The very mention of the name “Walker” is bound to leave at least one person in the room gnashing their teeth and cursing at God for letting this “despicable” excuse for a human being be born. For those who march in the streets in solidarity with their union brothers, think corporate executives should be burned at the stake, and whine about “underpaid” teachers being treated like peasants, Scott Walker is the embodiment of everything they hate. He’s a “slash-and-burn” budget-cutter. He thinks unions have too much political power. He thinks Big Labor bosses game the system to their advantage by getting in bed with politicians and bribing them – with campaign contributions – to shower their due-paying loyalists with endless steams of taxpayer-funded kickbacks. He’s not willing to play the bread and circuses charade anymore while our finances go to hell in a hand basket. He’s a champion of common sense austerity, thinks markets are generally better than government at getting things done, and doesn’t begrudge someone for making an honest profit. He wants to give businessowners room to breathe, rather than scaring them away with labyrinth tax codes and regulatory hurdles.

In other words, he kind of thinks letting people be the masters of their own fate is what this country is all about. Progressives hate that. Someone needs to be in charge, people need to be whipped into line for their own good, and no one should be allowed to fall down on hard times – ever. In purple Wisconsin, these two competing visions are always at odds with one another. Walker is a polarizing figure. You either love him or you hate him. There is no grey area. Not in this state.

God forbid someone touch the state-run prison camps and indoctrination centers we hilariously call “public schools.” In this hotbed of government-is-sacred Progressivism, that’s a big no-no. Why, how dare you think State funding and control of our kids’ education might lead to – I don’t know – a generation of robotic, obedient automatons devoid of any ability to think for themselves or question authority (a slogan the principled anti-Establishment, hippy left was proud to embrace not too many decades ago)? You’d have to be some kind of frost-hearted, unfeeling sociopath who’d like nothing more than to storm in on a bunch of bubbly, sing-song children frolicking through a field of flowers and send a ferocious pack of club-wielding mafia men after them to spoil their day. What kind of heartless creature are you? Have you no soul?

The Madison protestors beat their drums and scream to the heavens, teary-eyed and praying – every second of every day – that the Lord will strike that wicked tyrant in the Governor’s Mansion with a bolt of lightning. As Reverend Jesse Jackson said, he has broken a sacred covenant with teh childrenz. Teh childrenz! His school choice reforms and privatization schemes are satanic heresy, and gosh darn ourselves if we let this sin go unpunished. Forgive us, Almighty One, for not resorting to the guillotine. He told the unions to eat cake, and we listened. Have mercy on us.

Mary Bell and the bought-and-paid-for Democratic mouthpieces in the government teachers’ associations believe that parents having some say in where their children are sent to school is, like, the worst thing that could possibly happen. Don’t you know that portable backpack funding initiatives enable the children to escape the crime-ridden, bully-infested, achievement-starved cesspools our public schools have become by taking their parents’ tax-dollars somewhere else if they’re not getting the education they deserve? And don’t you know our revenue is drained in the process? You mean we’ll actually have to compete for business, like those lowly, uncultured yokels in the private sector? You mean we’ll have to raise standards, pick up the slack, only hire the best and the brightest, and pay teachers on a performance-based scale? You mean we’ll have to budget wisely and answer directly to our clients? Has this world gone mad!?

There’s a reason these people want to build barricades and wall you in to your designated school zone. They like their monopoly. They like being able to use guns and extortion to collect their fees and pamper their privileged, royal staff. They like that, after a few threatening phone calls and warning letters, men in black suits will shatter your windows, break down your doors, shove a gun against your head, and tell you to pay up or else if you don’t pay your taxes – what “yous” owe to da boss at state headquarters – to keep the schools’ doors open. Monopolies for me, but not for thee. It’s bad if a supermarket, bank, manufacturer, or big corporation does it – but not a school. No siree.

Don’t let them vote with their wallets and choose who they want to do business with. That means we’ll have to be – bum, bum, BUM! – accountable. Oh, dearie. Not that.

In my ideal world, the public school system would be torn from limb to limb with a chainsaw. It’s an atrocious system that depends on the use of State-enforced violence for its survival. But, unfortunately, I can’t and won’t live in some Libertarian La-La Land where my ideas prevail overnight. See the world as it is, rather than as you think it should be. It’s a piece of wisdom passed down through the ages. And one that is too often ignored all over the political spectrum.

