By J. DeVoy
Governor Christie tells a public school teacher seeking around $83,000 in compensation, exclusive of benefits, that she doesn’t have to work if she doesn’t like her current pay. He then tells a woman bemoaning cuts in social spending that, unlike the United States, New Jersey “can’t print money.”
It’s a shame that blunt common sense is so rare.
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The Legal Satyricon 
I’m in total agreement, although I believe in higher taxes. After spending the first 12 years of my voting adult life as a GET THE GUBMINT OF MA PROPER-TIE libertarian, I’ve finally come to my senses and swung a 180.
Here in CA, we get ballot initiatives about cutting taxes without cutting spending, and spending projects without increased taxes. Everyone wants everything without paying for it. The constitutional measure I would like to see would look like this: a decrease in taxes has to correlate to a cut, and make it multiple choice: a) education b) fire department c) police department d) social services. I would guess social services would go first (because poor people don’t vote) followed by education, then police, then fire. You want more teachers? Guaranteed money for education? A) property tax increase B) sales tax increase C) tax on movies and cinema D) gas tax.
People voted for the governator here in CA thinking he would offer this kind of bluntness, but CA is far more politically shitfucked than NJ.
California is never going to get out of the hole it’s in because of those ballot initiatives. That, and San Francisco being overdue for its once-a-century earthquake, are the only major reasons not to move there. You overlooked one of my favorite possible taxes, though: The non-diet soft drink tax. Even in a health-conscious state like CA, there’s plenty of revenue to be realized taking that route.
Also, affluent suburbs, especially the gated ones, would cut cops before (some) social services. Libraries > cops in high-income areas.
The United States has a higher per-capita rate of incarceration than any other nation in the world.
I wish someone could explain to me why the prison population is not the first choice for any state seeking to make budget cuts.
The reason out prisons are so full is because of the social outcry over mental health institutions in the last half century. Since states cannot get money to put people in institutions, they put them in prison. I work with homeless and the incarcerated, and see this constantly-not that my personal experience is any indication of fact.
legalize drugs. and not so you can friggin tax it; they should be free. we should be free. free from being criminalized for personal decisions
It turns out the woman makes over $86,000, exclusive of benefits.
Governor Christie should give her what she demands.
All for *9 months* of work a year. Teachers are way overpaid. Shakespeare’s line about lawyers from Henry VI was all wrong.
As someone who has known many teachers and married one, I can tell you that the “9 months of work a year” canard is pure bullshit. I have never known a teacher who took a three-month summer vacation. There may be teachers who do those things, but I strongly suspect that they are a small minority.
There are definitely bad teachers out there — I have known *of* (though never personally known) teachers who simply phoned it in because they were nearing retirement — just as there are bad lawyers; but most teachers are dedicated, hard-working people who have chosen to brave the relatively thankless world of education. They have to deal with students from homes at multiple different socio-economic levels; hostile or, worse, indifferent parents; school bureaucracies that are forced to deal with continually underfunded budgets; school boards that are increasingly being used as platforms for extremist political or religious movements to advance their agendas via curriculum changes; and a national system that mandates “performance standards” with neither a rational basis for evaluation nor sufficient funding to ensure a chance to meet them.
You dismiss Mark’s comparison with football players and famous singers out of hand, but if people were paid based on the value they contribute to their communities, teachers would be paid a lot more than entertainers. Or lawyers, for that matter.
You dismiss Mark’s comparison with football players and famous singers out of hand, but if people were paid based on the value they contribute to their communities, teachers would be paid a lot more than entertainers. Or lawyers, for that matter.
Except, of course, that they wouldn’t. It is much harder to become an elite athlete, top entertainer or any lawyer than it is to become a teacher. There would always be more supply than demand.
That has nothing to do with what I said. You may be right that there is an oversupply of teachers. (There may also be an oversupply of lawyers, so maybe don’t be so sure we’re worth so much.) But the point I was making is that if we paid people based on the value of their contribution to their communities *instead of* the current scheme, then teachers would be paid a lot more.
How are you measuring contribution? I’m not sure teachers have a large amount of social value or make social contributions that wouldnt otherwise be made (I would gladly teach my own children). Capital markets have the largest impact on communities, by efficiently diverting capital to innovative and/or efficient companies. These companies employ people, and many of them provide the development for us to move forward technologically. I’m not badmouthing teachers here, but am saying investment bankers have more social value/make a larger contribution.
Also, teachers take off about 2mo during the summer and get about a month extra with holidays, breaks, etc. $86k is just too much, and the teachers in my district make about $175k average, so imagine my outrage.
You have a source for that $175K average? The highest average I could find in a quick search was mid-80s and that was for special ed teachers, who always make more.
Yeah, “lord” knows, you wouldn’t want the people entrusted with the education of the (smaller) people who will one day take our places running this country to be paid more than, say, a football player or a famous singer — because after all, THEY contribute SO MUCH!
This is a terrible argument for reasons that should be self-evident.
Hot damn! Now I’m REALLY glad I voted for the guy. Awesome.
