Abbreviated Rant

I shortened up my letter so I could email it to my reps. This might be more reader-friendly for those of you interested in talking points.

Dear Representative/Senator/Governor:

The budget repair bill announced on Friday concerns me deeply for several reasons that are outlined below. As a teacher who works in your district, I am asking you to vote against this bill. While I understand that steps need to be taken to get Wisconsin’s budget deficit under control, I believe it is unreasonable to expect Wisconsin’s public workers to bear the brunt of the cuts. Before this partisan decision is made hastily and without public hearings, please consider the following.

I am a high school social studies teacher, and I’m paid to work 8 hours a day, five days a week, 190 days a year. I work at least 9 hours a day at school, usually one or two more hours when I get home, at least three hours every weekend, and at least five full days during the summer, winter, and spring breaks. That adds up to at least twelve weeks of unpaid work time. Almost every other teacher in my district works as hard as I do. If you vote for this bill, you are asking me and every other teacher in Wisconsin to continue doing all of this for thousands of dollars less each year, with diminished working conditions and great uncertainty about our unemployment. We’re not glorified babysitters; if I was paid like a babysitter, $3/hour for each student I personally supervise each hour of the day ($2.25 for each 46-minute class period, $1.50 for the 30-minute lunch period, and no pay for prep time), I would make $18,000 more per year than I do now. The teachers at the very top of my district’s pay schedule, the teachers who have been working in their profession for a lifetime and have earned advanced degrees, are the only teachers who actually get paid as much as babysitters. We do not do this job for superficial reasons; if you add the unpaid work to our calendar year, we don’t have summers off. We do what we do because we love our students. If you vote in favor of this bill, you are exploiting that love because you know many of us will continue to do our jobs for the students’ sake. If that is a decision you are consciously willing to make, you are not someone I want representing me or my state.

If passed in its current form, the budget repair bill will have serious consequences for the state of Wisconsin. These consequences will range from the absolute degradation of our public school system to the collapse of our economy as we know it.

First of all, research shows that good teachers are the key to student achievement. A 2007 presentation by education expert Harry K. Wong concisely illustrates this point and is available at this website: http://old.sandi.net/fridaynotes/2009/0227_wong.pdf. He cites several of the more than 200 studies that have shown that having an effective teacher in the classroom is the single greatest factor affecting student achievement; what we do is more important than any set of standards you might adopt, any standardized test you might implement, any set of textbooks you might order. The significant reduction of salary and benefits would mean that many of Wisconsin’s teachers would no longer be able to support their families and would have to pursue other employment. On average, Wisconsin’s public employees make somewhere between 4.8 and 12% less than their private-sector counterparts, based on studies from Rutgers University, AFL-CIO, and the Economic Policy Institute; the information about discrepancies between public/private compensation being given to the public by the administration and the Wisconsin Club for Growth (an organization that was created to shield corporate interests from having to name themselves) is misleading and incorrect. If the public has to be mislead to support this bill, isn’t that a clear indication that this is not the right thing to do? This bill would effectively turn the education of Wisconsin’s students over to the lowest bidder. District pay schedules would no longer reward teachers for furthering their education and becoming better teachers. Teacher turnover would increase dramatically, resulting in a continual influx of inexperienced teachers who have no incentive to pursue professional development and master their craft. I have been teaching for five years, and every year I am an exponentially better teacher than I was the year before; I have incentives to develop as a professional and remain committed to my district.

If you vote in favor of this bill, you are operating under the assumption that every teacher has the financial ability to continue doing what they do for altruistic reasons. This is hardly the case. The current insurance and pension benefits are the only things that allow public employees to support their families on their wages; without increasing pay for professional development and pensions for retirement, this job does not allow us to make ends meet. Wisconsin’s teachers who are bright, educated individuals who have chosen to become teachers because we love our students and believe in the value of what we do; we could have become doctors or lawyers, but we chose to become teachers. If this bill passes and education becomes a profession that cannot reasonably support a middle-class family, significantly less people will enter the education field. They won’t be able to repay their student loans and afford the professional development that is required for maintaining licensure. Schools will have significantly less qualified candidates to choose from. We will lose all the bright, hardworking people that have the opportunity to choose a field that allows them repay their student loans, pursue continuing professional development, and support their families.