Time to Get Pragmatic With Our Bad Selves

In the meantime, let’s have priorities. Our kids come first. And that means leaving as much money in the classroom as possible. It should be at the top of our list. And how do we accomplish that? By taking an axe to the overbloated pensions and health benefits of the educrats and the well-meaning – but nevertheless misguided – teachers. In some cases, this is, like, 80 percent of the budget, so don’t tell me we can save money without it. Now, don’t get me wrong. You need fairish pay and alluring fringe benefits to get the best-trained and most highly-skilled teachers to even hear you out. If you, as a district head, want them to be a team player, the compensation has to be at least half-decent (and I’m sure $100,000 a year is more than enough). Raise the bar too high, though, and you compromise other financial priorities in the process. Drive up costs, and you won’t have the resources to take care of everything else – which is exactly what has happened in Wisconsin schools. When everything is swallowed beneath a financial tidal wave of second pensions, taxpayer-funded Chevrolets, lounge sprucer-uppers, game-rooms for fired workers, absentee pay for teachers attending union get-togethers, and other ritzy-glitzy kickbacks – what happens?

Left with practically pint-sized crumbs, you can’t afford much else. Those pencils, crayons, erasers, and calculators you were planning to buy in bulk will just have to wait until next year. Those 1983 Apple III Plus computers will do just fine, and will the kindergarteners really know the difference, anyway? Sure, we’ll have hordes of new kids flooding into the building come fall, but we’re just going to have to jam ‘em in, seeing as we can’t afford to hire more instructors or interior renovations to accommodate them. That teacher with all the sparkly, shiny medals and trophies adorning her shelves will just have to be paid the same salary as everyone else. Tough luck. And the special-ed kids – um, well… they don’t exist.

I have to stop for a moment and catch my breath. I had to summon up all my strength to impersonate those, “Oh my gawd! The schools are underfunded, and they’re crumbling from the inside!” people. Sure, these problems do exist in, say, ghetto schools, but this cataclysmic, gloom-and-doom scenario is by no means the norm. Some schools, in fact, suffer from self-indulgent, casino-style gluttony, blowing everything on lavish gunk that doesn’t do anything to enhance the learning process. The number of “WTF” items in the MPS budget is endless. Hip hop classes, radio ads, and Progressive indoctrination courses – behold, unwashed knaves. Your tax-dollars at work. What more proof do we need that public-spirited bureaucrats are more trustworthy than you and me at putting the money we earn to good use?

Slash and Burn: It’s Good For Your Soul

But let’s assume, for a moment, that this run-down of events is – in some upside-down, topsy-turvy way – reality-based. Even those who hold the public school system in high regard should be hailing Walker’s budget repair bill as a godsend. They should be singing praises to these revolutionary, belt-tightening reforms, but instead they are running around as if the final battle between good and evil described in the Book of Revelations – the end of the world as we know it – is nigh. Whether or not they realize it, however, things are quite the opposite. As I said in my last blog post:

Walker’s budget repair bill (oh no, there’s that dastardly Hitler reincarnate’s name again!) gave school districts the tools they needed to cut costs, require teachers to chip in more for their health and retirement benefits, and nudge the unions to the side in budget negotiations. So if administrators want to tweak unsustainable pay and benefits as part of a belt-tightening agenda, they have more leeway to do so, since there isn’t a union boss standing in the way with his hand out barking, “Stop in the name of workers’ rights! If you want to close the budget gap, you’re going to have to cut funding for textbooks, desks, computers, and writing materials instead! Drop the sports programs. The special-ed kids will have to make do with what they have. Parents and kids won’t mind less time for music, gym, and art – which are just nonessentials anyway. Anything but the pensions! Anything but the paychecks! You so much as touch the teachers, and we will go on strike! We don’t care if the district has to close the schools. You’re in union territory now, and you just messed with the wrong people!” That kind of mafia-style, extortionist browbeating is now illegal, thanks to new collective bargaining rules. Unions can still negotiate for higher pay on behalf of their workers, but only past a certain rate of inflation – and with voter approval. (“You mean, the people paying our benefits get a say at the negotiating table? Outrageous!”) Everything else is off the table. You don’t like the terms of the contract, you send a letter to administrative offices or quit your job. It’s as simple as that.

Thanks again, Governor Walker. Your legacy is one for the history books.

These new tools allow school districts to create millions of dollars in savings, which can then be used to finance classroom size reductions, merit-pay (where high-performance teachers get bonuses for their exceptional work), technology updates, new textbooks, new hirees, and more. Oshkosh, Madison, Neenah, Appleton, and countless other school districts have already taken advantage of these innovative cost-saving measures.

Indeed, they have. Oshkosh, for instance, has re-worked its handbook so that, when teacher layoffs are up for consideration, the union’s seniority-based approach – that is, rules saying that those who have been with the staff longest get first dibs – are no longer the prevailing standard. In a crisis like this, the adopted line was almost rehearsed word for word by administrators: “Clear out your office and pack up your bags, young whipper-snapper. We don’t care if you’re Teacher of the Year, or if the president comes to you for advice on education reform. You’re outta here.” Now that the playing field has been leveled, however, a teacher’s fate depends on his or her actual record – that is, recent performance. It is this kind of fine-tuning that the budget repair bill makes possible. So if a teacher’s students are flunking their exams and standardized tests – and she doesn’t meet a fixed set of goals laid out for her by the district – she might be in for an unpleasant surprise when it comes time for weeding out low-performing staff members. As it should be. Private companies have to make these same kind of calls all the time. Real world, meet teacher. Teacher, meet real world.

