Time To Resist The Blackmail
By Mitch Berg
Here’s the lefty playbook when it comes to exacting more tribute from the people:
- Make a demand. Say, a 30% in crease in the school district levy, amounting to an increase in taxes of almost $40 million a year for eight years.
- Point out that if the voters don’t acquiesce to the demand, the thing that the taxpayers most value – in this case, 364 teachers. That in a school district with 5,300 employees, only 58% of whom, a little over 3,000, ever set foot in a classroom. That means you, the lefty, plan on laying off 12% of the district’s teachers – if the voters don’t give you what you want. (No administrator jobs are at risk, naturally)
It’s the way a petulant teenager acts when they don’t get their way.
It’s the choice Saint Paul Public Schools superintendent Valeria Silva has given the voters of Saint Paul.
And it’s worse than that. Greg Copeland, chair of “Vote NO 30% Levy Tax Hike!”, writes:
“The St. Paul School Board majority, following the recommendation of the Superintendent, showed so little respect for St. Paul Voters that it chose to combine the expiring 2006 Levy Renewal with a 30% Levy Property Tax Hike in a single ballot question, rather than giving voters an open choice of two questions, as it easily could have done; one to renew and another on the proposed 30% levy property tax increase.”, said Copeland.
There are so many angles to this story.
Blackboard Fodder: Teachers union members are among the most reliable Democrat voters out there.
But when every single bureaucracy that emjploys them uses this exact same tactic – using their jobs as bargaining chips, and never, ever touching the admin jobs that are the district’s greatest sacred cow – I have to wonder; don’t teachers ever get tired of it?
Do they all suffer from Stockholm Syndrome?
Mush, Sled Dogs!: I’ve been a Saint Paul taxpayer for a quarter of an endless freaking century now. Near as I can remember, the Saint Paul Public Schools have gotten every single levy increase they’ve ever asked for. And yet the schools never get anything but worse.
The district is under the impression that the few remaining businesses and residents that actually pay taxes are like ATMs with no limit.
We are not.
In the immortal words of Little Steven, “I’m getting tired of paying for sh*t I never get / Somebody promised justice, and they ain’t delivered yet”.
Subsidizing Failure: And yet the schools get worse and worse. The efflux of families, especially lower-income and immigrant families, to charter, parochial and suburban schools has ripped a minimum of 12% out of the district’s population (and many of the families are putting their money where their mouths are, and leaving the city).
And while some of the marquee schools – the ones that serve the white upper-middle class children of the more-connected government workers in Saint Anthony Park and Desnoyer and Highland are more or less adequate and make most of the right noises on command, the SPPS has among the worst achievement gaps in the US.
The Saint Paul Public School District is a failed venture. Since it is a wholly-owned arm of the St. Paul DFL, it is in every way a symptom of the failure of one-party rule in Saint Paul. If it were a business, it would go out of business. If it were a regulated business, it would be shut down by the government. If it were a charter school, the Department of Education would padlock it and MN2020 would wrinkle its organization nose and write a snarky “white paper” on what a crappy idea it was.
But Superintendent Silva and the School Board – loyal DFLers all – are doing what they do every time the levy comes up; holding guns to the teachers’ heads, and saying “pay up or the teachers get it”.
Call it “Valeria’s Choice”.
The people of Saint Paul need to send our worthless, incompetent school district a message; do a better job, or (heh) get out of the way and give the job to someone who can.
October 9th, 2012 at 12:56 pm
I too have paid St. Paul taxes for a quarter century. When it came time for my son, he went through the Catholic school system. I think he got a pretty good education at an annual cost a lot less than the amount spent per pupil in the public schools.
October 9th, 2012 at 2:10 pm
And yet, the reality is that while a small number of charter schools outperform regular public schools, most don’t, and those which operate for profit tend to be among the worst. Charter schools tend to pay less than other schools.
I don’t mind paying teachers well; my public school education included instruction from a number of teachers with PhDs, who provided a quality comparable to that of the best private schools – and I had my choice of public or private. Those teachers were worth what they were paid, and they were dedicated educators who had excellent depth in their subjects..
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/02/24/study-charter-school-performance/
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Charter schools in the Twin Cities metro area underperform academically in comparison to their traditional public counterparts, shows a report released today by University of Minnesota researchers.
The Twin Cities area’s 30,000 charter school students score 7.5 percentage points lower on math testing and 4.4 percent lower on reading tests than students at traditional public schools, according to the report from the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race and Poverty.
