In CJR’s latest podcast, assistant editor Lauren Kirchner speaks with Ryan Chittum, deputy editor of The Audit on CJR.org, about some of this week’s most interesting stories. They discuss the Wisconsin protests over union rights and what might happen next; why Apple’s price-gouging on iPad apps can’t last; and what the latest developments in the Bernie Madoff saga mean for the biggest names on Wall Street.
Listen to the episode below, and be sure to check out the CJR podcast homepage on iTunes, where you can listen to past episodes and subscribe for free.
"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance." -Murray N. Rothbard
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"[Y]ou have a crisis created, in large part, by conservative ideology. The budget problem in Wisconsin [was] caused by the national recession at large, which was, in no small part, due to the philosophies of deregulation, laissez faire ..." -Ryan Chittum (CJR podcast, 2/24/11)
So, exactly what entities, policies, and "philosophies" were enabling, manipulating, or outright controlling economic and financial conditions?
1. Central bank (banking monopoly): NOT laissez faire
2. Fiat money-creation (money monopoly): NOT laissez faire
3. Fractional-reserve banking (monetary fraud): NOT laissez faire
4. Income taxation (govt ownership of person, property): NOT laissez faire
5. One "deregulation" for every 10,000 or so "regulations": NOT laissez faire
6. Bush-era spending, borrowing, printing, deficit financing: NOT laissez faire
7. Obama-era spending, borrowing, printing, deficit financing: NOT laissez faire
8. Massive regulatory regime w/czars at every turn: NOT laissez faire
9. Govt control of prices, wages, etc.: NOT laissez faire
10. Too big to fail: NOT laissez faire
11. Protectionist tariffs: NOT laissez faire
12. Embargoes and sanctions: NOT laissez faire
13. Multi-trillion dollar militaristic empire: NOT laissez faire
14. 14-trillion dollar national debt: NOT laissez faire
15. Any national debt: NOT laissez faire
16. Monopolization via licensing regime: NOT laissez faire
17. Monopolization via "anti-trust" regime: NOT laissez faire
18. Central economic planning, in general: NOT laissez faire
19. Etc., ad inf.
Laissez faire means very limited-to-no govt intervention. No informed observer could sanely or honestly argue that govt non-intervention has been pervasive or rampant, or that the historical U.S. trend has been toward less intervention. For the love of self and humanity, please try to think outside the NYT- and AP-defined bounds of thought.
#1 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Sat 26 Feb 2011 at 12:18 AM
Jesus, your arguement basically boils down to "Government issued legal tender (monetary monopoly) NOT laissez faire."
The economy functions.in an environment created by government based on laws which should reflect societal values.
Government, and the laws they write and enforce, should reflect the values of the electorate in a free democratic society and what we have seen over the last 30 years is laws overturned and written to reflect the top 10%'s interests. What this has resulted in is massive deregulation and non-enforcement of the laws that protect the bottom 90%.
This has occured while regulation, such as the 2005 bankruptcy act which protected creditors from the defaults of their debtors, found it's way to easy passage.
Government within a democracy has legitimate functions and can sometimes assume illegitimate ones. Sometimes the anti government free marketers have a point. But often the people who yell "free market" are not yelling for a separation between economy and government, something that's hardly possible when the basic concepts of property are predicated on enforced law, but for government to laissez faire while the rich fleece the poor. "Stop getting in the way of my fraud schemes and let me make money! Laissez faire!"
And that is the problem. The government has deregulated business for the top few percents. They get away with financial murder. And if anyone tries to stop them, a large mass of people scream "Free markets! Laissez faire! Those idiots at AIG earned their taxpayer funded bonuses! They have contracts!"
I don't see anyone screaming for the pay and contracts of the unions. This debate is so screwed.
#2 Posted by Thimble, CJR on Sat 26 Feb 2011 at 01:31 AM
Thimbles actually wrote: I don't see anyone screaming for the pay and contracts of the unions
?????????????????????????
Are you blind or just on crack?
Every single news outlet has a dozens of stories about massive union protests all over the country.
The President of the United States is personally ordering his political army to man the union phone banks in Wisconsin.
Democratic legislators in at least two states have become fugitives in order to quell their own democratic governments in order to support unions.
But you can't see any of it?
Open your eyes a little, Thimbles.
#3 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sat 26 Feb 2011 at 08:17 AM
There are a few good outlets, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has been excellent on the facts and the Ed Show, well he's an opinion guy, but he's at least talking to the unions.
