Judges Lock Up More Teachers

Star-Ledger ^ | December 6, 2001 | SUE EPSTEIN, BEV McCARRON AND KELLY HEYBOER

[ZULU]

Another 88 Middletown teachers -- including a woman recovering from cancer, a man with spina bifida and a veteran teacher who hadn't missed a day of work in nearly four decades -- were led to jail in handcuffs yesterday as one of the nastiest strikes in New Jersey history dragged through a fifth emotional day without a settlement.

[eleni121]

...the supreme court gives everyone else the right to strike, teachers should have that right as well...

My understanding is that they are going to jail because they walked out DURING negotiations. Second, they are public employees and arrange contracts to work. If the contract has expired and no negotiations for a new one are planned then work actions can be scheduled and that has been done. But to walk out leaving the table and leaving their responsibilities over a contractual dispute? If that is true, then they are lucky to be in jail. I say fire them! There are plenty of retired professionals, graduate students, and perfectly qualified non academic types who could do the job just as well. And get those administrators in the classroom or are they supporting their "brothers and sisters" as well?

[Visioneer]

Thousands of public school teachers across the nation do not support the NEA policies or tactics in spite of its "claim" to represent "all" public school teachers. Those teachers are resigning from the NEA and its state affiliate organizations and are joining up with national groups such as the Association of American Educators ( aaeteachers.org ).

In the states of Georgia, Texas, and Missouri, more teachers belong to independent teacher associations than belong to the NEA and AFT state organizations. Other states with non-union professional teacher associations include Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, Iowa, Kansas, Arkansas, Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, Louisiana, West Virginia, Virginia, South Carolina, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and even the non-right to work states of Washington (where the state NEA affiliate has recently lost several lawsuits because of misappropriation of members dues) and Pennsylvania. In every state, these organizations are growing steadily in spite of unrelenting and vicious teacher union attacks and disinformation campaigns.

So be encouraged...

[SUSSA]

The real problem here is the government is in a business that should be run by the private sector. One group of bureaucrats just jailed another group of bureaucrats. Get the government out of the education business and the whole problem goes away.

[joathome]

Here are teachers salaries according to the NEA, so take it with a grain of salt. I've gotta' go, so perhaps someone else will find a more "reliable" source. :) Teachers salaries are quite reflective of the cost of living in the states, for the most part, anyway. Average Texas salary is $35,000, and that includes many more inner city school teachers than most states--combat pay. :(

Average Salaries of Public School Teachers, 1998-99 State Average Salary 1 Connecticut 51,584 2 New Jersey 51,193* 3 New York 49,437* 4 Pennsylvania 48,457 5 Michigan 48,207* 6 District of Columbia 47,150* 7 Alaska 46,845 8 Rhode Island 45,650 9 Illinois 45,569 10 California 45,400* 11 Massachusetts 45,075* 12 Delaware 43,164 13 Oregon 42,833 14 Maryland 42,526 15 Indiana 41,163 16 Wisconsin U.S. and D.C. 40,657 40,582* 17 Ohio 40,566 18 Hawaii 40,377 19 Georgia 39,675 20 Minnesota 39,458 21 Nevada 38,883 22 Washington 38,692 23 Colorado 38,025* 24 Virginia 37,475* 25 Kansas 37,405 27 New Hampshire 37,405 27 Vermont 36,800 28 Tennessee 36,500 29 North Carolina 36,098 30 Florida 35,916 31 Alabama 35,820 32 Kentucky 35,526 33 Texas 35,041 34 Arizona 35,025* 35 Iowa 34,927 36 Maine 34,906 37 Missouri 34,746 38 South Carolina 34,506 39 West Virginia 34,244 40 Idaho 34,063 41 Wyoming 33,500 42 Utah 32,950* 43 Nebraska 32,880 44 Louisiana 32,510 45 New Mexico 32,398 46 Arkansas 32,350* 47 Montana 31,356 48 Oklahoma 31,149* 49 Mississippi 29,530 50 North Dakota 28,976 51 South Dakota 28,552

The average teacher with years of experience makes less than most starting engineers here in Houston. Considering that the teacher "does" have more time off (although not as much as some of you think), her salary is quite adequate. SHE IS NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, overpaid.

