The only group in society that must be spoken of in reverential terms at all times, no matter what, is public school teachers. Attack the Boy Scouts, boycott Mel Gibson, put Christ in a jar of urine—but don't dare say anything bad about teachers. Unless you want it noted on your permanent record . . . We are simultaneously supposed to gasp in awe at teachers' raw dedication and be forced to listen to their incessant caterwauling about how they don't make enough money. Well, which is it? Are they dedicated to teaching or are they in it for the money? After all the carping about how little teachers are paid, if someone enters the teaching profession for the big bucks, aren't they too stupid to be teaching our kids?
Public school teachers are the new priesthood while traditional religion is ridiculed and maligned. As portrayed in the national pulpit of Hollywood, leaders of God-based religions are invariably lying scum. Not since Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess (1953) has Hollywood conceived of a priest or minister who was not a Nazi sympathizer, sexual predator, or some other breed of moral viper. Priests and ministers are smarmy, humorless hypocrites in movies like The People Vs. Larry Flynt (but the pornographer comes off favorably!), Judgment (child-molesting priest), and The Runner Stumbles (Dick Van Dyke as a hypo-critical priest who impregnates a nun). In Sister Act, Whoopi Goldberg is a Reno lounge singer on the lam who shakes up the stodgy convent with her fun, upbeat attitude. The late, briefly aired, and little-missed TV show The Book of Daniel was about a drug-addicted Episcopal priest, Daniel, who had an alcoholic wife, a drug-dealing daughter, one gay son, and another son who was having sex with the bishop's daughter. Daniel's lesbian secretary was having sex with his sister-in-law. In other words, it was a typical Hollywood family drama.
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By contrast, the moment a teacher walks onto the screen, you know who the hero is going to be. Teachers are Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, Jon Voight in Conrack, Richard Dreyfuss in Mr. Holland's Opus, Kevin Kline in The Emperor's Club, Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me, and Julia Roberts in Mona Lisa Smile. Among the Teacher-as-Saint movies are: Goodbye, Mr. Chips (three versions); The Blackboard Jungle; Stand and Deliver; and on and on and on. There are only two possible plots in movies about teachers: either inspirational teachers bring their passion and dedication to inner-city schools or inspirational teachers bring their passion and dedication to bored suburban kids.
In real life, these taxpayer-supported parasites are inculcating students in the precepts of the Socialist Party of America—as understood by retarded people. In early 2006, Sean Allen, a student at Overland High School in Colorado, taped his tenth-grade "world geography" teacher Jay Bennish ranting incoherently about Bush for twenty minutes during class. After a brief detour during which Bennish condemned the capitalist system, he proceeded briskly to his main point . . . George W. Bush is like Hitler!
Anyone who uses this adolescent cliche should not be in the tenth grade, much less teaching it. But Bennish thought he was Socrates, telling his students, "What I am trying to get you to do is think more in depth." How about this: Al Gore is like Hitler! Nancy Pelosi is like Hitler! Kanye West is like Hitler! Jay Bennish is like Hitler! And that guy on the Subway sandwich shop TV commercials who lost all the weight—I'm thinking: Hitler! (Are you cogitating deep thoughts?)
Although surely smarter than Bennish, not all American teen-agers are bright enough to withstand the constant propaganda from authority figures who are grading them. Part of Bennish's Socratic dialogue that day included this exchange: BENNISH: Who is probably the single most violent nation on planet Earth?! [sic]
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT APPLE-POLISHER: We are!
BENNISH: The United States of America!
After Bennish was placed on a short, paid administrative leave, about 150 students—
who can't place Spain on a map—"walked out" of the school to protest his suspension.
