The other is that we had a period of economic prosperity in this country that was initiated during the Reagan administration, and collapsed during Bush Jr. I’ll not try to give credit or blame to any of the Presidents of that era – each deserve a little of both.

It may have taken educators a while to get a ride on that gravy train, but you did – and I’m glad for it. But those days are over for a while – who knows how long. And it’s a really scary time for many folks in our economy, including me.

I think there’s some psychological equation that goes something like this:

EMOTION = FACTS x SURPRISE FACTOR

For decades, people thought the truth about the teaching profession was that it isn’t so well paid, but has the great benefit of getting summers off. Their impression of how hard teachers work is based on their experience as a student, and from a student’s perspective, it doesn’t look that hard.

I’m not saying that I believe teachers don’t work hard – I’ve spent about 500 hours in an elementary classroom since becoming a school board member, and I know how hard the work is, both when the kids are there, and after they’ve left for the day. You’ll never catch me saying teachers don’t have a tough job.

But most of the public never sees what I’ve seen, or what you’ve lived. They’re just recalling what it was like to be a student. So let’s agree that most – maybe the great majority of community members grossly underestimate the skill and stamina required to be an effective teacher. And that misunderstanding plays strongly into their ‘value equation.’

I’d argue that until recently, few members of the public have understood how teachers are compensated, or what role the teachers’ union plays in determining how teachers are paid. And frankly, as long as the public felt like they were doing well economically, and their taxes not that noticable, they had little interest in expending the energy necessary to find out how school economics really works.

Then the economy softened, and the stock market tanked. Folks who thought they had a lot of paper wealth in their home equity and 401(k) stock funds saw both evaporate seemingly overnight. Losing one’s job on top of that quickly drove folks to dispair – and anger.

Then along comes the school district with yet another property tax levy. When folks ask why now, when most of us are hurting – they are surprised to learn that the answer is that another levy is needed to fund the pay raises and benefits costs built into the collective bargaining agreement with the teachers (which is how 95% of our new levy money is spent). That’s the first surprise.

Then they start to understand that the pay for teachers isn’t as low as they thought. In fact, it’s pretty good (averaging $70,000/yr in most districts around here) – and there’s still those summers off. And not only that, but they can retire in their late 50s and make $80,000/yr for the remaining 25-30 years of their lives – with pretty decent health coverage.

Big surprise. The raw facts of the situation – the teacher pay grid, step increases, base pay increases, contribution toward health insurance, retirement benefits – are magnified by the surprise factor, and the folks of the community getting pretty pissed off.

So they start balking at passing new levies, and the school board counters by saying that if the levy doesn’t pass, they have to cut programming and services, starting with extracurriculars and transportation. The Board has no choice, they’ll say, because they’re bound by the terms of the CBA, with all its built in increases and benefits.

So the people elect new Board members who promise to be tougher negotiators with the union. They try, but the union leaders say, look – we’re only going so far, and if you push any harder, we’ll go on strike and screw up things big time for your kids. It’s ludicrous to say there is any other point of leverage in a teacher strike. Many, perhaps most folks in a community won’t care if the teachers go on strike because they don’t have kids in school. Sure, it will have some impact on everyone’s property values by scaring off potential buyers for a while, but only if the strike is never settled.

But the parents of school age kids will freak out, especially if it screws up sports or graduation requirements. There will be pressure to capitulate to the union demand, which is what the union leaders are counting on. Meanwhile, the levy still doesn’t pass, leading to layoffs and cancellation of all kinds of programs and services – starting with those most visible and painful. It leads to a kind of civil war in the community, and things are never the same again.

We are right at the point of this doomsday scenario in many school districts. Counterintuitively, it’s the most affluent districts who have the greatest risk, because they’ve been able to avoid this crisis the longest, and consequently have been able to shield the community from the facts. That’s a flawed strategy.

Here in central Ohio, the ‘ring suburbs’ about the urban core are one by one fighting the skirmishes that are the precursor to all out war. Our neighboring district – one of the best in the state – is right now in the process of laying off 100+ young teachers. One on the other side of the city is trying to get a levy passed in March – after having one fail in Nov – and if it fails again, they too will end up laying off 100+ teachers. We were fortunate to pass our levy by literally a handful of votes in November, and so are set for now, but I’m not confident that we can get another one passed in 3 years – the interval we’ve promised to stay off the ballot.

Most public school organizations – Board, Administration and Teachers’ Union – just suck at public relations. They try to control information, and that just leads to build up of the SURPRISE FACTOR. When the truth finally comes out, as it is now, the EMOTIONS run high, and a reasonable resolution is near impossible. Once folks take sides, the war is on.

That’s where we are now I fear.