But it’s not out of the realm of possibility that this teacher could score another job position with the credentials she has. In all likelihood, it’s bound to happen. This time, though, she marches into battle properly equipped. She knows where she fumbled and can correct her mistakes. All she has to do is tap into her unique talents and gifts – she does have years of training, after all – and apply herself. We’ve all been there, done that. We all stumble and trip on our way to success – being the imperfect creatures we are – but that’s the only way we learn how to become good at what we do. And sometimes, as we grow older, a profession we once dedicated ourselves to with a burning passion loses its luster. The flames die out. It becomes a bore-fest. The drive just isn’t there anymore. Our motivation is lost. And sometimes it’s time for us to seek out another calling. For a veteran of the teaching profession, maybe that means taking up a job as a daycare worker, a house-nanny, a counselor, or a social worker. If you’re good with children, the possibilites are endless. Maybe a layoff notice will be the best thing that ever happened to her. After all, she could be needed somewhere else.

Seniority privileges are not just bad for students. They’re bad for educators as well – both for the younger teachers whose fresh minds and innovative spirits can modernize the classroom for the needs of today’s students (rather than simply what worked in the past) and the older teachers who are tired, weary, and need a change of venue. That’s why the new collective bargaining restrictions are such a breath of fresh air. The unions no longer have the power to expropriate and milk districts dry. No longer will school boards be treated like cash-cows. For government unions, the bell has tolled. And it turns out we’re all better off without them.

For the first time in years, Oshkosh can play with contribution levels without having their heads chopped off. Now teachers will have to pay a little bit more for their health and retirement benefits. For years, the unions have been pushing soak-the-rich tax policies in the name of getting the richety-rich to pay their “fair share.” Oh, how the tables have turned. Maybe someday “fair share” will be a right-wing catchphrase. Wouldn’t that be something? With some skin in the game, maybe public educators will realize that we’re all passengers on a train swerving off the rails, about to crash and burn to our untimely demise. They will see the bill, and they will cringe. Just like the rest of us. Sucks when you have to chip in for the costs, doesn’t it?

Walker’s reforms have been a blessing in disguise for Neenah, as well. Chiseling through the kickbacks to conserve precious resources has never been easier. The unions will just have to shrug their shoulders and deal with it because there’s nothing they can do to stop it. They’re no longer in the driver’s seat. Workers’ health benefits are off the charts? No problem. Now the district can switch to an insurance policy more within the taxpayer’s price range. High deductibles and HSAs are making teachers more aware of the arm-and-a-leg inflation of soaring premiums. They now have every incentive to work with their physicians to keep costs under control, because a chunk of it is coming of their own pockets. These new collective bargaining rules are just full of win. And because of the savings realized from this new initiative, more money can be kept in the paychecks of Neenah teachers. I don’t think Walker and his repair bill cheerleaders had any clue that cracking down on the union’s stranglehold over school district budgets would have such extraordinary spillover effects. It truly is remarkable.

Madison, too, has turned a new page. Teachers, again, have to invest more in their own selves. A new middle school has opened its doors. They’ve got the ball rolling on an early childhood program. Layoffs have been narrowly averted. A merit-pay system for teachers who go above and beyond the call of duty is in the works. And it’s all thanks to the breathing room the district was given to determine its own fate and reign in out-of-control costs, rather than having the spendthrift unions steering ship. All aboard the U.S.S. Frugality. It’s about damn time.

Most recently, White Fish Bay has modified its retirement fund – through reductions, freezes, and increased contributions from employees – to save money for the district. The retirement age has been raised ever so slightly, and the move has provided much-needed stability in an atmosphere of unsustainable red ink and ballooning deficits.

You Mean, Scott Walker Isn’t the Anti-Christ?

Most studies show that – not accounting for the districts that failed to utilize Walker’s reforms, either for political or contract-related reasons – job losses have been kept to a minimum. For a whopping three-quarters of students, class sizes have stayed the same or inched downward. The number of teachers and education workers for every student attending these schools hasn’t ebbed a whole lot. For Wisconsin schools, there’s hope for the future and a bright light at the end of the tunnel. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?

More money in the classroom, more cash-flows on the balance sheet, and less teachers packing up their suitcases and getting the hell out of Dodge. Not too shabby for somebody who supposedly wants to bulldoze our children’s schools and replace them with strip malls, Wal-Mart Supercenters, and monuments to himself.

As this video demonstrates, it is the labor unions, not Scott Walker and his cohorts, who are raping the middle class, bilking taxpayers, busting municipal budgets, and destroying the country from within.