But what these people are defending is the union's right to collectively bargain. They forget that Walker has demanded they they accept lower wages, furloughs, and reneged contractual commitments on behalf of state for their pensions - demands the union ceded to while Walker has given revenue away that the state "doesn't have" in subsidies and tax breaks.
Nobody is defending the unions' right to demand the conditions they signed to, what the state owes them by contract, what they've earned in deferred wages.
http://tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/Permalink/UBEN-8EDJYS?OpenDocument
Now whether you agree with the conditions negotiated or not doesn't matter. When AIG bonuses were in danger of being clawed back, since they were paid by the taxpayers for work that was disastrously incompetent, the goddamned TEA PARTY protested on their behalf. Larry Goddamned Summers got on national tv to express how "What can you do? They have contracts." Gas bags all over the tv expressed their worries that the government was overreaching by trying to control wall street pay at a time when goddamn wall street was a WARD OF THE STATE.
Which it still is since the Fed is giving them money secured by dead beat mortgage collateral at 0% to invest in emerging markets and goddamned treasury bonds. They have contracts. They must be respected. They tanked the economy and collected more money than god in bonuses for doing so, but unions are the big villains.
They have "fat contracts" with pensions and health insurance, says 50 million dollar fat man Rush Limbaugh. They do menial work for more than minimum wage. They have collective bargaining, those sons of bitches. People like Jon Stewart makes fun of democratic legislators on the lam because the only reason why they ran is because they must be chicken. Like there were a multitude of things they could do to change this legislation but because democrats are scaredy scaredy, they ran away
4 minutes in.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-february-21-2011/crisis-in-dairyland---revenge-of-the-curds
My point stands, government is too impotent to get taxpayer money back from the TBTF parasite class slurping at the TARP trough because their valuable skills at crashing the global economy entitle them to their payouts mandated by contract, but unions can be slandered, insulted, and stomped on even when they give up the very things they're entitled to - mandated by contract - but won't give in to the extreme union busting conditions of Governor
ArpaioWalker.Nobody's saying the government signed a deal therefore the government owes this money. Where's the tea party?
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 26 Feb 2011 at 11:13 AM
Lay off the histrionics, Thimbles...
The Wisconsin bill doesn't modify any current contract obligations.
It just clamps down on the unions in future negotiations.
As FDR himself noted, collective bargaining doesn't work with government.
#5 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sat 26 Feb 2011 at 01:09 PM
And suddenly FDR is right about everything according to conservatives.
You've had decades of federal and state employees collectively bargaining, since 1959, and it's been successful. You've also had 30 years of republican governors passing super majority required for tax increases bills and stealing out of state contributions to pensions to make up revenue lost in tax cuts.
And you're wrong. It changes the terms of current contracts. The unions agreed to those concessions.
Anyways, I didn't come here to yap about that.
Yo Ryan. Remember a while back James was aching for you to take a look at Politifact?
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/fact_checking_the_fact_checker.php
There have been some interesting developments on that story involving Rachel Maddow and, to a small extent (because of the taint of the liar liar charge), Shep Smith.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/rachel-maddow-and-politifact-are-giving-me-a-frakking-headache/
Worth a read and a watch (video at the bottom). What do you think?
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 26 Feb 2011 at 01:53 PM
Thimbles actually wrote: You've had decades of federal and state employees collectively bargaining, since 1959, and it's been successful.
padikiller responds: LOL
Too, too funny!...
In Wisconsin, the average teacher makes $89.000 in salary and benefits for 9 months of work, while the state has racked up huge deficits and the schools have gotten crappier and crappier...
http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/112460034.html
SUCCESS!... (Liberal-style)
You're a laugh a minute, Thimbles!
#7 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sun 27 Feb 2011 at 08:47 AM
Try a $50,000 dollar average salary for an improving high school graduation rate that's 4% above the average of the rest of the US, a figure that has improved from 1990 by over 10%.
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0229.xls
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0252.xls
You would have gotten away with it if it weren't for that meddling census.
#8 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 27 Feb 2011 at 09:43 AM
"The latest figures from the National Education Association actually put the average salary for a Wisconsin teacher at $51,264."
This is, of course, just the salary, and paid for only 9 months of work,
On top of this salary, Wisconsin teachers receive fringe benefits that cost taxpayers, on average, more than $25,000 per year.
As the link I preciously posted makes clear, the teachers' wages and benefits have increased without fail, as student performance has drastically declined and as Wisconsin's deficit has soared.
