School costs take your breath away

Take a deep breath. Now exhale. Does that make you feel like you deserve a raise? If so, you understand the concept of the so-called "breathing bonus." And you also understand one of the main reasons New Jersey has the most expensive public school system of any state. One of the few useful results to come out of those legislative committees on property tax reform was an admission of just how costly it is to put a kid through New Jersey's public schools: $16,000 a year.

That figure was included in the report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Public School Funding Reform. Also included were several recommendations on how to make that number even higher, such as adding preschools in 78 more school districts and full-day kindergarten in all districts.

In case you're wondering why your property taxes are so high, there's your answer. The committee that was supposed to be figuring out how to cut school costs instead spent its time trying to figure out ways to spend even more money. Perhaps the low point came last month when the committee heard from an out-of-state "expert" who had analyzed the problem with New Jersey schools and figured out how to solve it: Spend an extra $337 million a year. That would permit a statewide spending figure of about $8,000 per year for every child in the state, he said.

That number seemed ridiculously low to me. Educators have a nasty habit of leaving out entire spending categories when calculating costs. The state School Report Card on the Education Department Web site puts the average at $12,567 for last year. But the committee actually gave an honest number: $16,000.

That's the figure you get when you divide the number of public school students in New Jersey, a bit under 1.4 million, into the amount we spend on public education, a bit more than $22 billion. That includes salaries as well as health and pension benefits. Why do we spend so much on education? There are a lot of reasons, but the main one is breathing bonuses. I had never heard that term before state Sen. Stephen Sweeney, a Democrat from Gloucester County, put it into a tax reduction plan he issued during the budget fight last spring. Among Sweeney's proposals was that public employers should end the practice of granting raises based on simple longevity, i.e. continuing to breathe. In real life, Sweeney is an ironworker, and he points out that employees in the private sector don't get continual raises just for staying on the job longer.

Public employees do, however, and teachers have the best deal. The teacher unions have prevailed upon politicians to give them both cost-of-living increases and longevity increases. This ensures that the cost of education will always outstrip the cost of living by a wide margin. I found out just how wide when I put in a call to Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute. Greene, a professor at the University of Arkansas, is an expert at penetrating the great maze of numbers put out by the education bureaucracies. But even he was a bit shocked at that $16,000 figure for school spending in New Jersey.

Greene quickly put his finger on the reason. Over a 33-year period beginning in 1969, the cost of education in New Jersey increased 182 percent in real dollars, Greene said. That means the price of education almost tripled in inflation-adjusted dollars. All the other states had increases during that period, though most were not as dramatic. Test scores, meanwhile, stayed about the same. The primary reason for the soaring cost is the unions' success in convincing politicians that teachers improve as they spend more years on the job. There is no evidence of this, Greene said. Teachers do indeed improve in the first two years, but after that they're about as good as they're ever going to be.

"By the third year they don't get better," Greene said. "They don't get worse either, on average." Yet it is often the case that older teachers are paid up to three times as much as younger teachers. The unions then complain that it's difficult to hire talented people to teach. No wonder, when all the money is going to the old-timers. The way to break this cycle is to implement a system of merit pay. "We want to come up with a way of measuring the contribution each teacher makes to learning," Green said. "Changing compensation should be related to those factors, not simply being around another year."

That's a great idea. The kids would get a better education and we could save a lot of money. Merit pay was not mentioned in that report, however. Politicians aren't allowed to talk about it. Talking about breathing bonuses isn't safe either. Last time I spoke with Sweeney, he told me he wouldn't be surprised if he ends up facing a primary challenge next spring from some shill for the unions.

If Sweeney loses, your hope for property tax relief will rest with that guy who got up before a union rally last spring and yelled, "We will fight for a fair contract!" Gov. Jon Corzine promises to make the unions happy, and he also promises to cut your property taxes.

All I can say is: Don't hold your breath.

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