You won’t see me rallying in support of raising teacher salaries or funneling more money into the government school system. (If I had my druthers, it would be torn limb from limb with a chainsaw). But you won’t see me throwing confetti in the air or dancing with girlish glee over teachers getting the pink slip, either. I’m not some heartless Scrooge who gets his kicks from watching teachers pack up their boxes and leave their students behind. Neither do I get excited seeing their eyes well up with tears as they kiss their careers goodbye. How mean-spirited and cruel that would be. I’m just not that kind of person.

If anything, I wouldn’t be where I am today if not for my early childhood teachers. At that age, I was a lot to handle, and definitely had my share of problems. These dedicated professionals turned my situation around and made my future a whole lot brighter. But let’s leave that aside for a different day. All I’m trying to say is that I recognize the hard work that some teachers do and am not here to “bash” them. I’m not a “teacher-hater” just because I support Governor Walker’s state education cuts. Leftists who throw around that loaded term just to dismiss and demonize legitimate opposition are no better than Iraq War supporters who scream “America hater” at anyone who questions the “grim” necessity of our presence there, or rightfully points out that it flies in the face of everything conservatives are supposed to believe in.

But I digress. The teacher layoffs in Milwaukee, despite being necessary to some degree, aren’t some erotic fantasy of mine. In fact, we could soften the blow by doing a number of things – none of which are popular in left-wing circles, naturally, but changes that could be made nonetheless. Last time, I discussed how the unions took a bad situation and made it worse. Superintendent Thornton asked for a 5.8 percent contribution from each teacher to finance their retirement benefits. A modest proposal to say the least. Most private sector workers don’t even get retirement benefits. But for the teachers’ unions, this was like taking a kid’s lollipop and smashing it to pieces on the sidewalk. “How dare you take away what rightfully belongs to me?” The district would have saved millions of dollars and hundreds of teachers’ jobs in the process. You have to remember, though: taxpayer-financed freebies, in the face of mounting deficits, are more important to the unions than saving the jobs of their own members. (Even to the members themselves – the people whose careers are at stake. This is no time to be a mindless union tool, guys. Stand up to your bosses, for heaven’s sake.)

But the stubborn MTEA and their lavish spoils are only part of the problem. The district itself, as it turns out, isn’t very responsible when it comes to their own (or should I say the taxpayers’) finances. To put it bluntly, these people are pouring money down a drain, wasting resources left and right – treating taxpayer dollars as if this were a trip to Las Vegas. For well over two years, the MacIver Institute has chronicled wasteful spending at the Milwaukee School District. And the district’s track record ain’t pretty.

Kids are holding up signs saying “Cut the crap, not the teachers.” Their ideological sympathies are dubious, but this slightly irritating bumper-sticker slogan actually raises a lot of important questions, particularly in light of the recent disaster in Milwaukee. Turns out there is a lot of “crap” in the budget, including a bunch of empty buildings going unused, thousands of dollars set aside for classes teaching kids everything they need to know about hip-hop, and thousands more directed at re-training courses for teachers who should have been fired already.

The list of “WTF” items is endless. Some particularly outrageous examples from last year’s budget:

• $2,000 for leather conference chairs
• $1,600 for yoga DVDs
• $130 for a flip camera
• $850 for Black History month costumes
• $2,850 for Kindle training
• $4,000 for teacher retirement plaques
• $300 for a Tardy Slip Pad (!)
• $4,500 for motivational speakers to come in and help teachers “Lighten Up and Build a Positive Work Climate”
• $10,000 for environmental education services
• $1,000 for “Teaching Life Skills” (whatever that is) from some unknown vendor (?)
• $4,000 for multicultural teacher training at the YMCA
• $1,000 for gardening classes
• $750 for adventure sports
• $30,000 for pricey Wisconsin Institute and Ivy tutors
• $5,000 for Wendell J. Harris & Associate LLC to mentor students in ideological pacifism
• $3,000 for a contractor to make three PowerPoints in support of the district’s “healthy food initiatives”
• $450 for Alamelu Vairavan to instruct a “tantalizing flavors from South India cooking class”

So far, this list looks it could be good for a few nervous giggles, but nothing particularly threatening in the scheme things. A few wasted dollars is, after all, a petty nuisance. What a relief it would be if this were all Wisconsin taxpayers had to fret about before drifting off to sleep at night. As much as I wish the ludicrous dispensation of taxpayer dollars would stop right there, it actually gets much worse. Far worse.

Teachers who know so little about the subjects they are supposed to help students learn – so little that they could use a few hours in the classroom themselves – shouldn’t be teaching, or should switch to a subject area they know more about. Pack up your suitcase and go back to college, for heaven’s sake. Perhaps remedial training will do wonders for them; who knows? But don’t leave taxpayers on the dime for any of it. Take bad educators off the district payrolls and make them pay for their own re-education. Most people have little objection to these common sense expectations.