Read it and weep!
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/feb/23/eric-bolling/fox-business-news-eric-bolling-says-wisconsin-teac/
#9 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sun 27 Feb 2011 at 12:10 PM
Yeah, please do read that and weep.
"However, according to a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the Fox figure for Wisconsin teacher benefits -- $39,000 -- is way too high. Average benefits amount to about $25,000 a year, said Marlena Deutsch, a spokeswoman for WEAC. In total compensation, Wisconsin ranks 23rd in the nation.
We couldn't find a definitive, independent state average for benefits in Wisconsin, but the data from the state Department of Public Instruction lists "fringe benefits" by district in Wisconsin. None were as high as $39,000. The median was about $25,800.
OK, now to the Average Joe or Jane who works in the private sector.
According to a national compensation survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the total cost of compensation to private industry employees last year came to about $58,000 ($41,000 for salary; $17,000 for benefits).
So Bolling's total compensation number for Wisconsin teachers is high, and for private sector employees, it's is low.
On his show the following night (Feb. 22) Bolling said in the numbers he had posted the night before, "our math was off a bit." A new graphic, he said, showed the unweighted average for Wisconsin teachers for the 2010 school year: a $51,000 salary, plus $30,000 worth of benefits (for a total of $81,000 worth of compensation). For an average private sector worker, he said, the salary in 2010 was $46,000 with $20,000 worth of benefits (total compensation $66,000).
Those revised numbers are much closer to the ones we found.
But many statisticians have a more fundamental issue with Bolling's comparison. In order to be a teacher in Wisconsin, you've got to have a 4-year college degree. And 52 percent of Wisconsin teachers also have a master's degree. That's much, much higher than the average education level for workers in the private sector. People with higher degrees in education typically get paid more.
We found two studies that factored in such things as education level, years of experience, race, gender, etc. and found that public employees tend to make a little less than people with similar backgrounds in the private sector.
A report titled "Out of Balance" by two University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors for the National Institute of Retirement Security, whose board is largely composed of representatives of public employee pensions, found that when "comparable earning determinants," such as education, are considered, state employees typically earn salaries 11 percent lower than their private sector counterparts. When you consider total compensation -- salary plus benefits -- the deficit dropped to 6.8 percent (because public employees generally get better benefits packages than those in the private sector).
One of the study authors, Keith A. Bender, an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, said that message has largely been lost in the Wisconsin debate.
As for Bollings' comparison, Bender said, "I guess you can do that if you don't want to compare like with like. But you are comparing less educated people with more educated people."
Another report, by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, found that Wisconsin public employees earn 4.8 percent less in total compensation than comparable private-sector workers.
The study's author, Jeff Keefe, issued a policy memo on Feb. 15, 2011, titled "Wisconsin public versus private employee costs: Why compare apples to oranges?"
"Inaccurate comparisons of national and Wisconsin public employee compensation with private sector compensation are circulating in Wisconsin," Keefe wrote. "These faulty comparisons, showing that public employees in Wisconsin are dramatically overpaid, seem to support legislative efforts to increase benefit contributions by public employees."
"But when we compare apples to
#10 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 27 Feb 2011 at 06:03 PM
And you guys are going after teachers now? Of the huge swaths of overly compensated, ungrateful pricks to pick from, you're picking on teachers? Would you prefer the Mexican immigrants taught your children calculus for minimum wage, just so you can give another tax break and government subsidized bonus to the parasite class?
You guys are nuts.
What Thimbles said.
#11 Posted by James, CJR on Sun 27 Feb 2011 at 07:13 PM
By the by James, wasn't that nice of politifact to rate that republican statement "In Wisconsin, teachers make $89,000 in salary and benefits, compared to $48,000 for all other workers in the United States." Barely True?
They sure find a lot of leeway to give when a) the guy had to admit that his $89,000 dollar figure was off by $8000 b) he didn't make an apples to apples comparison - preferring a gas station attendant to masters degree comparison c) politifact has to use data from "The Center for Union Facts" - a likely koch funded pr group - to say "Well you know, he could be right, but we don't want to get into the weeds".
I don't see that kind of leeway given to Huffington or Maddow and the way the article is presented, the skimming reader sees "Fox Business News' Eric Bolling says Wisconsin teachers get compensated nearly double those in private sector" and the rating Barely True
Politifudge.
#12 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 27 Feb 2011 at 07:56 PM
Thimbles hits the crack pipe: "But that doesn't change what you said earlier. You didn't say compensation. You said salary."
padikiller tolls the Reality Bell: Er... No, I didn't...
