The Enemy Within and the Great Society

At the risk of sounding preachy, I contend the following: the Enemy Within is the desire to focus exclusively on your own needs while expecting to be part of a great society.

The pillars of our society are the combination of a free-market economy and selflessness; both need to be in balance if we are to remain strong and work through the challenges we face today. We all need to fight against our enemy within.

In a time where solutions are needed, but not necessarily readily available, it is important to stay true to certain principles and not let the circumstances of the moment guide your decisions. For me, I believe in the words of former President Lyndon B. Johnson and believe they are something we should all consider, if not embrace.

“The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”

Growing Tired of the Extremist

There has been a great many articles in Newsday and the NY Times on the Governor’s budget, the slashing of funding to education and the possibility of thousands of school employees losing jobs after June 2011. Politicians and frustrated taxpayers seemingly have become more focused on costs, and less focused on the principles and government funded services that built our great nation. I have a difficult time understanding how laying off thousands of teachers, administrators, and custodians, etc, will help our economy, but it seems to be the result of a strategy to balance NYS’s budget while not raising taxes. There is a lot to be frustrated about; spending is outpacing inflation, there has been an ever brightening spotlight on accountability in the classroom and public union contracts with provisions that are protected by legislative statutes and regulations. These provisions and laws are anachronisms from a time when abuses of management called for certain protections for educators. There is a great need for reform in public education and we have the technology to collect and analyze data that can be used to raise the level of accountability in the classroom. I think all industries and employees have seen the affects of increased technology and the raising of the bar on accountability in the work place. The days of abuses to public school employees are long gone, but would they return if reform repealed these legislated, contractual protections? I have to imagine this is the fear of our public union employees.

On the other side of the politicians and frustrated taxpayers are the employees of public schools, many of them who come to work every day, year after year and never think of himself or herself as a public union employee. They think of themselves as teachers, or administrators of a public school system. Most of them do their jobs with great dedication and an abundance of enthusiasm for their mission – educating the children in their classrooms.

School employees are also taxpayers, have obligations to their families, and feel the same financial difficulties of rising taxes, college tuition, gas, and utilities – just like everyone else. Moreover, the fact that they may have a job, even if you do not, should not be held against them. There has also been a great focus on a retirement system that is breaking the back of the taxpayer, another anachronism that needs further reform. Nevertheless, all the money that the taxpayer is putting into the futures of school employees does not pay their mortgage, or their taxes, utilities, or their grocery bill next month. While the money is significant and meaningful, I can understand how it may be difficult to feel the value of something that is perhaps a couple of decades into your future, especially when your bills are mounting today.

I have to imagine it is tough to be a teacher these days. Teachers and administrators have a critical job that affects the future of our children, their community, and the nation that our children will lead in the new age, global economy. It cannot be easy to see animosity building against an honorable profession that means so much to so many. The screams for shared sacrifice may be economically driven and the need of certain reforms are certainly necessary to raise the level of performance to best enable a competitive education for our children, but if you are a teacher, it must sound and feel like someone saying “I do not care about you and you are doing a lousy job with our kids.” Now, I do not know about you, but if someone said that to me, I do not think I would jump up and say I am willing to do my part for the cause. I would probably say something to the contrary and throw in a few expletives along the way.

Personally, I am growing tired of the extremist. For the people who would willingly decimate our public education services and sees little value in a competitive education for children, especially someone else’s children in order to lower taxes, shame on you. And, to those die hard union advocates that preach education, but will allow public education to implode because they are unwilling to embrace the changes that will align their profession to the global economic landscape and higher levels of accountability to children, not to mention sacrificing brilliant young educators, their colleagues, that will be losing their jobs - shame on you too!