For me personally, this bill would have dramatic effects. My husband and I are both high school teachers. We have a home in Neenah. He teaches at Menasha High School, and I commute 2.5 hours roundtrip every day to Montello High School. I do this because it is where I went to high school, and I love the students and community. I give more time and attention to my students than I give to my husband. He understands this because he does the same thing. If this bill passes, our household would earn somewhere between $8-10,000 less each year. I will no longer be able to afford to commute. My husband and I will discuss the possibility of me pursuing another line of work. The semester I completed my student teaching experience, I also took the LSAT. My score was high enough for admission into most law schools. I chose not to apply at the time, because I had already fallen in love with the teaching profession. Thousands of teachers across the state will have to move into professions that pay the bills instead of allowing them to do what they do best – educate children. Montello will hire someone else to teach my students. This person may or may not care about the students and community as much as I do. They may or may not work 12 unpaid weeks to provide the students with the best education possible; in fact, most teachers will not have an additional 12 weeks to give if they have to pursue additional employment to make ends meet. If they are a new teacher, they may have to spend five years learning to teach as well as I have learned to do. They will have to spend months getting to know the students as well as I know them, so they can meet their needs in each lesson plan and class period. A colleague will have to spend time with them, showing them how to develop their website, explaining how we ensure success for our online students, and demonstrating how we work as a staff to reduce the incidents of bullying in our district. They will have to spend time tracking down parent/guardian contact information and learn which parents will and won’t work with them as team to help the student achieve. But they will be asked do all of this for significantly less pay, with no extrinsic incentive to improve, minimal job security, and no financial incentive to remain in the same district; the district will receive at least $500 less per student from the state, and will not have the money to pay its teachers decent wages. This person will probably find out that their pay is not sufficient to repay their student loans, buy a home, and raise a family. They may seek employment in the private sector. If they do find something that makes ends meet, they will leave the classroom and the process will repeat itself. If they can’t find a better-paying job elsewhere, they may stay in the classroom – not necessarily because they love their students, but because they have no other options. Wisconsin’s education system always ranks within the top ten in the United States (despite having teacher compensation that ranks 15th or 16th in the nation); as this scenario occurs in classrooms across the state, our education system will collapse, ultimately resembling that of Mississippi or Arizona.

The effects of this bill won’t just be felt in the education system; Wisconsin’s economy will suffer in multiple ways as well. Our significantly reduced income will result in significantly reduced spending. We don’t have a lot of discretionary income, but we will have to tighten our belts even more. The businesses in our community will suffer as a result. The Green Bay School District alone is estimating that its employees will have $7 million less to spend; this will have a dramatic effect on the local economy (perhaps Bass Pro Shops was wise to cancel its plans to build there, as the local middle class won’t have any money to spend). Many public employees will no longer be in the middle class if this bill passes, and many will actually qualify for state entitlements. Studies continue to show that income and health are closely linked; reducing public workers’ income will add to the state’s rising cost of medical care, which is one of the most significant issues facing our economy. This bill simply shuffles the state’s debt around by placing the burden on local economies instead, and it destroys a quality education system in the process. How are we going to attract good jobs to our state with an undereducated workforce? The employers we will attract will be manufactures that rely on an unskilled workforce and minimal environmental regulations to keep costs low; if this bill passes, Wisconsin will possess the same job-attracting qualities as Mexico.

The circumstances under which this bill has been introduced indicate that it is partisan and meant to have winners and losers. If you truly believe this bill is responsible and necessary, please give it the public hearings and debate it deserves instead of pushing it through the legislature in less than a week. The administration has hinted at some of these policies, but this is much more extreme than anyone expected, including many Republican legislators. The cryptic note of thanks and encouragement from the administration that accompanied this bill makes it very clear that public workers are being threatened with their jobs. It seems truly unfair to make the public think they have to choose between supporting BadgerCare or paying public workers’ benefits; these are not the only programs competing for scarce resources on Wisconsin’s production possibility frontier, and it’s misleading to make the public think so. The administration’s plans to call in the National Guard to replace workers shows that if this bill does get a public hearing, it will not have public support and the devastating consequences for public workers would be brought to light (and if the National Guard is brought in to fill prison guards’ jobs on a long-term basis, they’ll need job training, fair compensation, and benefits, so that puts us back in the same boat we’re in now). The fact that the Wisconsin Club for Growth had an ad in support of this bill on television within a few hours of the bill’s announcement indicates that this was a partisan calculation designed to blindside public employees and their unions. Public employees will not be able to exercise their right to peacefully assemble or meet with our representatives, because our time-off requests will not make it through the administrative process before the bill is passed. The fact that police and firefighters are exempt from these drastic cuts indicates that the bill is partisan and unreasonable; Republican representatives are unwilling to jeopardize the votes of those right-leaning professions, but are willing to make traditionally left-leaning groups take the cuts. If public workers should be expected to endure these cuts and continue doing their jobs because of their “professionalism and commitment to public service,” then why would public safety be jeopardized by including police and firefighters? Shouldn’t they be expected to keep working like the rest of us? If public safety is threatened by a bill, isn’t that a sign that it should receive more consideration before being passed? The brazen transparency of this bill’s partisan nature is astounding; if I was doing something this unethical, I would try to get it done without a public hearing too.

