California teachers have been going berserk crying loud and long about budget cuts and layoffs. They are bound and determined that you Must pay greater taxes so they can save our schools.
They have been running ads highlighting the 20 Billion in budget cuts to our schools over the last three years and the 30,000 teachers that have been laid off this year.
Just one problem:
They're Lying.
20 Billion in budget cuts?
Here is a graphical representation of the budget trend for K-16 provided by the state controller's office...
See that red line?
See it going up rather than down?
That's pretty much the opposite of a budget cut, don't you think?
Let's move on to the 30,000 lay offs the teachers claim have been made.
It didn't happen. Every one of those teachers is still on the job. (If you can call standing in front of legislator's offices screaming epithets teaching)
What actually happened was that, by law, school districts are required to send out "pink slips" to teachers for Next Year that warn them about potential budget problems for Next Year.
Last year, Lisa Snell at Reason.org issued a good summary of the process and the problems generated by it:
March 17, 2010, 2:08pm
As the AP reports this week, California's budget crisis could cost nearly 22,000 teachers their jobs this year.
State school districts had issued 21,905 pink slips to teachers and other school employees by Monday, the legal deadline for districts to send preliminary layoff notices.
While these numbers are exaggerated because California law mandates that districts can only issue pink slips before March 15th (so districts overstate layoffs and then rescind them later), it is clear that thousands of teachers will be let go in 2010. Therefore, it is critical that we continue to examine how these layoffs effect both teacher quality and cost savings for school districts.
Teachers unions could negotiate less extreme budget saving measures such as wage freezes or pay cuts rather than large layoffs. However, unions have negotiated automatic "step" salary increases years in advance and have been reluctant to freeze these policies even if it means thousands of teachers losing their jobs. In light of this behavior, it is likely that most districts in California will move forward with some teacher layoffs.
In California state law and local collective bargaining agreements dictate that teachers are layed-off on a "last-hired, first fired" system based on seniority. This seniority-based system means that a much larger number of teachers are fired because it takes a larger number of "new" teachers to fill budget gaps than more strategically looking at the entire teacher workforce and laying off teachers based on performance. It also means that students will lose many high-quality teachers that rank lower on the seniority scale.
As education researcher Marguerite argues in ”Seniority-Based Layoffs will Exacerbate Job Loss in Public Education,” to reduce salary expenditures by 10 percent, a district must cut 14.3 percent of the workforce when time served in the district is the driving factor. In this scenario, seniority-based layoffs result in 262,367 more job losses nationwide than seniority-neutral policies. And since teachers make up 51.2 percent of the school workforce, nearly 134,000 of those extra losses would be teachers.
California needs a quality-based layoff system.
While, for good reasons, political ads are not required to be factual, it is disgusting that Teachers, of all people, are willing to engage in such extreme obfuscations and outright lies to protect and grow their power and jumbo sized pay and benefit packages.
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