There are many factors why students do poorly, and many of them have to do with factors other than teachers — we have more students who are hungry, who are experiencing housing issues, or who have single and/or overworked parents and impoverished families.
and this study from Loyola Law School shows that charter schools aren’t the answer that they were expected to be:
http://www.luc.edu/law/academics/special/center/child/childed_forum/pdfs/2012_student_papers/sheehan.pdf
While on the surface, charter schools appear to be the solution to many problems in the traditional public school system, data shows that charter schools are actually not performing as well as many would like to believe. In reality, charter schools are creating more problems and corruption in the public education system in America and as such are not serving their initial goals.
I’m horrified at our poor test scores and even more appalled at the graduation rates. We’re turning out functionally illiterate and mathematically incompetent graduates too much of the time.
The most intriguing alternatives I’ve seen to education being both educationally successful and cost effective are alternatives like the Salman Khan Academy that is a cooperative effort with Bill Gates.
http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html
You make teachers the whipping boys because you don’t like democrats, which makes you lose objectivity.
We cannot expect improvements in education without investment, and we can’t expect teachers to be the sole solution when they are not the problem.
There are lots of ways we can make better use of teachers to teach – the Salman Khan method of teaching is superb. I’ve checked out a few of his videos; he really does provide world class educational materials FOR FREE.
There are schools using his content; I’d love to see what results if it were tried on an even larger scale here.
But leave the partisan politics out of this; the Tea Party and their efforts to put substandard partisan content into text books is one of the worst threats to quality education in this country, FAR worse than any problems you imagine with teachers.
October 9th, 2012 at 3:08 pm
DG,
I’ve accused you, from time to time, of recycling lefty chanting points and calling them “fact”. I have been absolutely accurate in every case in doing so – but never more so than on this issue.
For starters: please name a “for profit” charter school in Minnesota. I’ll wait.
Second: The group that many liberals squawk about the hardest, the “Friends of Education” group of charter schools, tends to get higher schools than charters as a whole. Some of them – Eagle Ridge in Eden Prairie and Nova in St. Paul – greatly outperform their neighboring public districts.
And as I pointed out when I wrote about the very self-same MPR story you linked, measuring overall “achievement” is misleading. Charter schools take in a *lot* of kids who’ve burned out on traditional education, or on whom traditional education has given up. Measuring a school’s overall performance is nearly meaningless; you really need to measure the aggregated change of the schools’ students over their academic careers to truly judge accxurately. If a school has 200 students – four classes of 50 – and each class is made up of 50% castoffs from the public system (as was the case at my kids’ charter school), the overall grades may be low – but if 80% of those 100 kids go from being “D” students in year 1 to “B-” students who actually see value in education in year four, that’s a huge success, test results notwithstanding.
And I’m writing this mainly for the benefit of those who may actually read it. I won’t delude myself by thinking you’re one of them.
October 9th, 2012 at 3:10 pm
DG,
And here’s further proof that you didn”t even read my piece. You wrote:
“You make teachers the whipping boys because you don’t like democrats, which makes you lose objectivity.”
I didn’t attack teachers in any way in this piece. I asked them if they’re tired of being treated like poker chips in a poker game between Tom Dooher, Valeria Silva and the taxpayers.
Please, DG – if you are going to leave comments here, please don’t waste everyone’s time. I’m not sure if we can even call that a strawman; more like “you just didn’t pay attention, and used my comment section, yet again, as an adjunct to your blog”.
October 9th, 2012 at 3:29 pm
Hey DG, seems your PHD level teachers aren’t doing so well in the urban utopia of Mpls”
“Looking at the number of students who make it from freshmen to seniors in four years, the graduation rate was a much lower 49 percent for the Class of 2010.
…………
“In Minneapolis, a district where non-white students are the majority, two of five black and Hispanic students who entered high school in 2006 walked away with a diploma in 2010. For American Indian students, the rate was 17.4 percent.”
…………
“Like Minneapolis, St. Paul has a nearly 24-point difference in the current rate (87 percent) and four-year rate (63 percent). ”
http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/129171263.html?refer=y
October 9th, 2012 at 3:59 pm
“The Saint Paul Public School District is a failed venture.”
I left a comment regarding Mpls & St.P graduation rates but it seems to have gone off into outer space….sigh
October 9th, 2012 at 4:05 pm
Takin another shot at it.
DG how’s that Phd level teacher working out in the urban utopia?
“Looking at the number of students who make it from freshmen to seniors in four years, the graduation rate was a much lower 49 percent for the Class of 2010.”
…..
“In Minneapolis, a district where non-white students are the majority, two of five black and Hispanic students who entered high school in 2006 walked away with a diploma in 2010. For American Indian students, the rate was 17.4 percent.”
…..