What I actually wrote, in unambiguous plain English, was... "In Wisconsin, the average teacher makes $89.000 in salary and benefits for 9 months of work, while the state has racked up huge deficits and the schools have gotten crappier and crappier..."
Sage Advice: Read first, type second, Thimbles...
The Reality here is that teachers in Wisconsin make more than $51000 a year in salary and more than $25,000 in benefits, that their wages and benefits have increased without fail while student performance has declined steadily over the last 20 years, and that Wisconsin is facing a huge deficit.
Sure, teachers are better educated than the average workers are... But they also work less... A LOT less.. Your average welder or truck driver doesn't get summers, holidays, spring break and two weeks at Christmas off.
#13 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sun 27 Feb 2011 at 07:57 PM
Yes, once again Politifact has disgraced itself by putting its thumb on the scale against Democrats and being very, very generous in its rating of Republicans. You saw, I imagine, the dispute that MSNBC has with Politifact, demanding from Politifact a correction of factual misstatements made about Maddow. I'm not surprised that Politifact refused to correct factual errors. In fact, Politifact NEVER corrects their factual errors.
I no longer consider Politifact a credible arbiter of truth. I regard journos who rely on Politifact to be lazy, vapid, and unwilling to do their own due diligence. In fact, the minute any journo starts citing Politifact, his credibility immediately disappears and he shows himself to be pretty much a worthless hack. there are many of those, in political journalism.
#14 Posted by James, CJR on Sun 27 Feb 2011 at 08:58 PM
Here paddy, I'm about to do what you never do. I didn't read your post carefully partially because I have other things on the go, partially because it's really easy to skim the repetitive sayings of a dishonest poster, but in doing so I made a mistake.
Now, by citing a $89,000 figure that was clearly wrong, based on a source you clearly did not read carefully, are you going to give me the same courtesy and admit your mistake?
Second, you don't know what a teacher has to do to co-ordinate a class of 30 students, all at different skill levels, who need activities and assignments designed to help them acquire testable abilities and then require feedback on those assignments once they are completed. 5 classes of 30 for 5 days a week.
Goodbye after hours. Goodbye weekends. Hello ever reduced funding for handling ever increasing work.
And that's assuming you're working in a good district where the school isn't falling apart and the majority of parents aren't dead broke and the kids aren't convinced that school is a waste of time because they can't see how they're supposed to do better than their parents when the school doesn't have money to update the text books their parents used. You don't know.
Answer me this. If it's such a cushy job, with all those benefits and salaries higher than the private sector, why is the turnover so high?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/education/27teacher.html
Third, Wisconsin hasn't done that bad over the last 20 years.
http://educationnext.org/state-standards-rising-in-reading-but-not-in-math/
More in a bit.
#15 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 27 Feb 2011 at 10:41 PM
Finally, still no fire towards making bankers pay for their taxpayer funded benefits?
Funny that. We're actually cutting their contributions to society as they become a bigger drag on it.
In fact, people like Christine Todd Whitman and others stole from state pensions so that bankers could get tax cuts, and then took the pension trust funds and handed them over to bankers to invest in garbage (New Jersey actually sold 2.7 billion in bonds at 7.6% interest to hand over to money managers who earned 6%. Then there was the transfer of a quarter of New Jersey's state pension to the bankers who skimmed 200 million a year off the top before they crashed it:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E1DE173FF933A15754C0A9609C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
Tragic quote "In many ways, the disagreement over the investments is part of a larger policy debate over both the fiscal well-being of the state's pension system and the philosophy behind it.
After the collapse of technology stocks in 2000, the value of the state's fund shrank by about a third. Other state pension funds also lost money at that time, but many finance experts criticized New Jersey's for being one of the few public retirement funds being managed by civil servants.
Even union officials outside New Jersey puzzled over why the state had been almost alone among major funds in avoiding such alternative investments as hedge funds, real estate and nontraded stocks known as private equities.
''Every other fund in the country was doing it this way, and New Jersey was doing it its own way,'' said John Adler, director of private equity for the Service Employees International Union national headquarters, in New York City.")
Which brings to one of those other state funds in Wisconsin.
http://www.bnet.com/blog/financial-business/how-wall-street-and-wisconsin-officials-blew-up-the-state-8217s-pension-fund/11119
Pick up a pension rock these days and you'll find Goldman writhing underneath it.