Chris Christie will do to New Jersey, my home state, what George W. Bush did to our country. Celebrate that if you wish.
It’s easy to tell someone else they don’t have to work when you have a taxpayer-paid job for the next 4 years.
What bravery.
Christie is a political hack who will make Jon Corzine look like George Washington before his term has ended.
@Dan Someone (because the reply threads are getting too thin up there)
if we paid people based on the value of their contribution to their communities *instead of* the current scheme, then teachers would be paid a lot more.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Adjusted for inflation, education spending has doubled since the 1960s while test scores are down. Some value.
In fact, according to the Department of Education, the long-term trends in reading and math scores have been upward. http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38
“Education spending” may have doubled, but average teacher salaries increased by less than 50% from 1961 through 2007, adjusted for inflation. http://www.aft.org/pdfs/teachers/salarysurvey07.pdf
That is one hell of a weak upward trend and hardly a justification for DOUBLING education expenses since the 1960’s. Also, you’re failing to consider that the things being tested by NCLB-mandated tests, state regents exams, the SAT/ACT and virtually any other measure of achievement have been massaged heavily in even the last decade in order to remove disparities in achievement along racial and gender lines. Accordingly, many of these “gains” are illusory because the test has changed, rather than the students’ ability or knowledge.
Why on earth should we be happy that teacher salaries have increased AT ALL since 1961??
In 1961, the median teacher was something like an academic 85%ile woman because there were few respectable jobs for a woman with a bachelors degree. Now, the median teacher is an academic 40%ile because educated women can get real jobs. But for the teachers’ unions, adjusted salary should be down.
Plus, college grads since the 1980s have had sub-110 IQs, compared to the 113ish that was the mean in the 1960s.
Considering that one SD of IQ is 15 or 16 points, a drop from 113 – around the top 20-15% of society in terms of IQ – to 105, which is just a shade above median, in just 40 years tells us how worthless higher education has become. Outside of top institutions, we’re not paying for people’s knowledge or education, just their credentials.
http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2008/06/mean-iq-of-college-grads-dropped-9.html
Why would IQ matter in this scenario? I was under the impression that IQ measures innate intelligence, supposedly. How does education impact something that’s innate?
Granted, even assuming it’s an accurate measure, high IQ doesn’t mean squat if you never get some sort of education. Doesn’t seem that you were going there though since you usually seem to argue that IQ score is the be-all, end-all.
IQ is not innate and can improve under proper conditions.
Ahhh because nobody ever made it without an education!!! Ever!
No, they didn’t. A high IQ where you never learn anything won’t get you anywhere. You’re inferring I meant a traditional education. I meant that they were taught things by someone, not that they graduated from high school.
@ DMG
-Not going there with this piece. I was just pointing out that ALL college grads are, on average, dumber now than they were in the 1960s. This group includes teachers. Another commenter bemoaned that salaries haven’t risen fast enough since then. I’m just proffering a metric that shows they should feel damn lucky that wages have risen AT ALL, considering that the quality of teachers presumably has dropped.
Okay, got it now.
As far as wages rising, they don’t even get COLA most of the time do they? I’m sure we could point to a lot of professions that have had faster-rising wages with arguable even less quality over the same period of time.
Maybe you have a point, but at the same time we don’t tend to hold everyone else to that same standard.
What is the relationship between “education spending” and teacher salaries? Since teacher salaries have not doubled in the period you’re looking at, while “education spending” has, presumably much of that increase in spending has been going elsewhere.
@Harry: Not clear where your data comes from, or what population your percentiles are referring to, but why would that necessarily correlate to salaries?
@jeffrey: How many of those investment bankers would be able to do their job without an education? I don’t see a lot of them who don’t tout their educational credentials. And the “teachers don’t work during the summer” canard is, as I’ve said before, bullshit.
Yeah, and so many people in IBD and its feeder schools went to average, middling schools!
I should clarify something here: I don’t hate teachers, as some of the people who pushed me to do useful things in my life were, in fact, teachers. These were also people making ~40k a year at the most with crap benefits at a working-class catholic high school with more at-risk youth than a well-heeled public school just two miles away; the students attended under protest because of their parents’ sacrifice. Despite being outgunned in terms of finances and teacher pay, which we’re told is sooooo important to ensuring teacher quality, the only other schools that compared or bested us on state and other tests were other catholic or private schools. My high school’s scores would routinely demolish surrounding districts that, again, had more resources and much higher spending per student. Consequently, the “teachers need to be paid more,” and “teachers are overworked” schtick falls on deaf ears, mostly out of respect for the educators I had who turned nothing into something without bellyaching about how bad the conditions were.
Another thing that offended me: How many of my college classmates defaulted into education after washing out of STEM subjects the first semester. The most common reasons given were that 1) the classes were easier, 2) it would make for a higher GPA, and 3) they would get off summers. NONE of these people cared about teaching, though none of them presently are employed in education, either. Honestly, I can see some of the appeal as a student; making arts and crafts or talking in front of a room of people seemed much more appealing than learning about quantitative social science research.