this uselss organization and should really come as no big surprise to anyone, especially when you consider that this organization is far less interested in our children than they are about the collecting of dues that they can then donate to Democrat candidates.


So anyway, now you may asking, what exactly are those previously mentioned “fringe benefits” comprised of, just what kind of things are we talking about here? Now I think we are all very well aware of the fact that anytime you have union involvement, the cost of the end product, in this case the education of our children, the cost is dramatically increased. Unfortunately, at the same time there is a just as dramatic decrease in the quality of that same product. And that is the same when talking about public school education. So, according to the report, we have public school teachers who receive far better pensions and extremely generous retiree health care benefits when compared to non-teachers at a similar level. The report also notes that there exists much higher job security for public school teachers. The authors of the report state that “we find that job security for typical teachers is worth about an extra 1 percent of wages, rising to 8.6 percent when considering that extra job security protects a premium paid in terms of salaries and benefits.” Public school teachers also have a lower unemployment rate compared to private workers, according to the report, with public school teachers at 2.1 percent and private school teachers at 4.1. As with any public employee, which teachers essentially are, it's almost impossible to fire them, they're just shuffled around in the same system. Thus we remain saddled with crappy teachers until they finally retire, to then enjoy their exorbitant retirement packages, courtesy of the taxpayer.


Now of course I don’t think I really need to mention the fact that The American Federation Of Teachers’ in its response to the report, issued a statement, according to NPR, calling the analytics of the report “ridiculous” and in some cases “pure fiction”: "This report contains a number of ridiculous assertions, such as arbitrarily assigning 8.6 percent as a “job security premium” teachers supposedly enjoy. This “job security premium” is pure fiction, given the 278,000 public education jobs that have been lost during this recession. There’s no basis for this claim—it‘s simply a placeholder used to lead to AEI’s conclusion. In our business, such reasoning would get a flunking grade. The truth—backed by reputable research—is that few, if any, workers subsidize their professions like teachers. America’s teachers spend hundreds of dollars per year on classroom supplies for their students and work longer hours than their peers in other nations, including late afternoons, evenings and weekends grading papers, preparing lesson plans, talking with students and their parents, and other school-related work." If we're going to be honest here in describing what defines "pure fiction," I think it fair to say that that would include anything that comes from this organization or any representitive of it, when they try to tell us that their primary concern is to provide the best education possible to our children. We spend more on education in this country than does any other inductrialized nation, and yet our kids come nowhere near being able to compete with students from other countries in areas of math, science or reading. So what does that tell you?