The new clergy not only teach children clever repartee such as Bush is like Hitler!, but they use their positions as taxpayer-supported wards of the state to demote the old religion, treating prayer, Bibles, and Christmas songs like hate crimes. At the Cori Street Elementary School in State College, Pennsylvania, children were led in a chant of
"celebrate Kwanzaa" while Christmas carols were stripped of all religious content. At Pattison Elementary School in Katy, Texas, Christmas songs were banned, but students were threatened with grade reductions for refusing to sing songs celebrating other religious faiths. A school district in California prohibits teachers from mentioning Christmas or wearing Christmas jewelry. A New Jersey teacher was forced by an ACLU
suit to abandon plans to take children to see the Broadway version of A Christmas Carol.
In Panama City, Florida, the school principal changed the name of a Bible study group from "Fellowship of Christian Students" to "Fellowship of Concerned Students" and for good measure prohibited the club from advertising. A school administrator in Dallas, Texas, was reprimanded for using her e-mail to forward copies of President Bush's National Day of Prayer Proclamation, though the school district had no problem with employees using e-mail to send jokes, chain e-mails, and secular messages of 98
encouragement.'
The worst scandal to hit the real churches in twenty years is the priest child-molestation scandal—which, by the way, pales in comparison to the teacher child-molestation problem. If only the depraved priests had had teachers' unions defending them, they'd still be running amok. All we'd ever hear about is how priests are hardworking, under-paid, and laboring under ghastly parishioner-priest ratios. The hero in every third Hollywood film would be a priest, and letters to the editor pages would be bristling with indignant letters complaining about how poorly priests are paid. Bumper stickers would suddenly appear, saying, "Someday, we'll have enough money for the Lord's House and the Air Force will hold bake sales to pay for its bombers." Most important, every school-age child in America would be required to attend Catholic Church for six hours a day—all subsidized by the taxpayer.
I'm sure there are a lot of wonderful, caring public school teachers out there. But there are also a lot of wonderful, caring Catholic priests. That doesn't stop people from noticing when there's a rash of bad ones. We'd all die without energy companies, but no liberal lips quiver when Enron comes under attack. Why are "educators" in government schools the only people on Earth who must universally be spoken of in hushed tones of religious worship? As it happens, public schools rival Enron when it comes to financial scandals and have more sex scandals per year than Catholic priests—thirty times more. But don't mention it or you'll be accused of hating teachers.
At least the public schools perform such a great service! According to David Salisbury, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the CATO Institute,
"Throughout the twentieth century, the scores of preschool age children on IQ and kindergarten readiness tests have climbed steadily upward. . . . It's not until they move up through grade school and on to high school that their performance declines."2
The international comparisons are breathtaking. American students excel on international tests in fourth grade, the earliest grade for which international comparisons are available. In fourth grade—after the public schools have had only a few years to do their damage—American students far outperform other countries in reading, math, and science. Fourth-graders score in the 92nd percentile in science, the 70th percentile in reading, and the 58th percentile in math. They beat 26 of 35 countries in reading literacy, including Germany, France, and Italy. The main educational difference between American children and Western European children at that age is that most American children have not been subjected to preschool, whereas almost all European children have.
But as American children spend more time in school, their scores decline. By the eighth grade, Americans are merely average in inter-national tests. By the twelfth grade—having received all the benefits of an American education—they are near the bottom. Math scores plummet from the 58th percentile in fourth grade to the 14th percentile in twelfth grade.
Most stunningly, in fourth grade Americans are in the 92nd percentile in science literacy—bested only by students in South Korea and Japan. Eight years later, American twelfth-graders' science scores have fallen to the 29th percentile. (For those of you who learned math in the U.S. public schools, going from 92nd to the 29th means it went down.) The only countries American twelfth-graders beat in science were Lithuania, Cyprus, and South Africa. If the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team could beat only 99
Lithuania, Cyprus, and South Africa, there would be congressional investigations.3
Question: Is student achievement inversely proportional to time spent in U.S. public schools, or is there a correlation between poor student achievement and time spent in U.S. public schools?
Discuss.
So that's how schools are doing at their primary mission. But liberals scream bloody murder and accuse you of attacking teachers whenever anyone mentions any problems with the public schools, no matter how meekly (unless "problems" means only "not paying teachers enough").