[NYConservative]

If someone can jail you for not going to work, that is involuntary servitude. I am completely appalled at this judge's actions, and am curious as to how the community benefits from this in terms of chewed up jail space.

If they don't want to go to jail or work they are free to quit and try to find a job in the real world. Involuntary servitude my foot!

[xzins]

Under the deal currently on the table, teachers would get a 3.8 percent raise the first year, 4 percent the second year and 4.2 percent the final year. Health care fees would be paid on a sliding scale based on salary. Teachers making more than $65,000 would have to pay $853 a year, instead of the current $250 flat fee.

That average salary of 56,000 would pay $735 on that sliding scale. They would have a 3.8% or $2128 dollar raise. The old fee was $250 for health care....so there's a $485 new cost. That equals .9% of pay, so the real pay raise is only 3%. The current inflation rate is 3.2% and forecast to increase to nearly 4% for the year.

The teachers are being asked to take a PAY CUT. You can bet that the inflation rate has been fully charged to Homeowners when they pay their property taxes, so the school system will receive the FULL inflation increase in their receipts. They simply don't want to give the teachers what they were giving them before.

This is power politics. It is a struggle within the market place in the labor market. That market is distorted by intervention of Judges in negotiations. It is also distorted by labor laws, so it is not a straight and narrow negotiation based on price and market. Each side is using what power it can muster.

I DO UNDERSTAND the teachers' desire NOT to take a pay cut. Those salaries may seem high to middle America, but the cost of living on the east coast makes them extremely small. In 1991, a 1200 sq foot house in Monmouth County NJ cost over 150,000. Today, I imagine its over 2 grand.

[Rodney King]

They are not going to jail for striking. They are going to jail for defying a court order. There is a difference.

that's ridiculous. The cour order tells them to stop striking i.e. to work against their will. So they are going to jail for striking.

[Orangedog]

And you forgot that they make on average over $56,000 dollars per year

Like many, I'm tired of these cry-baby union hacks. My high school experience in the late 80's was very an education in how the NEA has trashed the public schools. Most of the teachers didn't grade papers, the students traded papers, the teacher read off the answers and the students graded them. Recording those grades for a class takes about 3 minutes. Most tests that were not graded in this fashion were scan-tron test and graded by machine.

My US History "teacher" would hand out a slip of paper on Mondays with pages to be read and about 5 questions to be answered by Friday. Every 2 or 3 weeks we would have a test (scan tron) of about 15 questions, all taken word for word from the book. The rest of the time in class, this under-worked sloth would talk about his family and his plans for the weekend.

Then there was the Biology II "teacher." We called this class "Frankie's Film-Fest" because after he took attendence he would drop a tape of "Nature" or some David Attenburough doccumnetary into the VCR and leave! We wouldn't see him again until a minute or two before the class was over.

Then there was the Romanian math teacher who's mastery of the English language came from watching 6 months of American TV....it helps if the teacher can communicate with the students.

I could go on and on. Needless to say, my kid is in a private school and is way ahead of the public school kids her age. The teachers there are non-union and make less than the uninion hacks. I hope the judge in Middletown fires all of them.

[Alberta's Child]

First, we have a constitutional protection against involuntary servitude, secondly the supreme court gives everyone else the right to strike, teachers should have that right as well.

These teachers are not being forced to work against their will. They can quit their jobs and let the school district get someone else to replace them.

Secondly, the Supreme Court does NOT give everyone else the right to strike. Many public employees are specifically PROHIBITED from going on strike (including police officers, firefighters, teachers, air traffic controllers, and even many private railroad employees).

F#ck them all. They knew when they signed their contracts that they were not allowed to go on strike, and they are clearly breaking the law.

[Alberta's Child]

The judge is not the problem here. In fact, he would be remiss if he did NOT send them to jail.

[Alberta's Child]

But to force people to work pursuant to contractual terms they disagree with under threat of imprisonment is the most statist thing I can imagine, and is the complete antithesis of freedom.