Right?

Try telling that to the Milwaukee Public School District. These people spend thousands of taxpayer dollars on refresher courses every school year. In the last two years alone, there have been countless programs designed to re-train staff members who probably should been – dare I say it – fired. Below are just a few examples:

• $50,000 for SIGMA training (superintendent staff)
• $20,000 for Barbara Eberspenger and Catherine LaFond to “provide up to 200 hours to assist in planning and training for the Implementation of the Classroom Organization and Management Program (COMP)”
• $4,200 for a “daylong workshop” on the Progressive Era
• $5,000 for the Shape Up Shoppe to show the band director how to do his job
• $12,500 for James Weiskopf of the Milwaukee Teacher Education Center to provide up to “250 hours of support”
• $7,500 for a two-day teacher training course on American History from the Bill of Rights Institute
• $3,000 for the 3-day teacher workshops on American History from the DBQ Company
• $15,000 for “five summer seminar spots on the founding documents”
• $1,385 to retrain pre-school teachers for less than two days

Seriously? Hey, taxpayers: would you rather have your money spent on hiring new teachers to replace the incompetent ones, or would you rather pay companies to re-train bad educators in subjects they studied for hours in college and got a four or eight-year degree to master? Which scenario do you think is best for the future of your children? You tell me.

By the way, do you morally object to the images flashing across the television screen – the dirty music videos, the over-the-top vulgarity, the skankish dancers, the exaltation of bad values? Would you rather your kids not listen to music (let alone warm up to an entire genre) that goes out of its way to glorify sex, drugs, and street crime? Well, you’re in for a little treat, because MPS is using your tax-dollars to reinforce these values into the minds of impressionable schoolchildren. Hippity-hop is fine and dandy! Miss Teachy said so!:

• $2,100 on “hip hop culture” studies
• $500 for a two-day workshop on hip hop-related “culture” and “history”

But that’s not all.

Take a peeksy:

• $1,000 for MLK Day radio ad on 98.3 FM WJMR
• $3,500 for Custer High School radio ads on 98.3 FM WJMR
• $4,335 for “Just Say Yes to MPS” ads on WJMJ-TV

I know Martin Luther King, Jr. is a hero for African American children everywhere, but are expensive radio and TV ads really the only way to spread his legacy and get his message across? In tough economic times like this, is it really fair to ask taxpayers to pay for this type of thing, regardless of how noble the cause being advanced?

Or how about all of those empty buildings owned by the Milwaukee School District? How much longer do these people need to wait before selling the buildings off and cashing in? There’s not enough students to fill them. Parents are taking their kids out of the system and fleeing in droves. Enrollment rates are declining. Even the liberal blogosphere will admit the buildings serve the district no good purpose whatsoever, and should be promptly slashed from the budget and sold to the highest bidder in the midst of massive teacher layoffs.

Well, maybe not so much to the highest bidder.

However amusing it might be to watch from the sidelines, the squabbling over the issue about who gets what is… kinda sad. The district has so many options, plenty of willing buyers – a public eager to see these buildings finally taken over by some competent do-gooder. But partisan politics and the self-serving interests of the public school bureaucracy are standing in the way. Private and charter schools are ready to get a piece of the action. Luck – or should I say the petty concerns of MPS administrators – is not on their side, unfortunately. “Choice” schools, goes the refrain, are elitist bastions of inequality that shouldn’t even exist, and any measure that moves us even just one step closer to evil “privatization” (i.e. educational freedom) should be met with unrelenting resistance from the general public. (Let’s just ignore the empirical evidence showing that kids in “choice” schools graduate at higher rates than their peers in the government school system, or polls that show parents of “choice” kids express greater satisfaction with the quality of their childrens’ schools than parents in other groups.) The sky will fall and the earth will spin off its axis if MPS should auction off these buildings to the greedy, selfish, profit-seeking dumb-wads who seek to destroy our wonderful, happy-go-lucky public school system just to get rich.

After wading our way through all the semantics, it’s pretty damn obvious what the true intentions of the MPS administrators and staff members really are. The last thing the public school monopoly wants is to have is compete for students in the same market-like environment the rest of us do on a daily basis and allow parents to take their tax-dollars somewhere else if they don’t like what the government schools have to offer. They’re afraid that if parents are given the option to escape from the public school system and liberate their children from the chains of these oppressive, state-run prison camps, they’ll take it. That’s what this is all about.

The status quo defenders want to keep the empty buildings vacant, situated just where they are forever more. And the thought of MPS filtering through the waste and scraping out the gunk is just unthinkable. Never say “no” to a good spending project. Just keep passing out the checks and rearing up the money-pump, because that’s the “progressive” and “humanitarian” thing to do.