Through their girly guilt-mongering, Democrats have turned public school teachers (or as I call them, "disinformational facilitators") into religious icons. It's a good gig, especially if you don't even have to teach. At private schools, 80 percent of the personnel are teachers. By contrast, at public schools only about 50 percent of the personnel are actual teachers—most of the rest are cogs in the endless layers of machinery of the
"education" bureaucracy.' This would be like having 26 full-time coaches for a 26-man baseball team.
It's very important for the Democrats to control the public schools. John Dewey, the founder of public education in America, said, "You can't make Socialists out of individualists—children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent." You also can't make socialists out of people who can read, which is probably why Democrats think the public schools have nearly achieved Aristotelian perfection. For Lenin it was "Give me your four-year-olds, and in a generation I will build a Socialist state." For Hitler it was
"Let me control the textbooks and I will control the state." For the Democrats it's "Let us control the schools and in a generation no one will able to read."
Unfazed by international comparisons showing that American children fall behind with each additional year of school, Democrats want to get our students started falling behind even sooner. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, John Kerry proposed "investing" in Head Start, Early Start, Smart Start, Jump Start, Kick Start—and got a standing ovation. He mentioned the military and you could hear crickets in the convention hall. Al Gore's 2000 Democratic platform included federal preschool for every child in America. Sandra Feldman of the American Federation of Teachers says America "can't afford not to" adopt a preschool program like the French—whom our fourth-graders crush in international comparisons, by the way. Remember how factories in the old Soviet Union stayed open year after year even though half the products they turned out were defective? U.S. public schools have become like that, which is why Democrats feel so much at home in the education business.
Democrats like to say, "Sure, Republicans are all for fetuses, but once the child is born, do they care?" Their yardstick for caring is: Where do you stand on creating jobs for public school teachers? The rule used to be that you could be anti-abortion provided you sup-ported creating more welfare bureaucrats. Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer began a 1995 column with "Love the fetus, damn the child," and then went on a jeremiad against "pro-life"—his quotes—senators Bob Dole and Phil Gramm for putting together a welfare reform bill that "will make abortion a compelling choice for poor women." Scheer referred to this monstrosity as "Dole's bill." Once "Dole's bill" turned out to be a smashing success, it was renamed "Clinton's welfare reform bill" or, for short, 100
"President Clinton's crowning achievement."
So now the new rule is, in order to be the "right kind" of pro-lifer, you don't have to support massive increases in spending on welfare programs; you have to support massive increases in spending on public school teachers. When he was running for president in 2004, Al Sharpton said, Republicans "love the fetus and they cut the funds from the baby.
I don't understand this jaded love for children where you cut daycare, cut childcare, cut anything—Head Start—but yet you want to protect the fetus coming into the world." For liberals, a human life begins at the precise moment the person starts filling out his first application for a government job.
Howard Dean says Democrats should not turn their backs on "pro-life people"—but only if they are "the right kind of pro-life per-son," by which he means supportive of every possible teachers' union giveaway. Whenever the Democrats talk about increasing spending on "the children," what they mean is sending more dollars to useless government bureaucrats, even if they never encounter a child on the job. Until no one in America earns more than a kindergarten teacher, the nation does not value human life.
The only work Senator Chris Dodd has ever done in twenty-five years in the Senate is to try to nationalize kindergarten and prekindergarten child care. It's somehow cruel and unfair not to federalize all education workers in America. And there are a lot of them—
teachers, substitute teachers, assistant teachers, substitute assistant teachers, teachers'
safety instructors, teachers' pension managers, teachers' health care providers, teachers of teachers—and we haven't even gotten to the principals, assistant principals, and superintendents. Democrats won't rest until we have achieved a national average class size of 1 teacher for every .03 students.
