If you read the articles about the school, you'd see that some of the teachers, it doesn't specify how many, are already going above and beyond the call of duty. So there is not, anywhere, an indication that your accusation is anything other that partisanship. People already working hard are being asked to work harder. Fine, they asked for more money. If you, as you pretend to claim, support markets, then you would recognize this as a market response.
School not getting results? Fire everybody!
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If you read the articles about the school, you'd see that some of the teachers, it doesn't specify how many, are already going above and beyond the call of duty. So there is not, anywhere, an indication that your accusation is anything other that partisanship. People already working hard are being asked to work harder. Fine, they asked for more money. If you, as you pretend to claim, support markets, then you would recognize this as a market response.
I bet that some individually are going above and beyond the call of duty. But collectively they refused the extra hours, so collectivelly they acted quite selfishly and were quite greedy, considering they already make a handsome pay and the school desperately needs extra effort.
Is that a crime? of course not, it's their right. But the government is also in its right to fire them.
You pretend that you support market results and then you claim it's selfishness that that they don't want to give away something for nothing.
Dude, there's a reason I've been calling you a commie for 2 years, and there you go again proving me right.
You pretend that you support market results and then you claim it's selfishness that that they don't want to give away something for nothing.
Dude, there's a reason I've been calling you a commie for 2 years, and there you go again proving me right.
Oh boy. Did you miss my lonely and bitter effort in the last page, trying to explain to a brick wall that you can't call government negotiation a "market result"?
And IF you are to call that a market result, wouldn't the ultimate market result be the teachers ending up fired? I don't understand why you call their high salary and refusal to work extra hours a "market result", but not they getting their greedy asses fired.
If you believe it was all a "market result", than obviously the "market" decided the teachers were indeed not worth their pay. In other words, you are wrong no matter what.
In a private company subjuct to market rules, if things are going as bad as they are in that school, employees are expected to work more.
You haven't shown me wrong about anything. If the school district can replace the teachers and by doing so improve the performance of the students, then you can make the claim that the teachers were being paid more than was necessary to get good teachers. But not until.
Mise
isle of lucy
Yeah... they could... just like Walmart can....
No, market forces absolutely act on the relationships between government and employee. You said so yourself - that market mechanisms operate in the public sector labour market, and market forces certainly act in wage negotiations. The government is challenged by other players offering a better service -- private schools. If taxpayers don't like what a local governor is doing to schools, the taxpayer votes them out. The incentive structure is different, yes -- the government has an incentive to deliver services to the taxpayer, rather than to deliver profits to shareholders, but this in no way changes the fact that market forces act upon the market for teachers just as they act on the market for shelf-stackers or electricity or cars or anything else. You're merely pointing out differences between one market player and other market players; I could point out that co-operatives and non-profit organisations don't have anything like the incentive structure of many private companies; I could point out that law firms, for example, don't even have shareholders, but partners, who aren't always interested solely in making profit; I could point out that many government-owned companies, such as EDF in France, are operated as a purely profit-making enterprise. Just because the ownership structure public companies are different doesn't mean that they don't participate in the labour market just like any other company, and that their wage negotiations aren't subject to the same market forces as any other company.
And you're arguing that the public sector doesn't participate in the labour market at all...
LucyDuke
staring at the clock
Oh?
That's what's worth talking about. What makes the Colégio de Aplicação so great? Can we implement any of it, bearing in mind that the legality of different types of discipline probably varies from Brazil to state to state?
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Maybe non-unionised jobs have deflated salaries, because of the massive clout of the employer compared to the individual?
Note: I'm not saying that unions are always right, I'm just saying they are sometimes necessary in situations where the employers have far more bargaining power than they ought to. For example, in a nation where one single oil company employs, say, 80% of the working population, that oil company clearly has a lot of power over wages. Similarly, in regions where the auto industry is by far and away the biggest employer, auto companies have too much bargaining power compared to the workers; unions, in this case, level the playing field, and put workers on equal footing with their employers.
Again, I'm not saying this is true in all cases -- indeed, unions have often acted to the detriment of the people they're supposed to represent. And unionisation tends to benefit insiders at the cost of unemployed people on the outside. The point I'm trying to make is that unions may or may not be a Good or Bad Thing(TM). Sometimes they are good, sometimes they are bad.
In this particular case 78k seems like an inflated wage, seeing as how it is much higher than the median income in the area.
Integral
Can't you hear it?
Even though I kinda started this...
I don't think we have enough information to make a "too high/too low" wage decision here, though there is more evidence for the teachers being overpaid than underpaid.
