Categories
culture State technology thoughts

GRAMA Answers – A First Pass

I really appreciated the 36 questions that came out of the first meeting of the GRAMA working group and wanted to offer one perspective on a first pass at answering those questions. I will say upfront that the answers provided here are subject to modification or revision based upon more detailed information. Consider this the legislative intent or deliberative process version of any final answers. Before answering the questions I wanted to make one related comment.

When I saw that Common Cause was running a full page ad in the Salt Lake Tribune today calling for the repeal of HB 477 I worried that they were positioning themselves to take some credit after it gets repealed tomorrow (and it will). As citizens we need to be careful in our consumption of information. We need to make sure that we are not fooled by the claims of any interest group. Common Cause appears to be using this situation to help them jump start the reopening of their Utah chapter. I don’t know whether that will be a good thing in the long run or not – I don’t know much about the group – but we should not confuse their core advocacy for open government with any significant work to get this repealed. It was the uproar by the citizens of Utah that brought about this legislative reversal, not the political astuteness of some interest group.

Now, on to the questions:

Categories
Education politics State

The Straw Man of Teacher Pay


photo credit: 2create

I saw a post on Facebook, and later an email, with a title about how overpaid teachers are. The post went on to show mathematically that teachers are not overpaid by any reasonable measurement. Teachers and their unions would certainly appreciate the logic in their favor but the real value that I found in the post was not simply the numbers presented but the example that the post provides of using numbers to keep the debate uninformed. While it showed very convincingly that teachers are not overpaid (either literally or in relation to the service they provide) it masked the complexity of the issue by ignoring the crucial questions of how much we spend on education (it’s much more than teacher pay), whether we can afford the cost (whether or not the cost is a bargain), and what other alternatives we could explore to address the real issue (which is how we make sure that our children have a decent education available to them).

First let me list a few numbers (and their sources) that I would like to use in illustrating what was unsaid in the other post. I would like to thank Becky Edwards for helping me obtain the current numbers for the state of Utah that I am using. (Becky is currently the Representative for House District 20 in Utah and a member of the House Education Committee.)

  • The post compared teaching to babysitting and, using that assumption, concluded that parents should be perfectly happy to pay $20 per day for 6.5 hours of babysitting for each of their school aged children. Using that $20/day figure they calculated that teachers would be making over $100K per year. I don’t expect to use that $100K figure but wanted to include it here to briefly illustrate the conclusion of the original post.
  • The post also claimed that the average teacher salary was only $50K per year. I will be using that number because it seems reasonable and convenient but would like to state that I have made no attempt to independently verify its accuracy or its source.
  • The state of Utah currently spends $3.34 Billion on elementary education per year.
  • The state of Utah currently employs 32,473 elementary school teachers. (As far as I can tell that does not count administrators and other staff.)