Dodd's 2001 bill on "childcare" is typical. With a title that sounds suspiciously as though a teacher named it—"Focus on Committed and Underpaid Staff for Children's Sake Act"—Dodd's bill spent about two sentences talking about children and the next 90
pages detailing copious benefits packages for public school teachers. In a sentiment born of pure class hatred, teachers are enraged that they often earn less than members of the sweaty working class who probably don't even hold master's degrees in "education theory." Consequently, the Democrats are constantly introducing bills to legislatively proclaim that all teachers are worth more than plumbers, truck drivers, and other professions whose members do not vote for Democrats. Dodd's bill couldn't even make it through the "findings" section without long diatribes about the indignity of bus drivers earning more than teachers.
After two very brief references to "the children" at the beginning, the bill gets right to the heart of the matter: increasing the salaries of "child care providers."
Finding number (3) cites "a growing body of research" showing the value of "well-compensated child care providers."
Finding number (4) bitterly quotes Department of Labor statistics showing that in 1999, "the average wage for a child care provider was $7.42 per hour," and the "median wage of a family child care provider in 1999 was $264 weekly, or $13,728 annually."
These figures apparently include the salaries of teenage babysitters and after-school care at Grandma's house. One major reason child care providers show up as being paid so little is the large number of liberal Democrat cabinet nominees who pay their nannies off the books. The average teacher's salary that year was $43,300, compared with $40,100
for other full-time workers—who, I note, don't get summers off or leave work at 3:00
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P.M.
Finding number (5) expresses the class hatred of teachers toward the working class, complaining that "child care providers earn less than bus drivers ($26,460), barbers ($20,970), and janitors ($18,220)." Inexplicably, Derek Jeter's income from the previous year was not mentioned here. How about this: When the bus drivers' failure rate of getting kids to school gets up to around 50 percent, which is the teachers' failure rate of teaching kids, then we can talk about equal pay for teachers and bus drivers.
Finding number (6) complains about "woefully inadequate" health care benefits for child care professionals.
Finding number (7) returns to the important matter of paying "childcare workers"
more.
Finding number (8) complains, "Teachers leaving the profession are replaced by staff with less education and formal training in early child development."
Finding number (9) complains again about teachers' "low wages and limited benefits." (This can't be mentioned often enough!) Finding number (10) says that everyone suffers "the consequences of inadequate compensation" for child care providers, principally the providers, of course, but also—
way down on the list—even the children.
The eleventh and final finding praises state programs that in-crease the
"compensation of child care providers" and notes that the states could get better child care providers "by offering financial incentives, including scholarships and compensation increases, that range from $350 to $6,500 annually."
The cost of the bill that promised to make our fourth-graders as dumb as the French within five years was $5 billion. Every part of Dodd's Teachers' Union Wish-List bill was calculated to produce stupid children chock-full of behavioral problems.
The main reason good teachers aren't paid more is bills like Dodd's. Educating children is no longer the primary purpose of the public schools. Today their purpose is to employ 2 million people. Back in 1985, Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said, "When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children."5 The public may be confused on this issue, but the teachers' unions—and the Democrats—are not. If you gave all the money in the United States to the public schools, they would not improve; they would simply cost more. The teachers' unions are tenaciously committed to expanding their workforce, and paying every teacher the same salary, whether that teacher is world-class and deserves $200,000 a year or is utterly incompetent and deserves to be fired—possibly imprisoned.
Putting children in government schools at younger and younger ages does not help the children; it merely expands teachers' unions' membership rolls. As any normal human could tell you—and studies now confirm!—it's better for a child under five years old to be at home with his mother than in child care, no matter how "stimulating" the environment. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development studied more than 1,300 children in ten different states for seven years and concluded that the more time a child spends in nonparental child care, the more behavioral problems the child will have. Yes, perhaps given a choice between being left alone in a crack house as opposed to Chris Dodd's pre-K child care, the child care would win. But in most cases, that's not the choice. The Democrats' solution is to raise taxes to pay for preschool child 102
care, which will require more mothers to work outside the home to pay the taxes, which will require them to put their children in government child care. Except welfare mothers.
Those are the only women in America who Democrats think should not work.
The throwing-money-at-it approach to educating children has been tried so often that teachers are now among the highest-paid workers in America, with thousands of teachers—about 20,000—already earning more than $100,000 a year.