We have that (1) a teacher's base salary in this case is much larger than the median income and (2) the base salary is much higher than the average for the teaching profession. From DT's anecdote it's also higher than the 'combat wages' that urban teachers get.
In short, from the limited information we have it appears that the union was doing exactly what it was supposed to do: limit the quantity supplied of teachers and raise the equilibrium wage rate. It just fell apart when the school administration decided to wipe out the unionized workforce and rehire from scratch. The question remains whether one could hire competent replacements at a lower wage rate. My hunch is that you could lower wages 10% to 20% and still fill the staff with competent teachers; that's given the prevailing wages of teachers in similar conditions. This is not to say that you'd necessarily want to lower the wage rate, only that you probably could.
Unfortunately I do not have access to the countrywide wage microdata that would put these musings on statistically solid grounds. It'd be a simple enough exercise: regress wage vs poverty (% of students on free & reduced price lunch), ESL %, and other controls; see what the conditional mean wage is, compare to the Central Falls wage, and make your inference.
I don't think we have enough information to make a "too high/too low" wage decision here, though there is more evidence for the teachers being overpaid than underpaid.
We have that (1) a teacher's base salary in this case is much larger than the median income and (2) the base salary is much higher than the average for the teaching profession. From DT's anecdote it's also higher than the 'combat wages' that urban teachers get.
In short, from the limited information we have it appears that the union was doing exactly what it was supposed to do: limit the quantity supplied of teachers and raise the equilibrium wage rate. It just fell apart when the school administration decided to wipe out the unionized workforce and rehire from scratch. The question remains whether one could hire competent replacements at a lower wage rate. My hunch is that you could lower wages 10% to 20% and still fill the staff with competent teachers; that's given the prevailing wages of teachers in similar conditions. This is not to say that you'd necessarily want to lower the wage rate, only that you probably could.
Unfortunately I do not have access to the countrywide wage microdata that would put these musings on statistically solid grounds. It'd be a simple enough exercise: regress wage vs poverty (% of students on free & reduced price lunch), ESL %, and other controls; see what the conditional mean wage is, compare to the Central Falls wage, and make your inference.
You make Luiz's mistake of thinking a centrally planned wage will produce better results than a market wage. What if the district cannot attract and retain qualified and motivated people without paying a market wage?
Elta
我不会把这种
For the record (Because my love of unions is well known)
The union had ridiculous demands and deserved what they got.
The union had ridiculous demands and deserved what they got.
I don't know about in America, but at least here, private school teachers get paid way more than public school teachers. My (former) school's principal is the highest paid public school teacher in the state, owing to the fact that it's both a part boarding school and a fully selective school. I think the SMH reported it at something like $A230k. Now, there was another teacher at our school who left to go to one of the top private schools to become head of the History department, for what was rumoured to be a roughly similar figure. So if you're going to use private schools, at least in Australia, as a closer yardstick to measuring the market value of teachers, then it is clear that teachers should be paid more.
Good lord. If only my wife was paid anything near that for teaching. Geez she got ripped off.
Then they will end up like Nevada and be close to last place in education and lie in the media inflating what they say teachers get paid. (which iirc was $45k ish average which is such a lie).
EDIT - What is the socio economic and immigration status of this schools population anyone know?
Then they will end up like Nevada and be close to last place in education and lie in the media inflating what they say teachers get paid. (which iirc was $45k ish average which is such a lie).
EDIT - What is the socio economic and immigration status of this schools population anyone know?
Well, it's not quite as bad as it looks. $A230k = about $US210k. But public school teachers when they start out will only get about $A60k ($US55k), graduating to about $A75k ($US68k) over time, for a normal classroom teacher. The disparity in head teacher of public school and head teacher of private school in the given example, though, is enormous. Head teachers would rake in about $A80-90k ($US72-81k) at a public school, compared to the aforementioned $A230k at private, in that particular instance (although he was particularly high paid, and that was a particularly rich school he went to).
Gilder
Deity
Rhode Island is small enough so that most of the time, teachers don't necessarily live in the town they teach in. My own high school teachers came from places as far away as Bristol and Westerly. Central Falls is very near Providence and even closer to the Massachusetts border. It's extremely unlikely that the teachers actually live there, especially with that kind of cash they were making.
There must be huge state or federal aid coming from somewhere to even dream of setting salaries that high in a dead-end town like Central Falls.
according to the article DT linked earlier.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/education/25central.html
Yeah my wife teaches at a school with similar (maybe even worse) demographics. They do manage a whole lot better than that but always seem to be 'failing' in one category so the whole school get labeled a complete failure. Dumb.
Elta
我不会把这种
Wild stab in the air here, your wife is a teacher at Cheyenne, Mohave, or Canyon Springs?
