‘Bad parenting and social pathology,not taxpayer penury, underlies thereading-score crisis in New York.’
HERE’S an overlooked nugget tucked away inside all the public-school news: The United Federation of Teachers plans to spend $2 million writing its very own core curriculum for use by the Board of Ed.
And here’s a sample problem from the mathematics section:
Q. If New York City’s shamefully underpaid teachers were to get a richly deserved 150 percent raise, would they still be shamefully underpaid?
A. But of course, because there’ll be no justice until all shamefully underpaid teachers earn as much as Major League Baseball players. Don’t teachers work with children – the city’s most precious resource (except for taxpayers)?
Ha Ha. Just fibbing.
About the sample problem that is. The rest is gospel. Says UFT president Randi Weingarten: “If we can raise the level of our students’ achievement, everything else will follow.”
Everything else being 1.1 million appropriately literate, numerate, curious and committed public-school students, trooping eagerly into their classrooms each morning?
Not exactly.
“Threats of vouchers will fade,” Weingarten continues. “Blaming teachers for every ill will stop, as will the demands that teachers ‘give up this right or that benefit.'”
What a compelling fall-back strategy – teachers actually teaching!
Not to belabor the baseball analogy, but if Bernie Williams dropped 67 percent of the fly balls hit to him at Yankee Stadium, he’d be playing his classical guitar for a living – on a subway platform somewhere. And that’s no lie.
But when 67 percent of New York City’s fourth-graders turned up functionally illiterate in state tests in May, the teacher’s union called for more “classroom resources” (i.e., Big League raises) all around.
Last week’s reading- and math-test fiasco conjured similar incantations.
Yes, New York City could benefit from larger budgets. So could every other public-school system in the state – save for, maybe, Westchester’s big-bucks Pocantico Hills or Long Island’s tiny Amagansett, the state’s richest district.
But guess what. There’s more to this crisis than money – or the lack of it.
Per-capita student spending in New York City will be about $9,500 this year; the median teacher salary is about $47,000 annually.
In Amagansett, $22,000 is spent per pupil, and the median salary is a shade under $60,000.
But only 60 percent of the fourth-graders at Amagansett’s elementary schools passed the recent reading test – compared to 75 percent in Community School District 26 in Queens, and 62 percent in Manhattan’s District 2.
Could there be more at work here than a misallocation of public resources?
Of course there is.
It’s said, for example, that reading-test scores in New York are so pitifully low because public school libraries are understocked (or non-existent).
Let’s be frank: In much, if not most, of the city, a school-library book is much less likely to be returned than read. Bad parenting and social pathology, not taxpayer penury, underlies the reading-score crisis in New York.
Is that blaming the victim? Up to a point, sure. But often an unhappy outcome is the victims’ fault.
Those who disagree must explain Districts 2 and 26: Again, they work – but they most certainly don’t get any more money than the rest of the city.
There’s no mystery about why they work: It’s because they have recruited administrators and teachers who get value for the dollars that are available – because, in the end, there is a critical mass of parents who won’t accept anything less than success.
But what about the larger picture?
Once federal money and all the off-budget spending is figured in, the Board of Ed’s budget for the current fiscal year exceeds $10 billion.
But it seems that only 50 cents of every dollar ever makes it into the classroom. That’s an outrage (but you don’t hear Weingarten howling too loudly).
Anyway, bringing per-capita student spending in the city up to, say, Amagansett’s level would more than double the Board of Ed’s operating budget – to $23-plus billion dollars (and to no assured good effect anyway, given how Amagansett did on the tests).
But New York City’s tax base couldn’t stand a $1-billion increase in Board of Ed spending, let alone $13 billion.
As the present UFT contract moves into its final year, the taxpayer contribution to the pension of a single senior teacher will be $10,700, on a base salary of $70,000. Neither sum is princely, but – New York’s aberrant budget surplus notwithstanding – the city simply can’t afford a whole lot more.
Compare just the pension money with the average earned wage in Brooklyn last year ($26,600), in Queens ($30,700), on Staten Island ($27,300), and in The Bronx ($30,100). These are the wages earned by the people who carry the lion’s share of the city’s tax burden – and they are much more reflective of New York’s long-range circumstances than are Manhattan’s Wall Street-bloated average salaries ($63,000).
Sooner or later, Gotham is going to have to choose between adequately paid teachers and – among other things – its gold-plated, cradle-to-grave social-services system. (And won’t it be fun trying to parse the PC rhetoric as the UFT and the hospital workers’ union fight that one out.)
But, even then, New York City won’t be able to buy its way out of the public-education crisis.
If Randi Weingarten disagrees, she ought to get out of the way of folks who believe they can get the job done for less.
There are a lot waiting in the wings.
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Bob McManus can be reached at mcmanus@nypost.com.