“Our buildings are falling apart,” liberals weep. “We’re strapped for cash, there’s not enough textbooks, and our kids are being shoved into crowded classrooms with more and more kids. And now, to top it all off, our best and brightest are about to be thrown out of work. Where is the love, Scott Walker? Where is the love?”

And yet, when school districts across the state of Wisconsin are pouring money down endless pits of darkness, these same people, who protest in the streets over their precious freebies being taken away, are nowhere to be found.

Teacher layoffs can be avoided, but only if school districts are willing to make the necessary sacrifices. Savings require budget cuts. They require government workers paying a little bit more for their health and retirement benefits. They require the sale of unused buildings, cookies, Smartboards, laptops, and Wii Fit balance boards.

Make no mistake: avoiding pain is not an option. Those who think it is are in for a rude awakening. The drunken-sailor, spendaholic policies of the past are finally wreaking their havoc in, not only the state of Wisconsin, but in every last corner of America. Spending is the disease; budget cuts are the painful but necessary prescription to the fiscal woes that ail us. Unless we want to prolong the agony and postpone our troubles for a later date, thus making the final blow all that more severe, it is time for states and districts across the country to cast out their reckless spending addictions, pay down their debts, and balance their checkbooks just like the rest of us. The moment to break our old habits is now. The clock is ticking. Our time is running out. And the day of reckoning is just around the bend.

With hundreds of Milwaukee public school teachers receiving layoff notices this year, the blogosphere is jumping on this story like a pack of vicious hounds, looking for someone – anyone – to blame for the terrible news. Predictably, the Left is placing the blame at Governor Walker’s doorstep, blathering on, as usual, about his “draconian” school funding cuts. The Right is blaming the stubbornness of MTEA, the district teacher’s union. There is a bit of truth to the official narratives of both sides, though, unlike the Left, I argue that dismantling the public school system would be the best thing that could ever happen to education. While Walker hasn’t quite put his foot in that territory yet, his school choice reforms, otherwise known as “backpack funding,” are a start. As for the Right, I can’t help but smile when I hear them rail against the dreaded teachers’ unions. Finally, my people are growing a spine! (Even in Congress, apparently.) But they always stop one sentence short of saying the public school system is out of whack because of its nature, not just because the unions are standing in the way of progress by protecting the jobs and benefits of bad educators.

Nevertheless, you can’t blame conservatives for questioning the politically correct rendition of events spoon-fed to us by the mainstream media. Superintendent Gregory Thornton, time and time again, has asked the union to make some minor concessions, like – get ready for this – requiring district teachers to pay a little bit more for their retirement benefits (a 5.8 percent contribution off the top of their salaries). Dear God, I think he just drowned a puppy! Thornton says he can “save” the jobs of many MPS teachers with his proposal, since it would create millions of dollars in savings for the district. All the union needs to do is cooperate a little bit and make some sacrifices for the sake of the children. (If the Left can exploit kids to make an argument, so can I.) Wouldn’t you know it, though: like the spoiled brats they are, the union won’t budge. And neither will its members, including the teachers receiving layoff notices. That’s right. Don’t question your union bosses, sweetheart. Just beg your precious president for another teacher bailout at the expense of states and school districts who were actually responsible enough to get their fiscal house in order. Defend your union to the bitter end, because if you don’t – you might to need to lock your family up in a closet and never let them see the light of day again.

The Left recoils at this argument. “Listen here, you stupid right-wing hack. The unions agreed to several concessions in the contract they ratified with the school district late last year. Wage freezes. Bigger health care contributions. How could you miss this?” As it turns out, the union was continuously warned not to ratify their contract with the district until Walker strolled into office and passed his budgetary repair bill, which was presumed to include cuts in state “aid” to local school districts and minor alterations to the salaries and benefit packages of government workers. But the union went ahead and ratified the contract anyway. Why did these people act so foolishly?  Well at first glance, the concessions appeared to offset any funding cuts that were about to hit the district. According to your average left-winger, nobody foresaw the things this Governor was capable of. I myself was surprised by his courage to stand up to these union thugs and strip away their privileges. Who knew this governor, who appeared to be a political “moderate” during the elections, would actually be bold enough to curtail the power of public-sector unions in this state? I never thought I’d see the day. And we’re told the unions experienced the same awe-struck feeling I did. But should they have?

Never in their worst nightmares did the government unions of Wisconsin predict the passage of a law hacking away at their collective bargaining rights power. And that’s precisely why, the lefties shriek, the MPS teachers’ unions pushed through a contract in December instead of waiting around like a bunch of idiots. You can’t campaign on a platform of yanking away the taxpayer-financed goodies of government workers in a pro-union hotbed like Wisconsin and expect to win an election. So, naturally, Walker didn’t mention it until – oh my gawsh – that very same December. On second thought, maybe the union should have seen this coming. At the very least, leftists can’t argue, though some do, that the union couldn’t have possibly predicted school funding cuts. They did. That’s why the original concessions were made in the first place.