Mr. Governor, Stop Deflecting and Start Creating Some Meaningful Reforms and Mandate Relief

In today’s NY Times Governor Cuomo took at shot at school district superintendents’ compensation; and while it is an easy shot to take to strike up the ire of the general populace, don’t be fooled. This is a political deflection that is meant to put blame for high taxes on non-union, hard working leaders of education instead of a Governor that has turned his back on the education of the middle class in New York State. The Governor does not want to go after the unions or all of the protections union employees are granted under legislation and their protective body, the Public Employee Review Board (“PERB”), nor does he want to alienate legislators that he needs to approve his budget – a budget that will remove $1.1 million dollars of State Aid revenue from Elwood next year. The Governor has also rushed into a tax cap that has not been thought through thoroughly and does not provide the necessary exemptions and mandate relief. It is a tax cap that protects big business and large municipal school districts more than the families and homeowners on Long Island. These are the same legislators that have kowtowed to public unions for decades and filled the system up with more unfunded mandates than progressive reforms. These are the same legislators that significantly lowered employee contributions to their defined-benefit pensions in the laws of 2000 when the economy was good, and are now asking the taxpayer to step up and pay a backbreaking 11.5% - 15% of salaries as a contribution to the pension plans of school employees. These are also the same legislators that gave us the Tenure laws, the Triborough Law, and the Taylor Law that makes it almost impossible to gain leverage in a collective bargaining negotiation with public unions so we can remove the contract provisions that are vestiges of the 1950s and 1960s that should no longer apply to the business of educating children in the 21st Century. Laws that have allowed the public unions to hold our children hostage in any collective bargaining contract negotiation, employee evaluation, and necessary disciplinary actions. Now, allow me to stop my rant on the Governor and his cronies in Albany for a moment and give you some facts.

There are 121 school districts of various size and configurations on Long Island with an overall educational product and results that are among the best in the state, if not the country. The cumulative budget for these school districts collectively is $10,667,516,176, as reported in Newsday within the past week. Now, let’s imagine that each school district on Long Island employs a superintendent with a salary package of $300,000 per year on average. By the way, superintendents have individual contracts with school districts and are NOT protected by unions or are eligible for tenure. So let’s do the math: if you have 121 superintendents earning $300k per year that is $36,300,000, or 0.34% of the cumulative budgets of all schools on Long Island. If we eliminated every superintendent on Long Island, our collective cost of education would be lowered by 1/3rd of one percentage point. I do not believe that is the type of cost reduction that we are looking for; especially when you realize the value of a strong superintendent of schools. By the way, the Governor’s proposed budget reduces $250 million of state aid revenue to all Long Island schools, so it makes sense that he would look to deflect the financial devastation he is proposing to LI education somewhere other than his office or his pals in the senate and assembly.

The superintendent is the Chief Executive Officer of a school district. They are responsible for everything and to every resident in a school district. They need to assure instructional quality in the classrooms, they need to craft and provide the best educational product possible on a budget that becomes leaner every year versus the expenses that are only partially within local control. They focus on the curriculum, finances, personnel, policy, and student issues on a daily basis. A superintendent has a position of leadership of which a strong school system cannot survive without. If I learned one thing in my years as a member of the Board of Education it was this: there is no single component of a school system that is more meaningful to the success of the system and its benefits to children and community than a strong, experienced leader in the superintendent’s office. The value of an effective superintendent of schools is, as the saying goes, “Priceless.” I am sure there will be plenty of people that would like to debate my last statement, and it would be my pleasure to engage you in that debate. Because if you think that a school district can be productive and efficient by just turning it over to the teachers in the individual classrooms or a building principal (no matter how dedicated and talented they are) you are grossly mistaken.

Thank heavens we live in America Mr. Governor - a place that still embraces a free-market economy as part and parcel of our democracy. Please focus on reforms and mandate relief that will really make a positive difference in public education. Remember this as you pass through Albany on your way to bidding on that big White House on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC, and stop deflecting blame on the true leaders of education who should not be considered the epicenter of our problems so you can gain popularity for your obtuse political agenda.