Posted on 05/28/2012 12:07:06 AM PDT by Impala64ssa
Janesville teachers and their supporters expressed outrage this week after an anonymous group distributed fliers listing their salaries and urging parents to request their child be assigned to a "non-radical teacher" next year.
The fliers, which included the names, titles and salaries of the 321 highest-paid Janesville teachers, also urged readers to go to iverifytherecall.com to determine if the teachers signed the petition to recall Gov. Scott Walker.
Orville Seymer, an open records specialist with the conservative Milwaukee-based activist organization Citizens for Responsible Government, said the group responsible for the flier has asked to remain anonymous "for obvious reasons."
On behalf of the anonymous group, Citizens for Responsible Government filed an open records request with the Janesville School District seeking teacher names, salaries and titles. Seymer provided the information to the anonymous group, but was not involved in drafting or distributing the fliers, he said. No other requests of a similar nature have been filed with other districts, Seymer added.
The flier angered teachers, who were already targeted by a flier earlier this year accusing them of having a "Marxist, globalist agenda," said Ted Lewis, regional union representative for Rock County teachers.
"It's trying to intimidate them and make them feel guilty for earning salaries," Lewis said. "They're creating this witch hunt for people who engaged in their civic duty."
Lewis said it was "ironic" that whoever distributed the fliers "very publicly posts the names of individuals and their salaries and yet he or she won't even divulge their identity."
Chris Kliesmet, executive administrator of Citizens for Responsible Government, said his organization isn't responsible for the content of the flier, but said it has raised the question about what's being taught in public schools.
"The question in the back of a lot of people's minds is, 'Are my children being indoctrinated?'" he said.
Lewis said feedback he's heard from the public indicates that people find the vilification of teachers "outrageous" and appreciate what public school teachers do.
"Everybody I've spoken to say teachers don't deserve this," Lewis said. "This is an attack against teachers, against public education."
The Janesville Gazette reported Tuesday that the flier was not distributed in newspapers, but instead was placed in newspaper boxes at private residences without the paper's permission. Janesville Police Deputy Chief Dan Davis said Tuesday distributing fliers in newspaper boxes is not against the law.
Exactly. The little Marxist creeps have glass jaws, and are shocked when they are given a little of their own medicine in return.
Making people feel guilty for earning salaries. lol Isn’t that a common practice of the left in their class warfare tactics? Apparently they don’t like it so much when the same tactics are used against them.
I don’t think liberals feel guilty because of the amount of their salaries; it is because they do virtually nothing for it. Either it’s that ‘nothing’ or it is ideologically bent. In both cases shining a light on it evokes the same action as when roaches scatter.
Salary increases are negotiated as a lump sum of the total salaries paid. The union then distributes that across the step guide pushing most of the money into the higher steps. For example, a 5% increase doesn't mean all teachers get 5%. Those near the bottom get less, those near the top get more. The teachers use the artificially deflated lower salaries to pressure legislators to raise the minimum for starting teachers, if they can, or whine that teachers are underpaid.
Another fact I discovered analyzing one district was the average salary was bimodal, meaning there are basically two averages. Teachers with longevity milk the system for all it is worth, promising those lower on the scale their turn if they will only be patient. It's all a scam.
But all we hear is crying about the newbies earning $30,000. Got to start somewhere.
72,000 for 9 months of work seems outrageous to me.
“Everybody I’ve spoken to say teachers don’t deserve this,”
I don’t see a problem with public servant’s salaries being publicized.
It seems like a lot to me also. Take off an extra month for holidays and spring break and it is closer to 8 months. The hours are good too. No travel, no midnight calls to come in.
Cherry-pick the high salaries and go ahead criticize.
A LOT of teachers don’t make near this amount - just call your local Catholic school teacher if you don’t believe me.
Anyhow, I challenge YOU to try and deal with a classroom, given all the legal, curricular, parental, etc. pressures, never mind the little imps themselves.
Forty years overdue...close the schools, homeschool, stop the indoctrination, cripple the unions, slash property taxes...sounds like a plan.
A salary of $75,000 for 9 months is equivalent to a salary of $100,000 for 12 months.
Whether or not $100,000/year is outrageous or not is a matter of personal judgement, but I imagine somebody making $40,000 a year at Costco or something isn’t likely to have much sympathy for a person getting the equivalent of $100,000 a year who ends up complaining and whining about the indignity of being forced to make minimal contributions to their medical and pension plans.
I’m not sure if the flyer is a good idea or not, but one thing they should have done is include the 12-month equivalent value of those salaries, and perhaps the actual monetary equivalent of the pension and health care costs that those school employees find so onerous.
The answer is 'Yes'...
The table isn’t cherry picking. Shows quantities of teachers within a range. It does not support the myth that teachers are poorly paid. Everyone has pain-in-the-butt people to deal with in their jobs, with limitations on their actions.
The unions have done this to themselves. They let the miscreants & radicals stay on, if not be encouraged. Now when times are tough, people are giving them a hard look, and red flags are going up all over the place.
What I was trying to get at (albeit poorly) was that there are tons of great people out there in the education system, and they’re getting short shrift. “The accident did not happen” never makes the headlines.
Well done, Conservatives. The Truth will set you free. Expose the lies, shine the light in the dark places, and things will turn around. Very nice.
‘No outrageous salaries.’ These are salaries for 3/4 of a day for 3/4 of a year, don’t forget. Plus the benefits.
I think you’ve fallen into the trap that the teacher’s unions would like you to: that any attack on the current system is an attack on teachers (and you’re exactly right in that dealing with a class full of antsy adolescents is a thankless and often underpaid task).
The attack here is on the teachers unions - the folks at the top of that salary list are likely there not because they’re the best teachers, but because they’ve got the longest tenure, and because of salary scales negotiated by the unions that have nothing - zero - to do with performance. Teachers unions fight tooth and nail against any compensation packages based on performance.
The Catholic school teachers you cite aren’t unionized, and they’re almost certainly underpaid relative to their public school colleagues. Most often, they teach because they love it, and they put up with crappy salaries because they don’t want to put up with the crappy bureaucratic restriction of the government school systems - and (for many) because they see it as their vocation.
Somewhere there’s a happy medium, and whether or not it involves teachers union I don’t know. But teachers unions as they’re currently constructed are the problem. By their own admission (at the highest levels of the NEA) all they care about is sucking every bit of advantage they can for their members: students be damned.
If I was confident the teachers at the top of that list were the best teachers in Janesville, I’d say more power to them. What I expect is that there is no correlation between those salaries and actual teaching ability - and that things are likely to stay that way until the teachers unions are broken, or until they change the adversarial attitude they have to their employers (who are ultimately you and me).
I don't know of any Catholic schools with a teachers union, the salaries are a matter of supply and demand, not union extortion and political shenanigans.
Before the unions and liberal cultural corruption, the classes I were in had 30-32 students, teachers who knew their subject, were devoted to teaching and earned the respect of their students. The 60s changed all that when radicals dropped into teachers colleges en masse for deferments.
I'd venture to say all they care about is hobnobbing and junkets and all the other appurtenences of govermental elitism. Not only the students, but their own membership can go to hell, as long as they deliver the votes. Typical liberal modus operandi.
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