But don't impede these top .01% percent Americans. Don't demonize the devil's bankers. We should demonize the unions, because they take money from tax payers for services rendered or some such. And some of them make 75 dollars an hour making american cars!!11! (Remember that canard during the AIG bonus debacle? Always pick on the unions. Everywhere, every time.).
This is so stupid.
#16 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 27 Feb 2011 at 11:13 PM
The New York Times has an up to date article up on state worker vs private worker pay.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/us/26salaries.html
"When workers are divided into two groups — those with bachelor’s degrees and higher and those without — a very different pattern emerges. State workers with college degrees earn less, often substantially less, than private sector workers with the same education in all but three states — Montana, Nevada and Wyoming.
Less educated workers on state payrolls, however, tend to do better than their counterparts in the private sector. The median wages of state workers without bachelor’s degrees are higher than those in the private sector in 30 states."
#17 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 28 Feb 2011 at 01:13 AM
And two papers, from my Goldman pension link above , worth reaing to understand the state pension problem:
This one from pew:
http://downloads.pewcenteronthestates.org/The_Trillion_Dollar_Gap_final.pdf
And this one from Dean Baker:
http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/pensions-2011-02.pdf
#18 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 28 Feb 2011 at 01:20 AM
That blue collar workers who belong to unions are paid higher wages, whether in the public or the private sector, isn't surprising, and is shining testament to the effectiveness of unions. Unions exist to collectively bargain for better wages and safer workplaces. That's their whole raison d'etre And unionized workers, without dispute, have higher wages and safer workplaces than their doofus "right-to-work" brothers.. It's all there, in the data. That's what the "cheap labor" Republicans hate about unions.
Why low-wage, uneducated dipsticks troll the internet advocating for lower wages and unregulated workplaces is a testament to the effectiveness of the cheap-labor Republican ability to bamboozle the average angry, drooling Fox-watcher, and the weak-mindedness of the average Republican. Talk about stepping on your own dick. "Don't pay me enough! I'm a right-to-work Republican!" They want to work for less than minimum wage, if it were legal.
#19 Posted by James, CJR on Mon 28 Feb 2011 at 01:30 AM
Thimbles wrote: Now, by citing a $89,000 figure that was clearly wrong, based on a source you clearly did not read carefully, are you going to give me the same courtesy and admit your mistake?
padikiller responds: The $89,000 isn't "clearly wrong"... This is why Politifact called it "Barely True"...
After fishing around, Politifact came up with about $80,000 in combined salary and benefits. For nine months of work. But the data is all over the road.
If it makes you feel better... Use the $80,000 number from Politifact. My point stands.
#20 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Mon 28 Feb 2011 at 09:15 AM
Thimbles...
My mother-in-law retired after teaching for 35 years... My father-in-law was a principal for 30 years and taught for 10 years before that... My sister-in-law teaches in Virginia.. My aunt taught in New Jersey.....
Yes... once in a while they grade papers after hours or attend a game or other function at school.. But day in, day out, they get to work at 8:30 and leave at 4:00. Teaching is, no doubt, an important and demanding job, but it's not the hardest job in the world, by any means.
The market simply doesn't bear paying teachers $89,000 (or $80,000, or anything close to it) for nine months of work. You could replace these high-paid, and under-performing teachers immediately with eager, qualified applicants willing to work for half the money. The simple truth is that Wisconsin can't afford to pay these ridiculous union wages any longer. The Gravy Train has derailed.
#21 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Mon 28 Feb 2011 at 10:23 AM
I just finished watching the oscar winning "Inside Job" documentary for the first time. They talk about the pension scams, the ratings scams which enabled them, the absolute conflicts of interest between the officials of government and the officials of finance which rotate from year to year, the corruption of the economics profession (Glenn Hubbard, architect of the Bush tax cuts is savaged by the end), and a slew of other topics... It's a fine piece of work.
But it also beats the hell out of Columbia University officials on occasion (such as the Dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Business, Glen Hubbard and former federal reserve board official and Columbia Business prof, Frederic Mishkin).
Now that the movie has won an oscar, do you think it can be mentioned and evaluated a bit on the audit? I'll understand if doing so is sensitive.
I think it's coverage of the Economics departments' corruption by Wall Street is highly valuable since it's these people who produce the framework for policies which benefit the parasite class and the upper 1% (the rising fortunes of which is also discussed in the movie).
