Posted on 04/09/2012 4:56:17 PM PDT by MichCapCon
The Michigan Education Association’s newest strategy is to portray their teachers as underpaid while hoping no one is paying attention to the figures they are using to make their case, says one education policy expert.
“Clearly, their facts are not straight,” said Michael Van Beek, education policy director at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
It started when Steve Cook, the MEA’s president, said in a Detroit News op-ed that one teacher who contacted him was in his second year of teaching with a master’s degree and made $31,000 a year.
Michigan Capitol Confidential looked at the contracts of the lowest-paying school districts in the state and couldn’t find a contract that paid a second-year teacher with a master’s degree $31,000 a year.
However, in an interview with another newspaper, Doug Pratt, the MEA's spokesman, took what Cook described as the salary of one teacher and turned that $31,000 into the “average salary” of a second-year teacher with a master’s degree.
It’s hard to imagine any second-year teacher with a master’s degree earning $31,000 a year in Michigan, much less it being the statewide average. Consider that Eau Claire has the lowest average teacher’s salary in the state. The Eau Claire teachers’ contract states a second-year teacher with a master’s degree made $34,385 a year in 2010-11. And districts like the Troy School District pay a second-year teacher with a master’s degree $49,132 in 2011-12.
Neither Pratt nor Cook responded to an email seeking comment.
Pratt told the Livingston Daily News that “the average second-year Michigan teacher with a master's degree currently takes home $500 every two weeks after taxes and employee health care and pension deductions, and if he or she opts for a deduction toward child care.”
In the article, Pratt is attributed with saying that current school employees pay 3.9 percent of their salary toward retirement benefits. James Hohman, a fiscal policy analyst at the Mackinac Center, said teachers contribute on a sliding scale; up to 6.4 percent of their salary to the state pension plan and are paying another 3 percent of their salary for retiree health care. They also can pay up to 20 percent for health care costs under the new state law, but many districts negotiated contracts with lower cost-sharing. For example, that Eau Claire teacher would pay 10 percent of health care costs, or about $1,769 a year for the MESSA family plan.
Van Beek questioned Pratt’s logic of including child care costs and pension contributions when talking about how much after tax money a teacher has in discretionary income.
“It (child care costs) is like adding your grocery bill,” Van Beek said. “It’s a cost that you incur if you have children and decide to work outside the home. It’s a cost everyone incurs one way or another. If you have kids you have to take on costs to take care of them. Just like you have to eat to live, you have to buy food.”
Van Beek said that pension contribution will generate a yearly pension of about $30,000 to $40,000 during retirement and shouldn’t be considered a cost, but a savings.
“They can retire when they are 55 and have subsidized post-retirement health care benefits and have a defined-benefit pension that grows by 3 percent every year,” Van Beek said.
“I lived there 1079-1981. Loved it.”
That’s a mighty long time....
Like I said, I love it. That’s why I stayed so long.
Surely you jest! There isn't enough money in MI for me to be a teacher...there or anywhere else! It wouldn't take long for me to be on death row for murder!
No, I'm not nor have I ever been a teacher. I just think it's funny that people bad-mouth teachers when a lot are probably no more competent in what they they are paid for doing than are teachers.
Your table of NC teacher pay.
First here are some data points from your table:
with NBPTS certification:
0-2 years: $34,080
10 years: $42,240
15 years: $45,000
20 years: $47,390
25 years: $51,300
Someone I looked at yesterday has 27 years and makes $62,800. She might have taken some learning programs that boosted her pay but she doesn’t get additional pay for coaching or some other above-and-beyond activity. She’s just a teacher. She’s in the Wake County system.
Not my table, the state’s. Wake is one of the big systems in the state anyway (local governments are allowed to add to teacher pay, and the big localities usually do so) and most teachers don’t have National Board Certification. My point being is that most teachers in NC don’t make the top end salary you indicated, and the only reason I wished to make that point, was that in your earlier post you cited a teacher of 15 years making that much, and in my experience that would be unlikely unless you lived in certain areas. Just striving for accuracy- no bitching meant.
teacher pay
My statement was distorted. I look at state employee salaries continuously and tend to remember the high teacher pays. We non-teacher employees are envious of the teachers that get raises even though the rest of us haven’t gotten one for several years.
Well, be less envious- we haven’t moved on the chart in 4 years- in other words, no raises for experience, and none on the horizon. And if you really want to see a NC state employee that makes an unjustified salary, go look at what the ABC store folks make. Some of them make a great deal more than any teacher (or indeed, a great many other people, state employees or not, and with no special training or qualifications otherwise, save to be well-connected..)
I know some Michigan teachers.
Salary in lower 40s (in a cost of living area way above NC or GA) for teachers without tenure and with ten years of experience.
Their pay has gone down three years in row as train wrecks of union / legislature / district budgets are avoided.
It now takes ten years to get tenure if you didn’t have it before last year due legislature and district in-fighting for cost. That means you are working for NO retirement as it is all cliff vesting.
These include people with triple majors, highly educated in the sciences but without advanced degrees.
One I know pays for one dependent child healthcare coverage at about $200 per month which puts a lie to the legend that they get monster coverage for free.
I will grant that there are areas elsewhere where the salaries and benefits are criminal, but I don’t think Michigan in general outside of the big Detroit suburbs and urban core are going to serve as examples of such if you do the research.
I work in the private sector. Teachers are unionized (mostly) government workers. The point is that they work for an institution that now produces negative added value.
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