Where to Cut?

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One University of Washington professor is proposing a politically-incorrect solution to school district’s budget shortfalls this year. Research associate professor Marguerite Roza suggested in a July 30 briefing that districts might want to consider combining salary rollbacks with layoffs in order to retain more teachers and to keep class sizes low.

Using data from the American Federation of Teachers, Prof. Roza teachers received, on average, salary schedule increases around 2.87 percent per year between 1997 and 2007 and step changes, on average, of 3.16 percent annually. “These across-the-board changes to the schedule come in addition to the average 3.16 percent step change, such that a typical teacher continuing from one year to the next receives an average raise of 6.03 percent each year,” she wrote (emphasis added).

“So what does a district do if facing deep budget cuts and a now-negative [Consumer Price Index], even after implementing a hiring freeze?” she asked. “In some sectors, we might expect a salary freeze or even wage cuts.”

She later added, “In K-12 education, leaders are less likely to roll back or freeze actual wages, in part because they feel bound by the salary schedule…Freezing salaries, however, means either rolling back the schedule (by some negative percentage), or abandoning the schedule so that the step changes won’t apply—both actions have little precedent in districts.”

The study, “The Tradeoff Between Teacher Wages and Layoffs to Meet Budget Cuts,” was published through the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

“This tradeoff between numbers of teachers and salary levels is evident in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where at the time of writing, the school board has decided to lay off 5,400 of its teachers and support personnel,” Prof. Roza. What she doesn’t mention, however, is that employees in the LAUSD protested the district’s attempts to deny lifetime health benefits to new teachers.

“One of the issues that angers teachers most is that the district, while cutting into benefits for everyone, is trying to take away lifetime health benefits only from new hires, in the hope that active-duty teachers will look the other way and breath a sigh of relief,” wrote David Rapkin, a “high school teacher and member of the [United Teachers Los Angeles] board of directors” for the Socialist Worker last December.

“But this transparent attempt at divide and rule isn’t working,” he wrote. “C.C. Love, a high school teacher from Central Area, is one of many who isn’t taking the bait. ‘We refuse to be bamboozled by a contract that pits us against one another,’ she said. ‘If you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.’”

Perhaps more than salaries need changing in the LAUSD.

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.