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ps – I’d enjoy that cup of coffee and conversation, but I think we’re a few hundred miles apart. I appreciate a reasonable dialog from which I can learn something, and just maybe open the other’s eyes to a perspective they’ve not had before as well. That’s why I’m happy to invest in this conversation. I can tell you that there’s about zero chance of having a dialog like this with the leaders of our teachers’ union, who fought actively to defeat me in the last election…

But more than anything, I want teachers’ unions to find a way to communicate and negotiate such that it isn’t the kids who are held hostage. Teacher strikes should not be a club in your bag, and for you to even threaten this as a bargaining tactic neutralizes all your claims that “you’re in it for the kids.”

The same is true about your whine about Social Security. We have an interdependent society, and it’s pretty hard to define what is fair. I have no defined benefit pension, and it would be a stretch to say it was even defined contribution, as in even the best years my employer matched only a fraction of what I contributed to my own retirement. Believe me, I contributed all I could so that I could have a shot at surviving retirement.

Now that’s in question. My retirement planning assumed that I should be able to earn 5% interest on safe investments like CDs and municipal bonds. But since so many in our society decided to live well beyond their means on credit cards and second mortgages, our government has chosen to drive interest rates to zero. So while I am still able, I have been forced to return to the workforce to try to slow the consumption of my nest egg.

Oh, and by the way – what has changed the most in my expenses in the last year? My school property taxes. Paying the rising cost of salaries and benefits for our teachers is causing us to cut our family budget to pretty much the basics, and is forcing us to seriously think about selling our home and moving out of the community where we’ve lived for 30 years.

Meanwhile, our state teachers’ pension system is in a ton of trouble because they took a bath in the stock market and the real estate market. They might have been able to ride through that had they not paid out bonus checks when the market was booming (yes, they paid out a “13th paycheck” to retirees for a number of years). The solution first proposed to the retirement system now being significantly underfunded was for the working teachers and the taxpayers to increase their contribution percentage, but the taxpayers have balked at this. We taxpayers made the contribution we agreed to – it was the retirees’ choice to make risky investments and skim off the cream.

The teachers who retired in the last 10 years got quite a windfall. They got to finish their careers at a time when pro-labor laws gave them by far the stronger hand at the bargaining table, which was used in our district and many others to drive the terminal pay from $70,000/yr to $90,000/yr. Then the retirement plan had a kicker added so that a teacher with 35 years of service could retire at 88% of the average of their last three year’s salary. That’s not a bad deal – a pension of $80,000/yr for the rest of one’s life after retiring in one’s late 50s.

Teachers need to quit thinking of themselves as victims. Our economy is a living beast, and each profession seems to have its time in the sun. The last 10 or so years have been good for teachers, from an economic perspective. My friends who are nuclear engineers don’t have it so good today, although they did very well in the 70s. I’d hate to be an aerospace engineer these days – their boom years were the 60s. MBAs and lawyers owned the 90s. Both degrees seem like questionable investments now.

I think teachers have to be careful these days. Those “Teachers have the Most Important Job in the World” bumper stickers are starting to get under the skin of folks who have been hurt badly in this recession. And folks are starting to realize that the thing driving the increase in their school taxes are raises for teachers who seem to already be doing pretty well economically when most of the rest of us have high anxiety about our economic futures.

It doesn’t matter whether or not it was true that teachers got a raw deal in the past. All that matters is the present when it comes to politics and public policy. To continue to play the victim would be a serious political blunder for the teachers’ unions.

The Japanese have a proverb: “the nail standing highest is the first to be hammered.”

I think you vastly understate the power of the teachers’ unions. Check out the “Heavy Hitters” list on OpenSecrets.org, and you’ll see that in the period between 1989 and 2012, the NEA was the sixth largest political contributor in the county, and the AFT was 10th. Put together, their political contributions of $70.7 million during this period were 20% more than the largest group – Act Blue.

In comparison, the American Medical Assoc is 16th on the list, at $28 million – 40% of that spent by NEA+AFT.

Maybe the AMA is just better at lobbying than the NEA/AFT. Maybe the AMA focuses on just a few key things, and accept the rest of the crap dealt to them. You think education is fraught with testing and paperwork, try medicine. Teachers get no where near the professional scrutiny that MDs do. And when was the last time you heard of a teacher being sued for malpractice?

By the way, I have one kid who is a teacher and one who is an MD (in residency). When one compares the cumulative net cash flow between the two (ie amount spend on education vs cumulative earnings), the crossover is at about 37 years of age. MDs tend to do well later in their career – if they’re in the right specialty and practice in the right regions – but it takes them a long time to catch up. I won’t try to compare the relative workload and stress between the two professions, but note that during her residency, my youngest is working 48 weeks/yr, 80-100 hours/wk, and getting paid about the same as a teacher who is the same number of years post getting an undergrad degree.