When you work for the state, "statist things" tend to happen to you. Government employees are clearly held to a different standard than private employees in many cases, and the teachers in Middletown are being sent to jail because they are BREAKING THE LAW.

What they should be doing instead of striking is called "working to rule." This means that nobody does a single bit of work more than they are required, all requests for overtime are turned down, and everybody uses all of their available time off as per the terms of their previous contract.

Remember, this is not about salary demands -- it's about sharing medical insurance payments. The district currently pays $9,200 per employee for medical benefits, and asking them to increase their contribution from $250 to $900 does not sound excessive to me.

[Northpaw]

It's funny....I live in Oregon and personally know several teachers. They all live better than I do and I own my own business. One couple in particular are both teachers and own a $400,000 home and rental property. Another one of these 'poor' teachers just bought a $35,000 boat with cash. In Oregon, the PERS (Public Employee Retirement System) has a guaranteed return of 12% regardless of the market. My SEP IRA lost tons of money last quarter while my 'poor' teacher friends saw an increase. My advice to teachers is if teaching is such a horribly paid profession, find another.

[wbill]

Ok.....I feel the need to weigh in here. Wife was a teacher, her mother is a teacher, and many of her friends are teachers.

In the state that I live in, teachers attend school for 200 days a year, 180 of them with the students. Compare that to roughly 240 working days for private sector employees. That's two less working months per year.

My wife was required to be at school from roughly 7 to roughly 3, with no lunch. With time grading papers, assemblies, etc that works to roughly 50 hours a week. As a professional, I put in about the same amount of time, as do all of my co-workers. So that's a wash.

The 'BS quotient' that my wife needed to put up with is undoubtedly higher. Teenagers are notoriously difficult to deal with, their parents even more so. That's part of the job.....all teachers knew about that going in. Deal with it.

If I worked 1/6 less time than the average professional, I would expect to be paid 1/6 less salary. I'm tired of teachers incessantly whining about how they are overworked and underpaid. Anybody here that that thinks they make too much money at their job, raise their hand.

Now, to talk about how teachers do their jobs....

The state requires End of Grade testing to verify that the students are learning what they should be and can be advanced in grades. Last year, math scores were so poor, that 30% of the counties' students in the 8th grade failed the test. Was the state's answer to fire the teachers? Check out the test to be sure that the questions were 'fair'? Make the students work harder? No. Their answer was to lower the minimum score so that less kids failed the test and more could go on to High School.

As an added note, the minimum passing grade on the test was lowered from 47% to 23%. The test itself was multiple choice, A,B,C, or D. You do the math..... And yes, this is a true story. I didn't believe it myself.

This is the mentality that people turning their kids over to gov't schools need to deal with. Are there excellent teachers in the school? Yes. But their salaries are commensurate with the all the losers. There is no reward or incentive to excell, so the best and the brightest get dragged down in the muck with everyone else, eventually. Or, they move to the private sector, which is exactly what my wife did. Throw unions into the mix, and you get today's current education system.

[Alberta's Child]

You have to remember that the Middletown area has been hit hard by layoffs in New York City, both before and after September 11th. People who are already paying very high property taxes are not going to have any patience for the demands of these teachers. Especially when the teachers are being asked to pay far less for their insurance than most of the taxpayers in Middletown do.

[Labyrinthos]

The teachers, who currently earn an average of $56,654 a year...

Not true. At best they earn an average salary of $56,654 for for three fourths of a year, which prorates out to $75,538.66 per year for full time employment at eight hours a day, not including a generous number personal days, health insurance, and an impressive retirement package. Not bad for a job where a tenured teached can't be fired unless caught naked, having sex with an under-aged student while smoking crack.

[11th Earl of Mar]

Ronald Reagan fired, AND PROSECUTED, striking air traffic controllers.

I supported him, and in this case, the judge. I don't think judges should ignore laws with which they don't agree.

And if these teachers had a problem with the law, they, or the union, should have fought to get it overturned.

[wbill]

Small typo, the 8th grade students' test scores were mandated by the county, not the state. Sorry for the confusion.