California taxpayers will never come up with enough school funding to satisfy the education lobby. All the same, teachers unions must grasp that in lean years – the current $14 billion deficit qualifies – taxpayers can't afford expansive school funding.
In this time of looming deficits, California's schools should look instead at how to spend their limited resources more effectively. Why, for one niggling but common example, do classroom teachers in flush years or lean end up buying their own copy paper? The major example, of course, is why student performance has declined as personnel costs have soared – and whether more money can reverse the trend.
How much the San Diego Unified School District budgets for classroom copy paper should be easy enough to find if the district posted its budgets on its Web site. It does, however, post other hints at district
After a 2.75 percent raise as of Jan. 1, the minimum salary negotiated by the teachers union is $3,284.30 a month, rising over decades according to seniority and master's degrees to a maximum of $6,716 a month. For certificated managers (administrators) who work 12 months a year, the union-negotiated minimum salary is $4,405.41 a month, rising over the years to a maximum $15,093.45.
Yet studies have shown that seniority and master's degrees, particularly in education, aren't accurate measures of effectiveness in the classroom. And basing higher salaries for teachers and administrators on seniority attracts at least as many poor to middling teachers and administrators as talented ones. Equal pay for unequal work is no incentive to stick around.
Performance pay is an incentive. Need excellent teachers in math and science? In low-performing schools? Need principals experienced at maintaining order? Pay them more.
Even the American Federation of Teachers has acknowledged that “the traditional salary schedule does not reward additional skills and knowledge that benefit children ... does not respond to market forces ... nor does it provide incentives for teachers to assume differentiated roles.” Still, even the AFT has tied its support for incentive pay to a hike of at least 30 percent in base pay for effective and ineffective teachers alike.
Education unions rank unequal pay for unequal performance a notch below funding cuts on the anathema scale. Yet so long as they oppose performance pay for faculty and staff, the performance of students who most need adept adults will slide whether school budgets rise or fall.