Using data from the U.S. Department of Labor on household median earnings, Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder found, "Weekly pay for teachers in 2001
was about the same (within10 percent) as for accountants, biological and life scientists, registered nurses, and editors and reporters, while teachers earned significantly more than social workers and artists." Of the seven professions Vedder compared, the only ones with higher weekly pay than teachers were lawyers and judges, which, as Vedder said,
"one would expect, given that the educational training to become a lawyer is longer and more demanding."6
Of course, only teachers get long summer vacations, "professional development"
days, snow days, and every conceivable federal holiday. It appears that the only people who get better compensation than teachers for nine months' work are professional baseball players. So in order to compare apples and apples, Vedder compared hourly wages as calculated by the National Compensation Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, based on the teachers' self-reports for how many hours they worked weekly.
First of all, relying on self-reports of how many hours someone works is like relying on teenage boys' self-reports about how much sex they're having (90 percent say they have had sex, 60 percent with Pamela Anderson). Nonetheless, comparing hourly wages based on the teachers' self-reports, Vedder says, "Teachers earned more per hour than architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, statisticians, biological and life scientists, atmospheric and space scientists, registered nurses, physical therapists, university-level foreign-language teachers, librarians, technical writers, musicians, artists, and editors and reporters." Only lawyers, engineers, and doctors earned more. And a lawyer can't call in a "substitute lawyer" when he needs a "personal day." (Plus it's a lot harder for doctors, lawyers, and engineers to have sex with their clients.) Judging solely by the amount of time teachers spend writing letters to the editor complaining about how poorly paid they are, teachers seem to have a lot of free time.
A Nexis search of all news documents during the years 2000 to 2005 that included the words "letters to the editor," "teachers," "underpaid," and "overworked" produced 168
documents. The same formulation for other professions produced these results: doctors .................................... 60 documents lawyers ................................... 30 documents secretaries ............................... 30 documents reporters ................................. 29 documents firefighters .............................. 23 documents marines ................................... 15 documents priests ....................................... 6 documents carpenters ................................. 2 documents waiters ........................................1 document 103
Of course, we can't be sure that these were all letters to the editor complaining about the low pay of teachers, marines, firefighters, and so on; they might have all been letters complaining that teachers are "overworked" and "underpaid" compared to marines, firefighters, and others.
In 2002, Bob Chase, the president of the National Education Association (NEA), complained that teachers don't make as much as engineers ($74,920) or lawyers ($82,712). But I'm thinking, Why stop at engineers and lawyers? Why shouldn't kindergarten teachers earn as much as Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts? A better benchmark comparison for public school teachers might be private school teachers. Teachers in the private sector earn about 60 percent less than public school teachers.' And their students actually learn to read.
Comparing hourly earnings still does not quite compare apples and apples or even apples and oranges—more like apples to grapes—because of the massive benefits packages public school teachers receive. Teachers have far more generous pensions than other professional workers, allowing them to retire earlier. In 1995, while the average retirement age for teachers was fifty-nine, for professional workers whose only government pension is Social Security it was al-most sixty-four years old.8 Despite this, the NEA complains about teachers' pensions being offset against their Social Security benefits. So in addition to having taxpayers foot the bill for government pensions more generous than Social Security benefits, they also want the teachers to get their full Social Security benefits.
Pop Quiz: If a private sector retiree has to get by on Social Security and a retired public school teacher is entitled to two pensions, which one is hosing the American taxpayer more? Please show your work.
Then there is health insurance. Many public school medical insurance plans still do not require that teachers contribute any payment whatsoever toward the premium—
unheard of in the private sector—and woe to the politician who proposes increasing teachers' co-pay from $5 to $10. Finally, no matter what happens to the rest of the economy, teachers don't have good years and bad years. Public school teachers have absolute job security, which is also worth something.
According to Vedder's analysis of the federal data, teachers receive a package of benefits worth more than 26 percent of their salaries, compared with benefits packages worth 17 percent of a salary in the private sector. "All told," Vedder says, "teachers'
average hourly compensation plus benefits exceeds the average for all professional workers by roughly 10 to 15 percent."