Leaving aside the fact that Walker brought up the subject the same month the contract was ratified, every Establishmentarian in the Wisconsin legislature was warning the unions not to “seal the deal” until Walker’s proposed budgetary reforms were revealed publicly. That way, any concessions that were made would have been large enough to offset school funding cuts and whatever else was coming. That “whatever else” was apparently earth-shattering enough to send the entire legislature, left and right, into panic mode. Someone knew this was coming. The fact that even Democrats were shaky about hammering out a final deal at such an early date should have sounded off some alarms. The day of reckoning has arrived, and the concessions, it turns out, aren’t big enough.

Looks like the union made a little oopsy. And it is costing MPS teachers dearly. Not only do the unions not care about children or education in general, but they don’t even seem to care about their own members – the people who pay their dues and swear an oath of loyalty to the brotherhood.

And people wonder why I hate unions so much.

To Be Continued.

In my next post: Kids are holding up signs saying “Cut the crap, not the teachers.” Their ideological sympathies are dubious, but this slightly irritating bumper-sticker slogan actually raises a lot of important questions, particularly in light of the recent disaster in Milwaukee. Turns out there is a lot of “crap” in the budget, including a bunch of empty buildings going unused, thousands of dollars set aside for classes teaching kids everything they need to know about hip-hop, and thousands more directed at re-training courses for teachers who should have been fired already. Stay posted.

Wisconsin public schools are an abysmal failure. Pretty much everyone worth his salt knows it. But left-liberals, instead of re-examining the mechanics of the government monopoly on education and taking a second look at the moral hazards of politically powerful teachers’ unions, blame “inadequate funding.” There’s not enough “aid” to local school districts. We’re not giving teachers enough “tools” to deal with these problems. But despite the constant screeching from Madison protestors, the truth of the matter is quite different from this pro-Establishment narrative. Spending has soared in recent years. The Milwaukee Public School System for example, spends about $7,000 per student, whereas only a few years ago, it was spending over $1,000 less. 

Is low teacher pay the problem? I’m not convinced. In 2002, total teacher compensation (not only cash salaries, but health benefits and retirement pensions as well) was about $60,000 per MPS teacher. Today, that figure is an approximate $100,000 per teacher. That’s a $40,000 increase! Teacher pay, as the data clearly indicates, has been rising. And what about student performance? Has that been soaring right along with increased education spending, bigger budgets, and cozier benefits for teachers? No doubt, we’ve seen some fairly large math and reading-related improvements for middle school children, but nothing particularly miles apart from past trends. High school students aren’t as lucky, unfortunately. Performance has pretty much stagnated. Improvements have been neglible. There continue to be academic gains, yes, but these are increasing at a much slower rate – especially when compared to the exponential amplification of school budgets and teacher compensation.

More funding for education has not necessarily correlated with better outcomes. Just look at these depressing statistics for high school math “proficiency” rates. I’ve always emphasized that quality, not quantity, should be our primary objective. For too long, we’ve been obsessed with all the wrong things: the discussion always centers around “devoting” more resources to our schools, installing new technology, giving classrooms free iPods – the works. We’ve lost sight of all the things that really matter: focusing on the three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic), opening up opportunities for parents to exercise more discretion in how their children are educated and where they will go to school, paying teachers on a performance-based scale, and getting rid of the bureaucracy, the union privileges, the waste, the restrictions on the ability to choose the school of one’s choice – you know, overhauling the entire structure and putting the interests of parents and students over and above the interests of everybody else. Lobbyists, teachers’ unions, bureaucrats, administrators, special interest groups, and other members of the teaching establishment should not take first priority over our children. How could we lose touch of something so fundamentally important?

Opponents of the budget repair bill accuse Governor Walker of “gutting education.” Really? Returning educational spending to 2002-2003 spending levels is “draconian?” Seriously? Am I supposed to believe this? If Walker were, indeed, pushing privatization measures through the back door, as the ads on TV assure us – would that even be a bad thing? Our current educational system sucks. We’ve tried throwing more money into these boondoggles. That hasn’t worked. We’ve tried hiring more teachers. That hasn’t worked. We’ve tried increasing the salaries of educators. That hasn’t worked. We’ve tried replacing teachers with cute little whatchamahoozits – those techy gizmos you draw on, play games with, stare at teacher emails with, whatever. What a smashing success that has been! We’re running out of options. Why hasn’t dedicating more taxpayer dollars to our kids’ schools worked?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because the government school system is a freaking monopoly.

