The Strike Is Not About Teacher's Pay

The Chicago Sun Times published this:

Chicago Public Schools starting salaries are among the highest in the region... But the annual increases for teachers in CPS are much smaller than the annual increases in many suburban districts. For example, a teacher with a master’s degree, 30 additional credit hours, and ten years of experience, can expect to earn $87,513 in Evanston this year; last year, in Oak Park, a teacher would have made $88,978. In Chicago this year, the same teacher will earn $75,711 — about $12,000 a year less than in districts to which he or she could walk or take public transportation from a home in Chicago. Over the course of a career, that difference amounts to over a quarter of a million dollars.

Except that average household income in those cities is far higher than Chicago's:

Chicago - $45,700
Evanston - $67,700 (48% more)
Oak Park - $70,600 (65% more)

If the citizens of those areas were to pay the same percentage as Chicagoan's then the respective salaries would be roughly (using the numbers quoted which I find slightly inaccurate):

Evanston - $112,000
Oak Park - $125,000

By that measure Chicago is actually doing quite well. If you figured in benefits it'd be even more lopsided. The strike is not about salaries. 70% of CPS's (2012) budget is spent on employees:

Textbooks - $74 million
Construction - $391 million
Teacher's Medical - $348 million
Teacher's Salaries - $2,085 million
Total Employee Salary and Benefits - $3,584 million
Total Budget - $5,110

... and 1.4% on textbooks. I know this may come off as anti-teachers or whatever but the real target here is the author of the offending article and the newspaper that printed it. It's bad journalism.

CPS vs Chicago - 2012 Edition

I've written a little about this before. This article doesn't address the social issues or milieu of other complexities the situation entails. The Chicago Teacher's Union asked for a 19% raise as compensation for an extended school day, and as of Sunday night they rejected a 16% raise over four years. I know there are other issues at stake, I just want to figure out what this means monetarily for Chicago.

Chicago's budget this year (2012) is $8.2 billion while CPS's is $5.2 billion (2013 proposed), so over 63% of Chicago's expenditures goes to CPS. That's $1920 per resident (2.71 million people in the city). Of that $5.2 billion, $2.7 billion goes to teachers and support personnel salaries; $3.6 billion if you include benefits. The 19% raise comes out to $510 million a year in additional salary, $190 extra per Chicago resident, or an increase of over 6% to the City of Chicago's spending. If Chicago's budget doesn't change that would mean the remaining roughly 37% of expenditures would go down to about 31%. Other items on the budget would need to be reduced by about 16 or 17% to pay for this.

I'm not saying that each resident will have to literally pay that bill themselves. I'm using that measuring stick t bring it to a human scale.

What does all this mean (this is where the opinion part starts)? It means there's no way the city can be fiscally responsible and actually give the CTU what it wants. At the same time how can you ask the teachers to work a longer day without more pay? It's like asking them to admit they've been overpaid for years. The point is, I don't see either side walking away from this unscathed. It's another example of Americans wanting lots of services but being unwilling to pay the necessary taxes.

Here are the sources, I recommend the first one, it's the most interesting:

CPS 2012 Proposed Budget Overview

City of Chicago Proposed 2012 Budget Overview

CPS 2013 Budget Press Release

Updating Education

I've long thought that the material taught in schools bears little resemblance to what is required of most in the workforce, so I posed the question to some teacher friends of mine whether or not certain subjects could be highly abbreviated or all together eliminated from high school curricula and what might be added. The short answer was no, it should stay the same. With the general retort being that a well rounded liberal arts education is best.

Since then I've asked several people to tell me one thing they learned in high school chemistry; I usually get silence as an answer. I actually didn't expect it to be that bad. Of course the point of chemistry is not to make you a chemist and it's purpose is to teach you another way of thinking, the scientific method, to expose those who love chemistry to their future career, etc., but why not spend more of that time on things that you will need to know?

Here's my list, please feel free to add you own in the comments section, I'm curious what others think should be on there.

Finance
Statistics
Nutrition
Economics
Computer programming
Microsoft Excel
How to be a better consumer - related to finance and research
How to find a job, write a resume, dress for an interview, how to act at an interview
Writing in general, and I don't mean papers. Blogs, tweets, cover letters, emails, etc.
A class teaching you how to research anything. Also, how to read a research paper and where to find them
Basic circuitry, computers, IT infrastructure
Neuroscience/Psychology/Neurobiology - sounds complex but this area is literally redefining everything

Of all the jobs on earth a teachers job really hasn't changed much from the 19th century. An auditorium and a chalkboard - not much different. The new variable in the equation is of course the internet. Not long ago books were prohibitively expensive. If you go back far enough in time a single book could cost more than the common person could afford. Knowledge was hard to attain and spread. The barriers to entry have been reduced to the point of a laptop or tablet and a small source of power, and indeed to people in rural parts of the developing world this is the cost of their tuition. I've always found that I learn best when I'm teaching myself (really just reading lot of articles online), and increasingly that may be the mode by which many people learn. The kid in the video below takes this to a whole new level. And yes, it's worth your time: