Howard Blume reports that charters in Los Angeles are trying to avoid the cost of paying pensions by advising teachers who near retirement age to go to work for the public school system.
His fascinating story begins:
“A Woodland Hills charter school recently made an unusual offer to its veteran teachers: We’ll give you $30,000 if you return to the Los Angeles Unified School District before you retire.
“It wasn’t the teachers that El Camino Real Charter High School wanted to get rid of. It was the cost of their retirement benefits.
“The school’s cost-shifting strategy is one of many flashpoints between traditional public schools and the independent charters they compete with for students and money.
“In this case, it’s a battle over who should pay for an employee’s health benefits after retirement — the charter school or the larger school district.
“Financial challenges are all-but-universal in the education world, and retiree benefits are particularly costly. L.A. Unified’s unfunded liability for employee benefits has escalated to $13.6 billion.
“The El Camino plan would add from $2.5 million to $4.2 million to that deficit, based on district estimates. The idea is that teachers would spend their careers in the charter school, but later transfer to LAUSD to qualify for the huge institution’s retirement benefits.
“Except the district has decided not to play ball.
“Teachers who return to the district, simply to retire, are not entitled to district retirement benefits, general counsel David Holmquist said.
“This would be an obligation that in my view would be the charter’s responsibility,” Holmquist said.”
Blume points out that this decision raises interesting questions about Eli Broad’s plan to open 260 new charter schools, which will require some rethinking when they can’t dump their pension obligations on the public schools.
Guess Eli’s charters will have to stick with Teach for America, whose teachers are usually long gone before qualifying for a pension.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Eli may think pensions, health plans, are unnecessary for “his” schools, period.
That’s his profit margin. Pay less and pocket more.
LAUSD’s Budget, Finance and Audit committee discussed this at their last meeting. This problem exists primarily in conversion high schools because their teachers can choose to return to the district if they do so within 5 years.
Based on the outcome of the BFA meeting, there will no doubt be a new policy put in place to deal with this. It’s also important to note that Granada Hills Charter HS reneged on their original promise to provide lifetime benefits even though it was in their original charter petition. Palisades Charter HS, if I am correct, only offered lifetime benefits to teachers who were already employed at the school when it converted to independent charter status. So, any teachers hired after that are not eligible at all. The problem is the cost and the charters do not want to put that much money away or they want to spend it on other things.
Pensions for any teacher who is retired — in whatever form they take — should not be part of ANY school’s budget, period.
The pensions should be a separate line item. Either they are funded by past contributions or by new taxes. If there is to be a discussion about high costs of pensions for 80 year old retired teachers and the public wants to demand they eat dog food and tell them tough luck, we are breaking our promise and taking away your pension, then that should be something that is debated separately from school funding.
My understanding is that very few current teachers have the kind of high paying retirement payments that old teachers do. And just like certain corporate CEOs got tens of millions in retirement that might seem excessive but the “best and the brightest” board members happily gave it to them, some older retired teachers seem to get extraordinarily high retirement packages. That’s life. Those promises were made and need to be kept.
But to lie about that and pretend that the poorest public schools are “wasting” money because their pupils are charged for all those long retired teachers while the charter schools’ students are free riders? That is truly appalling. And the only people who defend such dishonest budgeting are corrupt and care only about their own pocketbook and not the students in public schools.
El Camino Charter HS won numerous academic decathalon awards over the past decade…so it is both their outstanding teachers, and their location in a middle class, upward striving, neighborhood with a plethora of highly educated parents, that made them a good school.
This is an alarming new wrinkle to pass the expense of retirement benefits off to the truly public LAUSD, and I assume that next this demand will be joined with demanding the public school district also pay the teachers health benefits.
This kind of creative book keeping is another ‘free market’ induced sham and hopefully the major law firms used by the billionaires will not be the adversaries of the once again, ripped off public. Certainly the charterizers can build these benefits for teachers (who are not allowed to unionize) into their budgets as a line item. And of course it will affect their profit margin. But then, they chose to be a “public” charter, but one that cannot use property taxation for funding…at least so far.
If this issue is to be decided in the court system, it could rapidly multiply with other charters joining as a class action, and making the same illegitimate demands, and It could be a major HUGE cost in defending for LAUSD. Where will O’Melveny stand? Who will they represent, the charters or LAUSD?
Addendum…for once, I agree with the LAUSD AG, David Holmquist that this is NOT the obligation of the District.
In the experience of the several novice teachers that I know, it is astronomically difficult to land a position in a public school, a charter school, a catholic school, a private school. Perhaps the odds of getting a position have increased (?) as veteran teachers retire, other teachers leave the profession, the amount of teachers, generally, reaches a downturn. It takes on average, from those I know, three years to get a teaching job. Catholic schools are closing. Charters are opening and being filled, if I recall the figure correctly, 80/90% by TFA, public schools in urban districts are partnered with TFA, and your traditionally trained teachers are turned away and relegated to substituting.
Given the lack of positions, and, generally, the lack of hiring going on, I cannot imagine that veteran teachers, near retiring, would fare any better in the job market than novice teachers. With the proliferation of charters being filled by TFA, districts being filled by TFA, veterans being thrown in rubber rooms, and novices being turned away, the charter school’s notion that the public school will even have positions open/available for veteran teachers wishing to retire, is laughable.
Meanwhile, the question that begs to be asked is: Are there charter school teachers nearing retirement age? I thought most charters were revolving doors for teachers and they weren’t allowed to stick around for more than 2/3 years, tops. Isn’t that the way?
Charters…good for nothing, except circumventing tax responsibilities, and lining the pockets of developers, realtors, landlords, privitazers, grifters, etc.
So, they throw back the students they don’t want (who make their secret sauce taste like dirt) and now they want to throw back the teachers who will cost them benefits? Its laughable, and tragic at the same time.
I guess the fact that Walmart offers nothing to its employees but part time work, no benefits, and seminars in getting on food stamps and obamacare, that should work for charter school teachers, yes? I wonder what type of benefits the administrators give themselves. I bet you they give themselves cadillac plans of all sorts, and golden parachutes, etc.
Shame on them.
People find out the hard way that, when it comes to charters and privatization and the reality of rheephorm:
Staff, students, parents, the community at large—when rheephormsters diminish and demean one and get away with it, they feel emboldened to sucker punch everyone else.
But touch a hair on their heads—and suddenly they’re screaming foul.
Shame on them? Are they capable of feeling shame?
Experience has proven otherwise.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
All decisions have consequences, and teachers need to understand these before they get involved in a game of ping pong with pensions on the line. Anyone that works for a charter should realize the charter may try to unload any responsibility to the employee. If employees do not belong to a union and are at will employees, they can be fired “at will.” They will have little recourse.
Teachers all over the US work at paltry wages with the understanding that at least in their old age they will have a modest pension and a modicum of health benefits to stay alive.
NY Parent commenter here, and so many others, clammer to cut even these and imply, as stated by Ms. Cartwheel, Librarian, that they seem to expect older teachers to hustle to the ice floe for rapid, but money saving, death.
The public can be very cold when it comes to money. Too bad they seem to forego belief in the Golden Rule.
I hope young talented people keep their eyes wide open before they choose to be educators…never thought that this old war horse, me, would write these words.
Ellen Lubic, you misunderstand my point (and I apologize because it was not clear).
I don’t begrudge any teacher his or her pension, nor do I want to cut their pensions.
What I want is an honest discussion about the various costs of education. Right now, retired teachers’ pensions are often charged JUST to current public school students as a per pupil expenditure. It makes no sense since that cost has nothing to do with those students and misleads the public into thinking that public schools are receiving far more money than they are. It is hidden in a way that hugely benefits the privatizers who run charter schools.
Retired teachers’ pensions need to be accounted for separately as a budget item. You can’t hide those historical costs by claiming that your neighborhood school is spending $15,000 per pupil if $5,000 per pupil is spent to pay out retiree benefits that weren’t properly funded in the past.
In the long run, this honesty benefits everyone. If public schools actually receive $10,000 per pupil once retiree benefits are not charged to each student, then charter schools who claim to be able to do it for less would receive $9,000 per pupil and not $14,000 because that is still “less” than the $15,000 charged to public school students, even if 1/3 is spent to pay out retiree benefits.
I want all retired teachers to get their full pensions. But I think it is absurd that ONLY public school students pay it because people are very dishonest about how public schools’ per student “allocation” is really spent. Every citizen is responsible for paying the benefits of retired teachers just like we are responsible for paying the benefits of retirees who get social security. It was promised and if we allowed our government to use the money that should have been put aside to give big tax breaks to the wealthy instead of putting it in that “lockbox” where it should have been, that is the responsibility of all taxpayers. According to the charter folks now, it is only the responsibility of the poorest at-risk kids who are left in public schools, and that is just plain wrong.
Thank you for clarifying your point.
It is clear that funding pensions cannot be based solely on property site taxation. When the country went into an economic dive in 2008, districts all over the nation lost huge amounts of taxes as mortgages defaluted and taxes could not be collected, due to the false fiduciary banksters use of derivatives (as a result of the deregulators and the death of Glass Steagall in 1999)…then the rise of phony and illegal credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations…and schools still suffer. I agree that there must be a better way to fund public schools.
In California, the failed cities of San Bernardino and Stockton attempt to avoid all pension payments by declaring bankruptcy. This includes teachers, firefighters, and other middle class vital job holders.
This is so important. In New York city, it seems that public school students are charged for ALL the costs of retired teachers — even if they retired decades ago!
If you look at the school-based budgets of the typical NYC public schools which take and KEEP all students (and can’t simply suspend them until their parents get the message that the child should leave), they manage on far less than $10,000 per student, while charter schools get over $14,000 per pupil with the ability to get rid of all the expensive students. But public school students are charged nearly twice what they actually receive. And much of the difference is the huge cost of the pensions for teachers who retired years ago — not the contributions to current teachers pensions.
It’s the dirty little secret that apparently both sides like. Charter schools get to claim they are “teaching for less” while profiting mightily. It’s no wonder that even the poorest charter schools were able to come up with funds for their own rent since their students weren’t burdened with the pension costs of long retired teachers. And the rich ones who also benefitted from Bloomberg’s policies of giving the charters whose boards his friends sat on free rent had plenty of money for marketing and PR and high administrative salaries. And no one else wants to talk about the high cost of pensions because hey, we might need to raise taxes on the wealthy to make up for the fact that the years in which they paid low taxes there was no money to put into retirement and therefore current pupils (but ONLY public school students) pay for pensions.
It is only when the pension costs of RETIRED teachers are looked at as a separate budget line that we can truly see whether public schools are “wasting” money as the people who hate poor kids who aren’t strivers claim, or whether the poorest kids that charter schools send back to public schools are being charged for costs that have nothing to do with education and that charter schools believe their kids should be exempt from paying. And the more kids in charters, the more costs are then charged to public school kids. No wonder the budgets of public schools are decimated while charter schools get more and more luxuries. In a fully public school system, a ten million dollar pension cost for retired teachers is charged to all 100,000 current public school students. In the new privatized system, only the 80,000 students now pay it! And if those public schools teaching them beg for more money because their students are now charged even more for pension costs, the charters claim it is more that they should get, attract more of the middle class kids with their luxuries, and therefore leave even fewer kids who now have to cover even more costs of pensions.
We need a good reporter to look at the REAL budgets of public schools and private schools and see how much is spent on teachers and classroom costs. It is clear the public schools have far less per student with far more at-risk students with expensive needs.
Question- what do you mean when you say that public school students pay for pensions? How do they pay?
Thanks
What I mean is that the pro-privatization folks claim that public schools get over $20,000 per pupil in NYC. But when you look at their school-based budgets — which are DIRECTLY comparable to charter school budgets (teachers, educational supplies, rent not included because it is now a freebie for charters) — you see that charters get $14,000 and some school based budgets are as low as $8,500 per pupil (like PS 87). That is a significant difference. And the pension costs of long retired teachers are most certainly included in the amount that those children are supposedly getting and wasting and that charter schools insist that they need to “compete” with those public schools with so much money who are actually running public schools on a fraction of what charter schools do. And not even kicking out all their expensive kids!
^^correction, some public schools get even LESS than 8,000 per student in funding. PS 29 in Brooklyn receives less than $7,500 per student in their galaxy budget. Of course, that low per pupil costs allows the DOE to spend a whopping $16,600 per student in a nearby school that housing a large program for students with autism. That is what happens when all students are in the SAME system — the ones who are less expensive to educate make up for the costs of the ones who are more. That is a good use of public funding.
A corrupt use of public funding is to give charter schools so much money when they don’t have to educate any of the expensive students. It’s nice for their administrators who can buy themselves nice luxuries and pay themselves high salaries, and nice for the well-behaved kids who can work at grade level without significant extra money or time needed. But as a use of public funds, it is terrible giving the most money to private operators to do the cheapest job.
^^my apologies, I got away from my larger point which is that those public school students — whether they are the kids with autism or the gen ed kids — are also charged for all costs of retired teachers. It comes directly from the money “charged” to their school. When the charter school folks have their way and the 50% of the cheapest to educate kids are in charter schools, the remaining 50% of the high needs kids in public will ALSO be charged all those charter students’ share of pension costs. So charters will be able to claim $25,000 a year for each of their student in the name of “fairness”. Or in the name of “we don’t care at all about the unworthy students not in charters because they are violent hellions who don’t deserve well-funded schools”.
Thank you Robert for asking that question. I am beginning to think that all of the “long retired teachers” are viewed a free loaders. Maybe they should all drop dead within a reasonable amount of time.
I recently retired and I can tell you 1.) I earned my retirement and 2.) I need my retirement. I hope nobody holds that against me.
Ms. Cartwheel, I don’t consider long retired teachers “freeloaders”. I think they deserve their pensions far more than the corporate CEOs who drove a company into the ground and walked away with tens of millions of dollars.
However, right now the costs of every retired teacher in the system — at least in NYC — is part of the per pupil expenditure of NYC schools. It is hidden in such a way to make the public believe that those public schools are getting millions more than charter schools and simply “wasting” it on luxuries like pencils and paper. Middle class public schools have parents make up the difference from their own donations so the school can at least offer a decent education. Poor public schools don’t have those parents and they continue in their decrepit buildings, teachers using their own money to buy supplies, and the public believes in the lie that those poor public schools are getting all the money that is taken from the budgets to pay for retired teachers pensions and all kinds of other “debt services” that are historical costs charged only to public school students. The more charter school students there are, the higher the amount of debt service and pension costs charged to the remaining public school students and the less those schools have in their budgets to actually educate the current students in their schools.
That kind of dishonesty helps no one except the privatizers who want to pretend that the charter schools that get a pass on all those costs are using “less” money when they actually receive far more.
NYC public school parent: “dishonesty” is an apt description.
I remember a similar example in NJ brought up by Jersey Jazzman. Charters wanted to get the same per pupil amount as real public schools but one of the hitches was that the costs of busing charter students to their charter schools came out of public school budgets from their per pupil spending!
So the charters wanted a twofer: have others pay for busing THEIR students while getting the same amount of money and not having to pay for busing THEIR OWN students.
As in so many other instances, the charter/privatizer sector isn’t “doing more with less” but robbing Peter (us) to pay Paul (themselves).
While still claiming the saintly mantle of poverty at the same time.
What a bunch of self-serving and self-aggrandizing hypocrites and liars.
That’s the way the heavyweights of rheephorm roll…
😎
NYC Charter schools get the same as public schools, but out of the public school student allocation comes all the costs for RETIRED teacher pensions, building maintenance, buses, crossing guards, etc.
Charter schools teach the cheapest to educate kids with the most money. When they paid their own rent, that made sense. Once Bloomberg decided to give his pet charter schools free rent and maintenance, guess who got charged for those out of their per pupil allocations? Public school students! it was a win-win for those truly reprehensible charters because not only did they get the money, they also got to take it right out of the mouths of the poorest students and help their schools become even more underfunded.
It astonishes me that the pro-charter folks can look themselves in the mirror as they laugh at all the money they take from the most vulnerable kids while kicking them to the curb in glee. Shameful.
IF the charter schools were paying their own full costs would you still be against them?
Harlan, if they received no public funds, I would support them
Harlan, if charter schools were paying all their own costs, I would flip the system. Public schools have the right to kick out any kids who they don’t want to educate to the charter school which is now obligated to teach them.
Do YOU agree with that? Or would you then be “against” public schools?
Somehow I suspect you want charter schools to be able to get rid of the kids who they find too much bother to teach and public schools to have the obligation to take them all — which is our current system. Let’s flip it and see what happens? I am just calling your bluff since we both know most charters would fail. I would strongly support the ones who succeeded.
Actually, I’d much prefer there be no charters and to have all public schools performing well. Unfortunately that is NOT the case, but blaming charters is a diversionary tactic from self examination.
If teachers or students interfere with your profit margin, cast them off. Throw those lives away, for greediness sake!
Thanks, Diane and Howard Blume for goodness.
The real problem is defined benefit pensions and retirement benefits. From now on all retirement benefits should be only defined contributions.
Hah!
Which means that teachers might never be able to retire. We had a teacher in the school who taught until he was 83. It wasn’t a good scenario for him or his students. But the defined contributions pensions have so little money in them that there’s no way people could retire on them, particularly in a down economy.
Defined contribution is the biggest fraud perpetrated on American workers in our history. It was created to offload retirement costs from company books to individual workers. Few workers have the time, ability, or connections to have defined contribution as a retirement plan. However, fund managers can make billions charging management fees, often eroding any gains by the employees. Many teachers also do not receive Social Security, our nation’s defined benefit plan. I often wonder how many Social Security recipients would give up their generous retirement plan for a national defined contribution one.
Yes, Mathvale..and Baby Bush tried to get all 401K contributions, and IRAs, to be delivered into the hands of the Wall Street manipulators. Now Trump wants to do the same…and his buddy Hillary, if she wins, probably will go even further. CalPERS has always been the goal of the Tilson/Bush types and with the poor managers at this largest retirement management org, it could come to pass.
The real problem is the greed of unfettered capitalism. All for me, and none for thee.
Before you know it, the banks will be charging the homeless to sleep under bridges.
http://www.alternet.org/comments/economy/new-poll-shows-majority-young-americans-oppose-capitalism#disqus_thread
In Harlan’s perfect Ayn Randian world old people & the disabled would eat cat food and freeze in the winter.
I’ve become accustomed to the abuse and it doesn’t bother me THAT much. It is a real question, however, how to provide for the retirement of public employees. At present, the defined benefit plans are underfunded in general. It’s a practical problem. No one wants to take away even ill-considered benefits already granted. Snarling at me and playing the Rand card, as if that were dispositive, doesn’t do anything to make the problem go away or to solve it. I don’t know enough about economics in general to take an overall view of things, but I do think it is corrupt of any employer to promise benefits based on future income. That’s a strong word, corrupt, but not too strong for the reality. That’s what’s wrong with Bernie’s program, much as I am charmed by the man, and agree with his wishes; he is making promises based on future income, over which neither he nor anyone else has any guaranteed control. Teachers like to teach in financially sound districts because their bankruptcy is unlikely. But it can happen. Detroit is still not fully sorted out.
It’s a shame, Harlan doesn’t remember when many Americans retired with pensions. He could advocate for people who work for a living and, resent hedge funders like Pete Peterson, who has spent a half-billion to destroy workers’ deferred compensation (Social Security). Labor hasn’t seen a real wage increase in 40 years. Their rewards for productivity gains have gone to Wall Street, and in return, the financial sector drags down GDP by an estimated 2%.
All very confusing to me. I’m an economic naievetist (if that’s a real word). So many here post with such passion as if they really understood what is going on. I do not. But it does seem to me that “greed” of “bad people” is much too simple an explanation. Maybe it is the true explanation, but I wish people would explain the fundamental simple economics of things, even though, of course, no body is under any obligation to educate me. I try to do my own thinking, but what seems to me to be just common sense, i.e. save for retirement up front and as you go, receives passionate and vitriolic objection. If I set out to open a school I would NEVER, just NEVER, promise to pay benefits in the future that I did not know whether the enrollment would support. Every year’s budget would have to balance. Each year. I’d hire the best people I could but I would NEVER say, “take less pay for now and down the road I’ll take care of you.” That’s not even ethical, because no one can predict the future. No one. I suppose SOME people foresaw the consequences of the Community Development Act which required banks to lend to people who couldn’t afford a house, and I suppose SOME people saw that the bundling of those mortgages into securities was a bubble, but I had never heard of it until a long article in the WSJ after the crash explained about the bundling and “tranches.” This business of underfunded pension funds is, to my mind, a matter of political passion. When times are good, states can get by with it; when times go bad and tax revenue falls, they get into trouble. I should think that teachers would DEMAND up front funding just to be on the safe side.
I meant to say “should NOT be a matter of political passion.”
Harlan, banks were never “required” to lend to people who couldn’t afford a house. You completely misunderstand what happened.
The government said you could not REFUSE to lend to a person with a good job because he happened to be a minority or wanted to buy property in a minority neighborhood that the bank decided was too risky. The banks said, “okay, if you force us to do that, then we are going to start lending to anyone we can find because we own the politicians and they will never regulate us and we can screw up and get bailed out.”
No one forsaw the greed of the mortgage lenders. No one told they they MUST offer no income mortgages. No one told them they MUST bundle those high risk mortgages in a way so that the buyers had no idea it was a sucker bet. But shame on you for pretending that bankers’ hands were forced.
Thank you for this different view of the way bankers reacted to the Community Development Act. I still see it as an unintended consequence of an honest effort to decrease economic discrimination and redlining. The government should not be in the business of correcting economic social ills. I still blame the government more than the bankers. Shame on YOU for thinking human nature is not fundamentally corrupt.
Harlan Underhill says: “Shame on YOU for thinking human nature is not fundamentally corrupt.”
You nailed it, Harlan. That’s why charter schools – which started as an “honest effort” to create better schools for at-risk kids — have become fundamentally corrupt. They realized that the only profit to be made was in educating the cheapest kids and making any expensive students feel “misery” until they left for the public schools which had to take them in.
Harlan,
The average cost of state public pensions is 3% of state budgets, less than the “corporate welfare” that states give out. Many state pensioners paid into their state government, in lieu of Social Security, They do not qualify for S.S. and, there are prohibitions against 401 k’s for them. They work for the people of the state to provide essential services. The only reason to throw out the state pension system is to create the playbook to eliminate its parallel, Social Security.
The US is on a path to return to a population of day laborers, some of whom may be able to cobble together enough to make retirement investments for hedge funders like Pete Peterson to manage. Traditionally, employees/retirees have relied on financial managers, who have no requirement for fiduciary obligation (recent bill passed by the U.S. House). Currently, the average employee/retiree loses about 25% of his investment, to fees. Should a person retire at the peak of Wall Street’s manipulation of markets (they profit in down markets from short sales), he is sh_t out of luck.
Social Security (like state pensions), with monthly guaranteed payments, assure people (if their medical costs aren’t too high) don’t have to beg on the streets for food. To me, the most productive nation in the world (mostly, the result of labors’ efforts) is a nicer place to live, when I know excruciating poverty has some limits.
Just a tip, if you’re listening to the right wing, they’re the promotional part of the scheme to make sure that the 6 heirs to the Walton fortune get more than what they currently have, which is equivalent to the combined wealth of 40% of Americans.
I read about this.
This charter basically told its teachers — some formerly LAUSD teachers,
some not—that they’ll pay them a $30,000 bonus if they will return to work
in LAUSD, or switch to LAUSD just prior to retirement.
The charter folks want those teachers to work at least one more year
in LAUSD just before retiring, and they’re bribing them a one-time
bonus buyout of $30,000 to do so.
Why?
It’s not the teachers that the charter folks want gone…
it’s their retirement costs.
That $30,000 would be a mere minuscule fraction
of what the charter would have to pay in retirement if those
teachers finished their careers at the charter. If they then
jumped ship to LAUSD just before retiring, LAUSD would be
stuck with the costs. A charter advocate defends this,
saying that the charter in question is “trying to do right
by the teachers” involved.
Huh?
If, after so many years at the charter, the teachers return to or switch
to working at LAUSD to finish their teaching careers., the charter
gets out of paying retirement.
And Jack…why would LAUSD hire them back? They are not of the same status as the Garcetti one term, ed advisor, who took a LoA to work for the city while being paid by LAUSD. She had about 30 years with LAUSD as a teacher and an administrator, and now will be there until she is 65, and then collect the total of her benefits.
However, we have not seen LAUSD even hire back many of the teachers, counselors, librarians, etc. that they fired, much less hiring back offending charter teachers who dumped their public ed jobs. They are however hiring TFA kids at about $36K a year with NO benefits, and they are still firing long term teachers and/or adding them to the ‘teacher jail’ population in order to cut the budget and swipe their benefits BEFORE they vest for a lifetime…and I predict that will be the way of it for a long time.
Our city, which has the second largest enrollment in the Nation, and the most complex and diverse population in the US with about 106 languages spoken in the District, is unique.
I wish that the conversation could stick to our problems here and now, and that NY, which is spoken of on this site at least a few times a day, to be the major topic another time.
Please California and west coasters, jump into this conversation. Like Vergara, this new twist could kill off our public ed very fast…and it all starts in California where most of the billionaires LOVE to live in their mansions, lolling in the great weather while they think of new ways to steal from the rest of us.
“and it all starts in California where most of the billionaires LOVE to live in their mansions, lolling in the great weather while they think of new ways to steal from the rest of us.”
Do we know the political affiliation of these California [Silicon Valley?] billionaires?
I am sorry if I hijacked this conversation.
Howard Blume’s story is all about what the charter school movement is really about.
Privatize the profits of running a charter school. Socialize the costs of running a charter school. Make public school students pay their own share of costs AND make sure they are also charged for any of the extra costs that charter schools believe need to get off their books. With their billionaire backers and their politician friends making sure charters profit handsomely while public schools are charged for as many of their costs as they can get away with.
It’s a sure-fire recipe to destroy public education. As long as public schools pay their own costs plus all the costs that charter schools can foist upon them, they will become so debt ridden that they will cease to exist.
Yes, Harlan, you must have taken a long vacation not to know the DFER leaders of the Billionaire Brigade in California, including Eli Broad, David Welch, the Wassermans, the Resnicks, and others. All are Dems by the standard of voter registration. All are major donors to Hillary.
But then, join them with their NY hedge fund partners like Whitney Tilson and his clones on Wall Street, all also Dems, who are selling their clients classes on how to invest in Public Education. And don’t forget the prime immigrant, Rupert Murdoch, who also is a HIllary supporter. And all the Hollywood crowd like Geffen etc., some are only multi millionaires…but all are registered Dems.
FYI…as am I, a lowly educator who had high hopes for Bernie.
On the subject of worker pay, I just found this YouTube video from CRACKED, with a critique of UBER, one that is relevant to what you posted.
( 8:01 – )
( 8:01 – )
CRACKED references the fast-dropping pay for Uber drivers. Lately, it’s fallen to $9/hour.
Why do they keep lowering the pay for their drivers?
CRACKED:
“(UBER) has been slashing their pay ever since (they started) … Some of (the reason) is just because they can.
“How do you maintain good drivers if you gradually lower what you’re paying them?
“You don’t.
” If … (As a consequence of lowering salary … ) you lose great drivers while also increasing or maintaining the demand, which can only mean that you’re incentivizing worse drivers — the kind of person whose time IS worth less than $9/hour — to sign up and snag as many rides as they can.”
——————
I also did a Google search and found that a lot of Teach for America Corps Members teacher for the minimum two years, work for the TFA organization in the Recruitment and Marketing Departments, then move on to…
You guessed — UBER, where they make big money in those same departments. I found countless Linkedin profiles that have this resume.
Pass the buck . . .
New way to “pick up girls.”
Harlan,
I thought you were dead.
Harlan, you’re not dead.
Welcome back!
Danke!
Harlanu2@gmail.com Sent from my iPad
>
Wow . .. The las time you wrote to me in German is when you sent me all those obituaries from the NY Times . .
In addition, that would negate all the effort the district spent getting rid of older, veteran teachers before they reached retirement age, accuse them of unsubstantiated acts and fire them. This is like karma coming back on the district because the veterans you try to push out, try to return and claim these benefits.
I repeat, the problem is the contractual promise to provide future benefits when no one can predict the future economy. A defined contribution arrangement is by definition fully funded at the person’s retirement. Teaching in a good school is the best work in the world, but it’s not rocket science. Some people have a gift for it, but it is not, what one might call intellectually demanding, once one has a good text book(psychologically demanding of course).
It’s not discrimination against teachers to point to the impracticality of defined benefit pensions. It’s what killed the old GM too. It’s a bad idea anywhere it is practiced. And its abuse by public employees of all sorts is what generates the unpleasant backlash against public education, which is, after all one of the fundamental glories of the USA. Imagine, education for everyone. Everyone.
How much more enlightened and democratic can one be?
Maybe as enlightened as Japan?
Trying to steal promised wages from the elderly because it turned out the money that should have been put aside was instead given to big donors in tax breaks or funding for their pet projects would be considered appalling in Japan. If the elderly retired folks were promised a pension, there aren’t people clamoring for how they can take it away and tell them they only get half of what they expected.
If you want to argue that we should change the system for current teachers or new hires, then we should have that debate separately. In fact, new hires often do have lesser pension promises now. The problem is that there are people who want to take back the money promised to people who worked 40 years in a relatively low-paying job thinking they had a guaranteed pension.
But there are certainly members of the public — often people who became billionaires because they had no moral compass — who think we should do the same with every military retiree and policeman and firefighter. Tell them we were just kidding and they don’t get a pension anymore. We can’t afford it because there are wars to wage, military contractors to overpay, and tax reductions for billionaires that are far more important.
Yep, that’s what Utah did. Teachers new to the system have to teach for FORTY YEARS in order to vest. How appalling is that? We need to take care of people. Period. This extending of time means that you WILL have people who are quite elderly, or with significant health problems, continue to teach, because they can’t retire. How is that good for anyone? And why should we be punishing the younger generation? That’s ANOTHER way to not attract new people to the profession.
And Utah’s pension was and is fully funded. This was a “solution” without a problem. And firefighters and police weren’t affected by the pension “reform.” They each have 25 years to vest. Before, for teachers, it was 30.
Their solution to a non-problem unfairly impacts teachers, 75% of whom are women. It is a symptom of the low regard people have for teachers these days. Some states like New Jersey have failed to pay into pensions and have mismanaged the state’s pension system. Both of my parents worked for companies and received defined benefit pensions, and it neither bankrupted or destroyed the companies. Eliminating defined benefit pensions, even when it is not necessary, is part of the rhetoric of the 1% to get all of us to readjust our ever lowering expectations.
Good point retired! NJ pension is reportedly $40 billion in the red. It is expected to implode a few years down the road. Do they have vegetarian dog food?
Wow folks, I’m feeling the love. I was in an intellectually undemanding job and an abusing public employee. Oh the shame!!!
An ugly thing happened in the corporate sector when companies who had promised defined benefits to their employees ran them in ethical ways.
Corporate raiders saw that well-funded pension fund as an asset ripe for plundering. Buy a company, reward the buyers by paying enormous bonuses while decimating that “overfunded” pension plan! All legal if you had the chutzpah and had no moral compass to tell the difference between right and wrong. Greed is good! Pretend that the stock market rise means there is no need to fund those pensions — the rich CEOs need that money more and they deserve it for recognizing how wasteful it is to have that money sitting there to fund pensions!
Meanwhile when that pension fund went bankrupt years later, did it matter that the people who walked away with millions and millions to mismanage the company were wrong? Of course not! Because they were now rich enough to buy politicians to let them plunder the next public asset. And the people who pay the cost will never be the ones who ran the company into the ground, walked away with millions, and put the blame on “greedy workers” for daring to think they deserved the promised pensions.
The fact that these greedy people seem to have bought themselves nearly every politician in both parties allows them to get away with it. The demise of the middle class and the rise of Donald Trump is on them. They have succeeded in making struggling lower middle class Americans blame other struggling middle class Americans because that keeps them from voting for politicians who might actually limit their greed. And to them, greed is good. The fact that those people have forgotten everything this country stood for is something I hope their children someday blame them for, when they are living off their parents billions behind gated and armed communities. Or have moved to Western Europe where only the countries with a strong safety net are where rich people want to settle.
Meanwhile, it is the 30 year retired teacher who is “greedy” for wanting her pension at age 75. Not the people who stole their pensions and made billions and insist that if their taxes are raised and they “only” have 200 million income instead of 400 million each year they will suffer great harm. Nope, those are the ones who politicians believe know how to tell us to educate our kids. No moral compasses, but they sure believe that their “principles” will teach children how to be just as immoral as they are.
Eli Broad did something like this in Detroit, with the charter district he created and ran. Public schools students had $400 less in funding per year than charter students, because the public school students were servicing the accrued district debt.
A state legislator in MI had to FOIL emails to find this out- none of it was publicly available. Can you imagine? An elected state representative had to file a FOIA demand to get correspondence related to “public schools”.
Transparency in ed reform is an absolute joke. It’s bad enough they don’t regulate any of this- they also conduct all these billionaire purchases of school districts in the dark.
This is what I mean. It is appalling that servicing past debt is ONLY charged to current public school students out of their per pupil allocation. The fewer public school students there are, the more their budgets are used to pay for that debt. And then charter school students get to keep their entire share? It’s a sign of the terrible education reporters that this hasn’t been covered clearly.
It’s amusing how the Obama Administration has stopped (publicly) cheerleading these Broad take-overs.
Duncan himself traveled to Detroit to promote Broad’s last charter project.
It must be an election year 🙂
I was confused and frankly shocked after reading Diane’s headline and blog post: charter school teachers are taking jobs at LAUSD schools just to cash in on a pension?
But then I read the actual article. These are veteran LAUSD teachers who are vested in the LAUSD pension system, and the charter school in question is unionized. Most importantly, LAUSD and UTLA signed an agreement giving this charter school’s teachers up to five years to return to a traditional LAUSD school, no questions asked.
It is essential that school districts fulfill contracts, agreements, and obligations to their employees. It’s utterly shameful that LAUSD violated this contract.
It’s also important to remember that running a school district entails many, many more expenses apart from just pedagogical salaries, books, and pension payments. There’s the cost of building and maintaining school buildings, as well as the energy required to heat, cool, and illuminate them. There’s food and busing, custodial staff, support staff like nurses, school security officials, and food workers, and of course the considerable numbers of administrative employees who don’t work in schools. The biggest cost, though, is employee fringe benefits: health, vision, dental, and disability insurance. Anyone interested in learning more about the size and types of these costs in a big-city district should examine the table on page 19 of this PDF: http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/new-york-city-public-school-indicators-demographics-resources-outcomes-october-2015.pdf
Tim, you and I both know that charter schools in NYC are receiving a per pupil share that is nearly twice as much as most elementary schools get.
By the way, EVERY cost you just listed is a freebie for charter schools. Guess who pays for their cost? My kid and all the other public school kids who pay the charter school children’s share as well as their own.
By the way, I don’t understand people like you Tim, who truly seem to despise any child who a charter deems unteachable — which in the case of your favorite charter is a lot of them!
Why do you support the richest charters getting richer by TAKING from the poorest students? Don’t they have enough from their billionaire donors? Is it really not a “win” unless they can take money right out of the hands of the public school kids who need it most?
I don’t believe any parent with kids could be as gleeful as you always are when you see a chance to take money from the poorest children. Do you really have kids? Do you teach them that some kids just aren’t worth and that you wish they would disappear? Because that is certainly what I always hear you posting on here.
The “2016 National Forum on K-12 (venture) Philanthropy” will be held Sept. 13-14 at the Sofitel Hotel, San Francisco Bay Area, in Redwood City, Calf. Presenters will include people from the Arnold/Walton Foundations and Summit whatever, as well as others.
“The Bay Area is the epicenter” for profits on the backs of kids, taxpayers and communities. It is the epicenter of the takeover of our national government (substituting oligarchs for a representative government of the people, by the people and, for the people).
Charter school debt returns 10-18% to Wall Street. Reed Hastings has called for the end of democratically elected school boards.
Should a California earthquake occur, taking out only those who work against American democracy, a cheer, but, no lament, would be merited.
I taught for 16 years in one CA public school district, then moved to another. I need to work in my “new” district, Lbusd, for 17 years to qualify for healthcare coverage in retirement. I’m on year 14 right now. 30 years in CA public schools so far, and no retirement coverage yet!
Linda, please clarify. Why should CALPERS pay for health care? You will get a state pension, plus Social Security, plus you will qualify for Medicare, won’t you?
As usual, Harlan believes that people who drag down GDP, like those in the financial sector, need his support b/c the richest 0.1% don’t have enough influence in avoiding taxes and concentrating their wealth.