David Hogg Tweeted this:
So we can’t
-afford textbooks for our children
-regularly fund inner-city schools
-pay our teachers a livable salary
-have free public collegeYet, we can arm teachers sounds like the @NRA is pulling strings to increase gun sales in a record low year. https://t.co/Ca8NbMCpyk
— David Hogg ? (@davidhogg111) August 24, 2018
David Hogg is an angry empty shell. It’s clear that he is a power hungry narcissist, who knows nothing, and is willing to regurgitate any Lefty talking points that will get him more notoriety.
Says David Hogg “We we can’t… pay our teachers a livable salary.”
A bill in Florida from 2015 addressed teachers’ salaries.
Beginning teachers would earn at least a $50,000 salary – starting next school year – under a bill filed this week in Tallahassee.
While the starting pay varies among districts, the state Department of Education says the average salary among all Florida teachers for the 2013-2014 school year was $47,780.
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics says the average salary for all Florida workers is just over $41,000.
So the average teacher’s salary in Florida is $6,780 above the average for Florida workers.
A list of teachers’ salaries by city for 2018, shows that in the area where Hogg lives, Fort Lauderdale teachers make $54,921 and Pembroke Pines teachers make $53,950.
Data from 2012 shows “The country’s 21,656,200 government workers earned an average $51,340 per year.”
The median salary for an FBI agent is $64,313, which makes me wonder how his family affords the house they live in. Then compare teachers’ salaries with the salaries of military commissioned and non-commissioned officers.
There is plenty of debate to be had that we pay our military too little for what they do, but to suggest that a teacher’s salary is not “livable” when it is commensurate with other goverment employees, is bullshit.
John Stossel broke this down on 20/20 in 2006.
Moving way from the salary argument, the Sun Sentinel has reported, and this blog has covered, just how badly the Broward County school system, teachers and administrators, handled the Cruz situation that ultimately led tom the shooting. Why would anybody in their right mind want to secure more money for the very people who lied in reports and covered their asses to fail to stop someone who was clearly a threat from killing kids?
Since giving money to incompetent and undeserving people is what the Left wants, Hogg is not just trying to get more money for teachers, he’s trying to get more money for colleges.
Let’s talk about the disaster that is the American college system.
Here is the Huffington Post: New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators.
The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty, according to an analysis of federal figures.
The disproportionate increase in the number of university staffers who neither teach nor conduct research has continued unabated in more recent years, and slowed only slightly since the start of the economic downturn, during which time colleges and universities have contended that a dearth of resources forced them to sharply raise tuition.
So make work bureaucrats are multiplying and draining all the money out of the schools.
HuffPo isn’t finished yet: Why Are Campus Administrators Making So Much Money?
Americans committed to better living for bosses can take heart at the fact that college and university administrators — unlike their faculty (increasingly reduced to rootless adjuncts) and students (saddled with ever more debt) — are thriving.
In 2011, the last year for which figures are available, 42 private college and university presidents received more than a million dollars each for their work. Robert Zimmer (University of Chicago) was the best-paid, at $3,358,723. At public colleges and universities, nine top administrators garnered more than $1 million each in 2012-2013, with the best-paid, E. Gordon Gee (Ohio State University), receiving $6,057,615.
Since then, it’s likely that the number of millionaire campus presidents has increased, for their numbers have been growing rapidly. Indeed, in 2012-13, the number of public university presidents receiving at least $1 million for their services more than doubled over the previous year.
This is a YUGE blind spot on the Left. The same people who chant “screw the rich” and hate CEOs and business owners never seem to care that college administrators are making bank off of rising tuition.
I’ve said it before, there is a certain salary needed to attract and retain people who have the skills to manage a large business effectively. A school president may deserve as much as a Fortune 1000 CEO if the college has as many people and a budget tantamount to a Fortune 1000 company. But that does’t explain why that school needs a dozen deans of “Diversity and Inclusion,” and an army of liaisons.
Forbes makes this clear: Bureaucrats And Buildings: The Case For Why College Is So Expensive.
The audit took particular aim at the amount of money the system funneled towards administrative expenses. Between fiscal years 2012-13 and 2015-16, the Office of the President’s administrative spending increased by 28%, or $80 million. And 10 executives in the office whose salaries were analyzed by the audit made a total of $3.7 million in FY2014 – $700,000 more than the combined salaries of their highest-paid state employee counterparts.
But ballooning administrative costs are not unique to the University of California system. Over the last decades, the higher education world has witnessed a sharp upswing in administrative spending.
During the 1980-1981 school year, public and private institutions spent $20.7 billion in total on instruction, and $13 billion on academic support, student services and institutional support combined, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. By the 2014-2015 school year, total instructional costs had climbed to $148 billion, while the same grouping of administrative expenses had risen to $122.3 billion.
Put another way, administrative spending comprised just 26% of total educational spending by American colleges in 1980-1981, while instructional spending comprised 41%. Three decades later, the two categories were almost even: administrative spending made up 24% of schools’ total expenditures, while instructional spending made up 29%.