Discussing a problem without also proposing a solution is an exercise in futility. Wisconsin’s budget crisis can be addressed in a number of other ways that don’t destroy our education system and our middle class. First of all, refinancing the state’s debt is a step in the right direction. It addresses this year’s budget shortfall and would help repay Minnesota and the medical malpractice fund. The $30 million saved by this budget repair bill could be recouped in a number of other areas. For example, the $25 million set aside for the economic development fund (that still has $75 million in it) that is meant to promote job creation could be used to protect the actual jobs that we already have in the state. The $48 million being set aside for private health savings accounts could be used to mend the budget. The average income of the individuals who use these accounts is $139,000, and almost half of the people who use these accounts do not take money out for healthcare. This is an unnecessary tax shelter for the upper class, and it is probably a better candidate for the guns-or-butter BadgerCare example than public workers’ compensation. Another place to save money is the job-creation tax incentive. At a cost of $67 million to the taxpayers of Wisconsin, this “incentive” gives employers $90-300 for each job created. Do you honestly believe that a business will come to Wisconsin or create a new job to save less than $1 each day? This tax break has absolutely no hope of creating a single job, yet it could save twice as much money as the plan to gut our middle class. Other smaller means of saving money could include selling any mansions the state might own and operate, as well as not funding the security costs associated with state employees attending high-profile football games…

My final solution to the budget shortfall also involves public employees. By population, Wisconsin is the 20th largest state in the union, and yet we’re one of only ten states that has a fulltime state legislature. The National Conference of State Legislatures classifies us as having a full or near full time, fulltime pay, large-staff professional legislature. Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, Indiana, Arizona, Tennessee, Missouri, and Maryland all have larger populations than Wisconsin, and yet Wisconsin taxpayers are paying 99 assemblymen and 33 senators fulltime wages and benefits to do what those states’ legislatures do on a part-time basis. New Jersey and Florida, though much larger, pay their legislators less than Wisconsin. Michigan, with the nation’s eighth largest population, is considering a bill right now that would reduce its legislature to part-time. California, the largest state in the union, is considering the transition as well. The cost savings of reducing salary, benefits, and per diem pay would be significant. While reducing public employees’ compensation will cause measurable negative results, returning the Legislature to its previous part-time status would have several positive effects. First of all, legislators would have significantly less motivation to make decisions along partisan lines, because they wouldn’t have to court the party for reelection support. The job would be more about doing the right thing than about perpetuating oneself in office. Corruption like the Capitol scandal that led to the conviction of former Senate Majority Leader Chuck Chvala would subside, because our legislators wouldn’t be so concerned about reelection. The gridlock that polarizes and paralyzes our Legislature would diminish as our legislators would make pragmatic decisions in the best interest of the state. This bill could potentially pass simply because legislators don’t want to put themselves at odds with the party that wants it pushed through. Please have the courage to demand that it get a fair public hearing first, so that the citizens of Wisconsin can hear how this bill will actually affect our state.

In conclusion, the budget repair bill is based on the false premise that public employees are overcompensated; studies continually show that to be false. This bill will devastate public education and other public institutions, shift the budget shortfall to local governments, and destroy the middle class in Wisconsin. The partisan nature of the bill, as shown by the exclusion of police and firefighters as well as the continued tax breaks for businesses and the upper class, shows that the interests supporting the Republican Party are not even being considered as sources of revenue for the state. Finally, the fact that the administration hopes to push this bill through in less than a week so that the parties involved don’t have time to adequately respond, the legislators don’t have time to listen to their constituents’ concerns, and the public isn’t even given a hearing to learn about the bill shows that the bill is deeply flawed and would not receive support if given more time for review.

Please have the moral character to do what is right for Wisconsin and don’t support this devastating bill.