“Like Minneapolis, St. Paul has a nearly 24-point difference in the current rate (87 percent) and four-year rate (63 percent).”
http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/129171263.html?refer=y
Throw some more money down the cesspoll DG?….pfft!!!
October 9th, 2012 at 5:25 pm
DG wrote:
. . . and this study from Loyola Law School shows that charter schools aren’t the answer that they were expected to be:
It’s not a study, it is a student paper.
October 9th, 2012 at 9:50 pm
You may remember that, after our ambassador to Libya was killed, Dog Gone repeated MSNBC’s outrageous insistence that several American citizens be charged with incitement to murder, or perhaps be turned over to some Libyan mob for street justice. This was because the State Department initially reported that our ambassador was killed as the result of protests over some Youtube video that insulted the originator of the Muslim cult.
Today the State Department admitted that there was never any protest at the Libyan embassy, against a Youtube video or anything else. It was a coordinated al qaida attack from start to finish. That is all it ever was, there was never any reason to believe it had anything to do with some mythical protest.
This was admiited tonight by our state department, but it has been common knowledge since at least Sept. 21, ten days after the attack:
Yesterday, however, CBS News reported that witnesses at the scene say there was never an anti-American protest outside the consulate. “That is in direct contradiction to the administration’s account of the incident,” said CBS correspondent Margaret Brennan. In today’s paper, The New York Times also reported that witnesses say no anti-American protests occurred at the consulate: “Libyan witnesses, including two guards at the building, say the area around the compound was quiet until the attackers arrived.”
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/09/timeline-benghazi-attacks/57124/
On Sept. 13, two days after al qaida attacked our emabassy in Benghazi and killed our ambassador, Dog Gone wrote this:
I think it would be poetic justice, after holding the film makers accountable for their efforts to incite insurrection against our government to in turn extradite them to the middle east for a little rough justice there, since they like that violence so very much.
.
http://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/?p=30407&cpage=1#comment-105254
Dog Gone, consider this an intervention. You need help.
You are wrong on virtually every topic you write about. You make stupid mistakes. You jump to conclusions. You cannot evaluate sources and evidence any better than a little child. You are not a danger to your fellow citizens, your country, and democracy itself only because you have no power to impose your will on our political system.
Still, he internet, and our national conversation, is worse off because you choose to join it.
October 10th, 2012 at 6:42 am
Dog Doo Doo;
“my public school education included instruction from a number of teachers with PhDs”
This one quote explains so much! Imagine if these people had actually taught you something other than left wing doctrine? Thanks for exposing why you don’t have a clue.
Teachers deserve to be whipping boys, because just like all union weenies, they are the biggest hypocritical whiners and complainers. I can share several stories about my interactions with my children’s teachers, as well as those of neighbors and friends. On one of these incidents, I had to go to the Superintendent’s office and threaten to sue the school district to get results! They ultimately disciplined the teacher, whom, in my opinion, was an idiot! Overall, there is a huge difference in the quality of the teachers today as opposed to when I went to school in the late 60’s and early 70’s.
I have two friends that got so tired of the stupidity from Dooher and his lying henchmen, that they grabbed other jobs, but retained their teaching credentials to serve as substitutes on occasion. They have told me that on every Friday morning through the school year and many Mondays, their phones ring off the hook from schools looking for subs to fill in for teachers calling in sick! If this wasn’t the typical m.o. of union employees, i.e. calling in sick when they aren’t, I would give them the benefit of the doubt, but when all things are considered, I can’t.
October 10th, 2012 at 6:44 am
DG turns out that the story about the Libyan Consulate you gave us was a complete lie. The AP has a quite different version, a firefight from the start, the dead Libyans were far more likely to have been attacking than defending the ambassador.
The video was just a coverup for gross incompetence in not having anywhere near enough security.
October 10th, 2012 at 8:01 am
It’s nice when Dog Gone visits. Comic relief is always fun. But her tactic isn’t unique and we should recognize it so we can defeat it when others use it.
Mitch’s premise was that school district administrators threaten to cut teachers first, as blackmail to get more tax money to spend on non-teachers stuff like administrators. They’re telling families “pay up or the kids get it.”
Dog Gone’s premise the poor quality of charter schools. That’s simply not responsive to the point. It’s as if her eyes skimmed over Mitch’s piece, found one keyword “school” and it triggered a reflexive response “Charters Teach Poorly.” Maybe so, but they don’t blackmail families and that’s the level DEMOCRAT school administrators have sunk to.
If my choices are “less successful” versus “wicked,” I’ll take the one that’s trying in good faith to do the right thing. Charter schools for me.
.
October 11th, 2012 at 12:16 pm
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