The Atlantic backs this up: The Reason Behind Colleges’ Ballooning Bureaucracies. Universities’ executive, administrative, and managerial offices grew 15 percent during the recession, even as budgets were cut and tuition was increased.
Beyond make work jobs for Leftists who want to grow fat on subsidized tuition, what about the classes being taught.
They are Leftist indoctrinating crap.
Too many college students were never taught the basic referents of liberal education. Most supposedly aware, hip and politically engaged students can’t identify the Battle of Gettysburg or the Parthenon, or explain the idea of compounded interest.
Many students simply cannot do the work that was routinely assigned in the past. In response, as proverbially delicate “snowflakes,” they insist that they are traumatized and can only find remedy in laxer standards, gut courses and faculty deference.
“Studies” activist courses too often are therapeutic. They are neither inductive nor Socratic, and they rarely teach facts, methods and means of learning without insisting on predesignated conclusions. Instead, the student should leave the class with proper group-think and ideological race/class/gender fervor of the professor — a supposed new recruit for the larger progressive project.
The result is many colleges fail at producing useful adults.
bachelor’s degree is no longer proof that any graduate can read critically or write effectively. National college-entrance-test scores have generally declined the last few years, and grading standards have as well.
Too often, universities emulate greenhouses where fragile adults are coddled as if they were hothouse orchids. Hypersensitive students are warned about “micro-aggressions” that in the real world would be imperceptible.
Apprehensive professors are sometimes supposed to offer “trigger warnings” that assume students are delicate Victorians who cannot handle landmark authors such as Joseph Conrad or Mark Twain.
“Safe spaces” are designated areas where traumatized students can be shielded from supposedly hurtful or unwelcome language that should not exist in a just and fair world.
No wonder the country is suffering from a shortage of skilled workers while having a booming surplus of unemployed college kids.
This graph is from a WaPo OpEd What happened to all those unemployable women’s studies majors?
If your major falls into the categories of Other Fields, Social and Behavioral Sciences, or Humanities, expect that chronic underemployment will be your live.
Yes, we need museum curators and researchers, we need writers and artists, we need people to add to the rich diversity of thought in Western Civilization.
However, not every art major will end up a great artist, not every literature major will end up writing a book let alone a NYT best seller, not every anthropologist will end up with a discovery in a museum. Most won’t.
Only the best of the best will do that. If you want to work to be one of those people, more power to you. If you chose that major because it sounds fun and easy, that’s a good reason not to go to college in the first place.
So what will free tuition for all do?
It won’t send more kids to vocational schools to learn electrical work, machining, CAD programming, or HVAC work. It won’t add to the number of doctors, nurses, scientists, or accountants. It will flood schools with more kids who go for the sake of going and will pick majors that sound fun, and funnel more and more money into ranks of make work bureaucrats who push identity politics.
Why? The iron law of bureaucracy, that’s why.
This is what David Hogg is attaching his name to.
It’s not going to make kids any safer. Just further damage the economy at the sake of feelgoodery.
One of the things I rant about concerning “Free Collage” is that sooner rather than later the people doling out the money will choose who gets how much and what they can study. Poor high school grades, failure to do well on the SAT? Two years max at a community college (sadly community college is becoming an additional high school without proms or football). Decent High school grades, but poor SAT math score? Maybe a four year college with a major in Journalism or other humanity if there is an opening in the quota. Great high school grades, great SAT scores across the board? Congratulations post graduate schooling in Engineering, Medicine, Law, or something useful. However the price for this largesse from the government is a requirement to work for the government at a decreed salary for a number of years. For any of the categories, failure to maintain the mandated GPA will result in expulsion and assignment to the unskilled labor pool. After all someone has to clean the bathrooms of the Commissars.
Free University for engineering, medical, technical or free for trade schools for building trades
Excellent wide-ranging piece, J. KB!
To pile on: “University of Michigan Paying $8.4M Annually for Nearly 100 Diversity Staffers” http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/06/04/university-michigan-paying-84m-annually-nearly-100-diversity-staffers
I disagree with Hogg on every issue I have seen him bloviate on. With that being said, teacher pay is nowhere near that, in my experience. I have been teaching for 5 years, and I only make about $42k. My wife has a Masters degree and is in her 14th year as a teacher. She makes less than $49k.
That website is listing TOP pay for teachers. For example: Orange county schools starts teachers at $39.4k, and tops them out at $55k. All of the other counties in central Florida are about the same.
If you are going to compare military pay to teacher pay, compare apples to apples. You have to compare teachers to officers, and don’t forget that military pay comes with all lodging, food, and medical paid for, and they can retire after 20 years.
Pournelle’s Iron Law in action: “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”
In the case of public education, it’s an unfixable problem, because the bureaucrats will just withhold the funds for teachers until they get more money. Which they then mostly spend on themselves.
Then there’s the scam that higher education has turned into. They’re living “max your credit card” lifestyle, except the students get to foot the bill, all for a degree they can’t really use. And for some strange reason, the schools don’t get the blame for this!