New York Public Education Failing : Old Agenda Root Cause

What this all about in New York is the unions and progressive socialist liberal democrats, but I repeat myself, circling the wagon to protect themselves from an ever shrinking influence and membership.

Know to that ever since the advent of Vouchers, Charter Schools and the new digital learning landscape has begun it march into the public learn curve, the unions and their democrat benefactors have doubled down on it's unworkable and outmoded system of teachers protection, tenure, to control how education funding is processed in the community.

After all, it always about the money and who controls it. The unions believe they could hold the community hostage by the power they have over the taxpayer funding of teacher's and their salaries that educate their children.

The strategy is if you don't pay us enough we can't teach the children what they need to become good citizens. But as history has shown the demand for more and more money and less responsibility never ends. But maybe once the funding becomes so expensive and the results produced by public education, the taxpayers will finally say enough is enough.

And in New York this might be the time and place to make a stand. Still, there are a lot of feel good democrats in New York who believe they are powerless to big government, and even worse believe big government has always been the way of things, so not continue as before. Chance are the entire system will have to fail before the general public will take notice.

New York Education Costs Rising due to Teacher Salaries
Source: "What's driving k-12 school costs?" Empire Center, February 3, 2015.

February 20, 2015

New York legislators are embroiled in debate over how to fund K-12 education -- in 2011, a new law gave voters power to cap their property taxes (which fund education), which some New Yorkers are saying has forced schools to make massive cuts to programs and budgets.

According to a report from the Empire Center, New York public schools cut thousands of positions after the recession, yet continued to see rising expenditures, despite drops in enrollment. According to the report:

• Between the 2008-2009 school year and the 2013-2014 school year, New York's median teacher salary increased 11.5 percent, with many districts seeing salary increases twice that size, in large part due to automatic increases linked to employee seniority.
• Including teachers and non-teaching professionals, median salaries increased by more than 40 percent from 2000-2001 to 2013-2014.   
• These wage increases have occurred despite falling enrollment.  The schools were employing almost as many professional staffers in 2013-2014 as they were in 2000-2001; however, there were 304,633 fewer students in 2013-2014.

The report notes that costs have also risen because schools fired teachers using union rules that require the dismissal of younger teachers (so-called "last in, first out" rules). Because teacher contracts generally give much higher salaries based on experience, salary costs have increased.

Moreover, pay increases translate into higher pension costs: according to the report, New York City's employer contribution to its teachers' retirement system grew by 33 percent between the 2008-2009 school year and the 2013-2014 school year, rising from $2.3 billion to $3.1 billion.