Wisconsin's Budget Repair Bill

February 12, 2011



Dear Assemblyman/Senator/Governor:

The budget repair bill announced on Friday concerns me deeply for several reasons that are outlined below. As your constituent, 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 graduated from UW-Stevens Point five years ago, and I have been serving as a fulltime high school social studies teacher since then. According to my contract, I am expected to work eight hours a day for about 190 days each year, and I am compensated for those hours according to the negotiated contract of my union. In those eight hours, I teach six classes, supervise students during one period of the day, and use prep time that consists of one 46-minute prep period and the 36 minutes that I am required to be at school before and after bells ring. During my eight-hour day, I am expected to do the following:

Plan lessons for six classes (often six different classes). I carefully budget every day of my 18-week classes. Each lesson builds on the previous one, because I have to provide scaffolding that enables each student to progress from one skill or concept to the next. The curriculum I teach has to be rigorous enough to prepare my students for post-secondary education and competition in a global society. Using both state standards for social studies and the recently adopted Common Core Standards, I carefully select the skills and concepts my students need to master in the lesson to develop as citizens in the 21st century; these skills include digital-age literacy, inventive thinking, and interpersonal communication. After selecting the skills and content to be taught, I have to decide how to assess student progress and achievement; my lessons must include both formative and summative assessments. Formative assessments serve a diagnostic purpose so I can check student progress during a unit; they show me each student’s progress so I can re-teach skills and content to individuals or the class as needed. Summative assessments are given at the end of a unit to serve as a final measure of each student’s achievement. Best practices for summative assessments involve requiring each student to use higher-ordered thinking and the ability to synthesize and apply the skills and information they’ve learned in an authentic assessment (e.g. developing a plan to solve the Middle East conflict as opposed to taking a short-answer test about it). The lesson must also prepare students for the reality of standardized testing, often conducted in multiple-choice format, which is decidedly not based on best practices. In addition to reconciling best practices with the realities of public education, these lessons must also be designed to address the individual needs of each student in my class (close to 30 students in some classes). I need to know each child’s reading ability (lexile, coding, comprehension), find appropriate texts for those abilities, and obtain copies in a manner that does not violate copyright law. For the many students in my class who receive special education, I make sure that I am in compliance with their Individualized Education Plan (IEP) or 504 Plan; this often requires meeting with special education teachers to develop appropriately modified activities for students. As I select activities for each class, I have to make sure what I’m planning will capture and hold my students’ attention for 46 minutes; this requires knowledge of each student’s learning style, strengths, weaknesses, and multiple intelligences. Each lesson has to be designed to work within the resources available in my district. For example, my lessons have to teach digital-age literacy in a junior/senior high school with one 24-seat computer lab, despite having 27 students in a class and fifteen other educators looking for lab space for their classes. My lesson plans often include arriving at school an extra half-hour early to give individual students access to the computer lab for their projects, because many don’t have technology at home. Before the students walk into my room each period, I need to have to read all of the texts I will be using, make sure I have enough copies of everything, and rehearse the plan so that I can implement it smoothly with my students.

Teach six classes. When the students walk into my classroom, I am responsible for much more than teaching the lesson I carefully and skillfully prepared. It is my job to observe them for signs of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, neglect, substance abuse, etc. I have to foster a relationship based on trust and mutual respect with each student that allows me to do this effectively. When I do notice signs, I am a mandated reporter and am obligated to document what I’ve seen, contact the appropriate authorities, and continue to help the student succeed in my class. Many students enter my classroom despite facing great adversity in their personal lives. This year, 43.8% of my students qualify for free-or-reduced lunch, meaning that almost half of my students may not get enough to eat at home. Their school lunches are designed to stay within a limited budget while meeting federal standards and often feature main courses such as “pizza dippers” or three breaded chicken strips, along with canned peas and a Smuckers Uncrustable®. This may be all that is in their bellies for the day when I’m charged with the task of helping them investigate the modern-era legacy of classical Greek civilization. In addition to socioeconomic challenges, most of my students are significantly impacted by Wisconsin’s alcoholism problem. Many of my students abuse alcohol or are expected to pick up the pieces of their parents’ alcohol use; my students are often responsible for the physical and emotional care, financial support, and transportation of younger siblings, in addition to their own. I gather this information through conversations and observations during my 46 minutes with the class each day, and I take all of this into consideration as I do everything I can to help each student master the lesson’s skills and content despite what they are going through outside the classroom. In addition to my responsibilities regarding students’ wellbeing, I am also responsible for their social development. Students in my classroom need to be learning interpersonal communication skills, such as teamwork, collaboration, and personal and social responsibility. It is my job to guide their behavior as they develop these skills, as well as to provide continuous feedback about their progress. I have to earn their trust before they are willing to view me as an authority on these skills, so I have to be mindful to model them at all times with the students. Classroom management is an important part of teaching; I have to have clear policies and expectations for student behavior, and when those expectations are not met, I have to know how to respond. Whether a student comes to class unprepared, uses vulgar language, or becomes physically threatening, it is my job to handle the situation fairly and completely. I have to be aware of students’ relationships with one another and look for signs of bullying, disrespect, and potential conflicts. I try to mitigate these issues with thoughtful seating charts, group selections, and conversations with the students involved. I also have to recognize when my students are struggling emotionally, and I have to know each student well enough to have positive interactions with them, encourage their achievement, and foster their self-esteem. Many of my students have diagnosed emotional behavioral disabilities (EBD), and I have to be aware of their moods, behaviors, and medication issues before, during, and after class to help them maintain self-control; in the event that a student does lose self-control, I have to know exactly how to respond to the student based on the situation to prevent harm to the student or others. I have professional development training for these situations, so I am able to physically restrain a student without harm, as well as know how to respond and minimize the damage when a student bites me, chokes me, or tries to pull out my hair. In addition to all of this, I teach the lesson I planned for the day.