Congratulations to the teachers' unions! But do we have to keep hearing about how underpaid, overworked, and underappreciated teachers are? It's like the "Islam is a religion of peace" mantra—and similarly based in reality. One begins to wonder if schools of education teach anything besides how mistreated teachers are. Everyone simply asserts, as one columnist did in the Los Angeles Times, "Teachers are underpaid."9
The author went on to say that teachers "give it their best and try to make it work." That must not be easy, considering they have to labor with the knowledge that someone, somewhere earns more per hour than they do. Only an electorate educated in a school system like ours would fall for the argument that teachers aren't paid enough. Hey—
maybe these teachers aren't so dumb after all.
A lot of people in America have difficult jobs. There are men sleeping in their boots in 104
Afghanistan right now so the rest of us can sleep peacefully at night. There are store owners who haven't taken a vacation for twenty years. There are entrepreneurs working weekends and risking everything for an idea that will make the world better or safer—or on the other hand might fail and land them in bankruptcy court. (And they don't get summers off.)
The very fact that teachers have three months off in the summer and can hold other jobs is indignantly cited as further proof that teachers are underpaid. Shelley Potter, president of the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel, told the San Antonio Express-News, "For most teachers, it's a matter of necessity to work that extra job to make ends meet."10 Teachers seem not to realize that everyone else works in the summer, too.
In fact, almost 80 percent of teachers do not take second jobs in the summer. That's according to a lachrymose op-ed in the New York Times bemoaning the idea that teachers should spend any of their three-month summer vacation working. "One day," the writers say, teachers are "shaping minds, a moral force in the lives of the young people they teach and know, and in some ways the architects of the future of the nation"—such as by telling students, "Bush is like Hitler"—"The next day they're serving cocktails and selling plasma TV's at the mall." The indignity!
If we're choosing the most underpaid profession, my pick is doctors. They spend a minimum of seven years in school, with somewhat more rigorous schedules than those of education majors. When they finally graduate from medical school, they will leave with $100,000 to $200,000 of student loan debt. Their reward for all this hard work and deferred gratification is a residency, where they will work up to 120 hours a week, often 36 hours consecutively, for the princely starting salary of $29,000 to $37,000. Finally the big payoff comes—but there are still the student loans to pay off and malpractice insurance premiums of $50,000 to $300,000 per year. Some doctors will clean their own office toilets when they start off just to make ends meet.12 Ac-cording to Department of Labor statistics, the mean average salary for doctors ranges from $106,000 a year for podiatrists to $190,000 a year for surgeons. Which isn't bad—why, it's nearly as much as a school principal makes in New York City!
Compare the years of training for a doctor with the educational achievements of teachers. As summarized by Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute—who has a Harvard master's degree in education himself—"Undergraduate education majors typically have lower SAT and ACT scores than other students, and those teachers who have the lowest scores are the most likely to remain in the profession. The lower the quality of the undergraduate institution a person attends, the more likely he or she is to wind up in the teaching profession."13 In a 1999 interview, Hoover Institution fellow Thomas Sowell was asked what change in America would give him the greatest satisfaction if he could snap his fingers and make it happen. He answered, "Do away with schools of education and departments of education. Close them down." The "Mickey Mouse courses that you have to take to enter the field," he said, were driving away many of the best people from teaching. Sowell also remarked that "the most childish letters I receive in response to my newspaper column come from teachers. . . . They seem to think that they can simply make up their facts, and that they can psychoanalyze me. They like to tell me, for in-stance, `You must have had a bad experience of teachers.' "14
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In 2001, only 60 percent of education students taking the basic teachers' licensing exam in Virginia were able to pass. The test asked questions like these: Martin Luther King Jr._ (insert the correct choice)
for the poor
of all races:
a. spoke out passionately
b. spoke out passionate
c. did spoke out passionately
d. has spoke out passionately