For a primer on that see Charles Fergeson's inet discussion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZafoyyqJ7I
I think people have to start questioning the attitudes of our elites towards risk, because it's obvious that they aren't appraising it correctly - sometimes out of ideology - but mostly because proper appraisals do not serve their interests.
And their bad information and the actions based on their bad information is killing our interests.
http://www.ted.com/talks/naomi_klein_addicted_to_risk.html
#22 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 28 Feb 2011 at 11:57 AM
Paddy: I hate my family in law. They're a bunch of dead beat teachers.
Thimbles: Answer me this. If it's such a cushy job, with all those benefits and salaries higher than the private sector, why is the turnover so high?
#23 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 28 Feb 2011 at 12:09 PM
Padikiller must have an unusually lazy and shiftless family, because all of the teachers I know -- and I know quite a few -- are hard-working, dedicated, highly skilled individuals who are thoroughly professional and much much underpaid for the amount of education they have and the hours they put in for their profession.
They spend many hours before and after classroom time attending meetings, grading papers, putting in playground duty, working with parents and working individually with children, going to seminars and training sessions, and preparing lesson plans. Not only do they do this before and after classroom time, they do it on the weekends as well. They often attend school during the summer or get a part-time job to supplement their low pay; they spend their own hard-earned money on classroom supplies and volunteer in the community. They are, each one of them, a credit to their profession, and I have every respect for the work they do.
These post-bachelor prepared, master's level graduates start out around $30,000 per year, hitting 40 grand around the 10-15 year mark -- this for certificated teachers with a master's degree! Pay that is way below the level of bachelor-prepared classmates. I don't know where anyone gets that $80,000 a year -- that is simply a lie. It's a lie. Anyone who cites that spurious figure immediately loses credibility.
So I guess I can't blame a seething, savage rightwinger that is so ashamed and incensed about his family, who are evidently the bottom of the barrel when it comes to the teaching profession. All professions have people like that, but the majority of teachers are hard-working, dedicated professionals who earn their pay and more, but do it because they love it.
#24 Posted by James, CJR on Mon 28 Feb 2011 at 01:24 PM
The reasons teachers leave jobs?
Let's check.
According to data from a North Carolina survey, in order of importance, they are:
1. To teach elsewhere (22%)
2. To retire (16%)
3. To move due to family relocation (12%)
4. Unspecified reasons (12%)
5. To take a non-teaching job within the school system (7%)
6. To stay home with a child (4%)
The percentage of teachers who resigned because they were dissatisfied with teaching?... (2%)...
Yep.. A whopping TWO percent.
Nice try, Thimbles, but no cigar.
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/recruitment/surveys/turnover/2008-09turnoverreport.pdf
#25 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Mon 28 Feb 2011 at 01:57 PM
According to data from one state, North Carolina, during 2009, a bad year for alternatives:
http://www.allbusiness.com/labor-employment/human-resources-personnel-management/13114163-1.html
2% of people who left that year were dissatisfied.
There are other, more through, studies.
http://www.calstate.edu/teacherquality/retention/
#26 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 28 Feb 2011 at 06:55 PM
Such as this one in Wisconsin:
http://www.ncrel.org/quality/mobility/turnover.htm
And there are other stories:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/26/950079/-I-Dont-Want-to-be-a-Teacher-Any-More
I know teachers who have left the field too. I know the time they put in, uncompensated, getting tests and work assignments marked and returned, trying desperately to get the kids into a testable condition for the NCLB assessments.
I don't believe your in-law stories. My experiences and the time demands of increased class sizes tell different.
#27 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 28 Feb 2011 at 07:12 PM
Not arguing by anecdote here, but just noting that my aunt--who admittedly an exceptionally devoted teacher who puts in 60-70 hour weeks during the school year--also has to spend a not inconsiderable amount of her own money to buy supplies for her class. I don't think that's uncommon.
#28 Posted by Ryan Chittum, CJR on Mon 28 Feb 2011 at 07:47 PM
60-70 hours a week?
I call bullshit.
How on Earth? 13 hours a day?
I can't see it. You get to work at 8 on the inside, leave at 4 on the outside and then what? Grade papers at home... Work the occasional football game... Put together a test... And what else that could take up 30 hours a week?
I have a ton of teachers in my family and they are as dedicated and hardworking as anyone, but they aren't putting in anywhere near these kind of hours.
They do buy supplies for their classrooms... They are reimbursed for some of them and get tax credits for the rest, but we're not talking about thousands of dollars here. We're talking about a couple of hundred bucks.
#29 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Mon 28 Feb 2011 at 08:03 PM