Communicate. Teaching children is a team effort. During the day I communicate with parents, guardians, social workers, administrators, teachers, guidance counselors, and others. I speak with parents/guardians often about student progress, behavior, concerns, and requests for help. Many of my students switch schools frequently, and parents’ phone numbers change often, so I spend some of my day tracking down accurate contact information. Some of the parents I contact are willing to work with me as we provide an education for their child, while others do not return calls or address me with profanity because they have better things to do. (As a public employee, I’m sure you also have unpleasant conversations with members of the public, and I hope you feel well-compensated for your time and effort). I meet with special education teachers to discuss student progress and to develop modified activities and assessments to meet individual students’ needs. I meet with other teachers in my department to discuss resources, curriculum, standardized testing preparation and results, and professional development opportunities. I meet with administrators to discuss school policies, student issues, and my professional development. I meet with the school guidance counselor to discuss concerns about individual students and trends in our student population. This year the guidance counselor and I met with all our students in small groups to discuss the causes and consequences of bullying in our school, and we worked with the students to develop a plan to address the issues they identified. I provide a summary of my department’s current efforts and activities to the school board. This year a small group of teachers and I prepared a plan for our district’s transition to the Common Core Standards through literacy professional development, because we understood that our district was not taking up the task quickly enough. As part of a group of teachers at my school who are certified to teach online classes, I have spent several hours over the last year meeting with the group as we’ve attempted to design and refine the methods through which we promote and monitor student success in these courses. We’re doing this as part of our effort to teach digital-age literacy in our district, because we know that our students need these skills. I am also expected to maintain a helpful webpage for my students and their families, with information about class assignments, lesson plans, and highlights of what we’re doing. Communicating with students is an integral part of teaching. I have to provide in-depth, timely feedback to students about their assignments and assessments. Because their assessments need to be rigorous and authentic, grading the assignments takes a great deal of time. I use rubrics to show students how their work does and does not show mastery, I give written and verbal feedback for reflection, and I work with each student as they revise their work so they can demonstrate mastery of the material. Multiple-choice assessments do not do any of these things, but again, I have to make sure students are prepared for those too, so they can perform well on state assessments.

Professional Development. It is my job to be aware of trends in education, best practices, and DPI regulations. I pursue professional development in a variety of areas, including literacy, assessment, technology, and classroom management on a regular basis to make sure I am meeting my students’ needs in the best way possible. My licensure is regulated under PI-34, so I develop, implement, and provide evidence of completion of a professional development portfolio (PDP) every five years. As I complete the PDP, I must demonstrate reflection and collaboration. My first PDP focused on pedagogy, so I have spent the last five years researching the teaching styles and strategies that are most effective. I selected two after conducting this research and worked continuously to master them. I demonstrated this mastery by preparing and teaching a session about project-based learning at the Wisconsin Council for Social Studies (WCSS) state convention. During this time I tracked student progress, percentage of completed assignments, WKCE scores, and other data to demonstrate the results of my professional development efforts. I am now submitting my information to my self-assembled PDP team, consisting of a professional educator, an administrator, and a college professor, for their approval. Once the work is approved and my license is reissued for five more years, I will begin the process again. I am also preparing and teaching a session at this year’s WCSS convention on the topic of using nonfiction in the social studies classroom, because teaching literacy is such an important aspect of what goes on in my classroom. In addition to licensure-related professional development, my colleagues and I often provide one another with district-specific professional development; this often involved helping one another improve our websites, debating the merits of transitioning to standards-based grading, or learning to use classroom technology more effectively. Most of our professional development is paid for out of our own pocket and has nothing to do with licensure; we choose to do it because we know it makes us better teachers that our students benefit from our knowledge and skills.

This description of my job duties is not comprehensive. I didn’t include everything I’m expected to do, and I’m sure other teachers’ positions cause them to have more responsibilities than I do. But more or less, this is what I’m paid to do in an eight-hour day, and if I don’t get it done, the quality of my students’ education suffers. As you can probably infer, there is no possible way to get all of this done in eight hours, so I keep working until it’s done. 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. What I’d like you to understand is that I’m not special; I’m not a rock star compared to my coworkers. 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 do 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. On Friday night, my husband and I began making a list of things we’ll need to cut from our budget if this bill passes. In addition to the gas I buy commuting to my job, we will no longer subscribe to Dish Network; we will cancel our gym memberships; we won’t buy the iPad we’ve been saving up for since November; we will buy cheaper out-of-state produce at the grocery store as opposed to supporting local growers at the Neenah farmers’ market; I will pay to have my hair cut every six months instead of every three (and I’ll try convincing my husband to let me attempt cutting his hair myself to save us the $10.50 every month); we won’t buy a new kitchen sink; we won’t replace the carpet in our living room; we won’t buy new bicycles this spring; we won’t continue to buy the various candles, cookie dough, boxes of fruit, and poinsettias that our students sell to raise money for their extracurricular activities; we won’t go out to eat on Friday evenings at local restaurants; we won’t replace either of our vehicles until we absolutely have to, and at that point we will buy well-used vehicles; we won’t buy flowers from the local greenhouse; we won’t go house-shopping this spring to look for a home that is large enough to accommodate the family we are planning (we’re hoping for two kids and a bulldog), and the timeframe in which we will be able to afford to have children will be pushed back significantly. This is just the list we rattled off on Friday. The real list will be much longer.

The Green Bay School District 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.

Sincerely,