That’s right. I said it. Public schools are a monopoly industry legally protected, courtesy of artificially government-granted privileges, from the full-fledged rigors of market competition. Would any other private business be able to get away with the things government schools routinely get away with? Observe:

• Parents, as taxpaying citizens, are not allowed to just take their dollars and hand them over to some other place if the school their kids attend is, well … crummy to say the least.
• Payment is mandatory. Think about it. What happens if you don’t pay the required taxes to support these institutions? Well let’s see. You probably get a few notices in the mail, maybe even a few threatening phone calls, and then, before you know it, you have a bunch of men with black suits raiding your home, shoving a gun against your head, and telling you to “pay up” or else. They call themselves IRS agents, but if they were representatives of any other private organization, they’d be called “thieves” and thrown behind the slammer. For all the bad stuff that’s been said about Wal-Mart, it sure as hell doesn’t collect its fees through outright extortion. And it doesn’t lock people up in little metal cages for refusing to give up their possessions. Now who’s the real “rights”-grabber here?  Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, WEAC.
• Services can’t be declined. I mean, you can pay for a private education instead, and educate your children at school if you want (kudos to those people), but schooling is mandatory. Again, what if Wal-Mart threatened everyone who didn’t, for whatever reason, shop at their store or buy their cheap, made-in-China products? Yet when the government does the same thing, anyone who raises questions about this despicable arrangement is a “right-wing extremist” or a “fringe lunatic.” Funny how the raving psychopaths in the Wisconsin Legislature get to call the rest of us lunatics. That’s rich.
• Try sending your kid to a public facility outside the government-designated school zone. See where that gets you. What if Mary’s Polka-Dot Boutique appointed itself the designated clothing shop of your “geographical fashion zone,” and prevented you, at gunpoint, from lining your wardrobe with shirts and jeans and dresses and swimwear from other stores? Off to prison with you, Mary. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.
• While the owner of a private company would be arrested for trying to pay his workers the same way, the salaries and benefits of school teachers are paid for through taxation – by forcibly seizing money from citizens and distributing the loot among whoever happens to be on the payrolls. Not only is that how moochers roll, but it’s also tantamount to theft.
• Teachers, for the most part, are paid the same regardless of their performance. Competence is becoming increasingly irrelevant. In an era when performance (i.e. merit)-based pay is increasing among workers in the private sector, teachers are still being paid on an antiquated scale. Seniority and union standards of “fairness” override teacher quality and job performance. Even the Democratic president will admit this. Parents need to know whether their child’s educator is producing results. “Is my kid learning how to add, subtract, divide, and multiply numbers? Is he learning how to develop critical thinking skills necessary to succeed in the workforce later on? Is he learning how to read properly? Is he learning what he needs to know about the sciences, the arts – American history? Is he picking up on proper writing skills? How is he scoring on his tests? What is he getting for grades? Will he graduate someday? How do I know he won’t drop out of school?” Teachers who go above and beyond their call of duty, I sincerely believe, should receive higher salaries than their lower-performing counterparts. Merit pay would be an improvement over the largely uniform, one-size-fits-all method of payment we use now. Our best teachers deserve to be rewarded for their efforts. The bad ones? Punished. Sane people call this “common sense.”
• In many schools, firing a bad teacher is like trying to ask Fidel Castro to step down from his throne. As an educator, your job is pretty much guaranteed for life. Why are K-12 teachers getting lifetime tenure? Sit back, relax, don’t worry about getting the boot for the rest of your adult life. Caught watching porn on your computer? Did Miss Alan really send sexually explicit messages to one of her 10-year-old female students? Mr. Riggers, did you really beat up one of your pupils? You’re fi—oh wait, a minute. Due process. That’s right. Tenure. Union protections. How silly of me. Now think about it for a moment: Would any of this fly at a private company? Imagine missing out on work for two straight weeks, not answering any of your phone calls, emails, or … door knocks. You frolic through the entrance one day. Your boss stops you dead in your tracks. “Where the hell were you?” “At my house.” “Why didn’t you show up for work?” “I didn’t feel like it.” How do you think your boss would react to that excuse? Yet when a bad teacher does the exact same thing, it’s considered a violation of her due process rights if you, as an administrator or principal, try to fire her on the spot. In fact, there’s a lengthy list of legal procedures and steps you have to follow before you can tell her to take a hike. Sometimes it takes weeks, months – maybe even years. Just take a look at the way this process works in New York City. Federal, state, and local legislators propose all sorts of different programs to bolster teacher quality, but nothing works as effectively as – you guessed it – the threat of impending job loss. Fire bad teachers, and the problems with teacher quality will disappear. Judging from my own personal experience, the alternative is to have teachers sit on the computer all day and shuffle through emails while students glare at corny old ninety films flashing across the television screen. And that can’t be good for our children.

As we can see, the government school system just doesn’t work. No wonder Governor Walker is experimenting with school voucher programs, lifting enrollment caps on virtual and charter schools, and easing restrictions on sending children to private, non-government facilities. Rather than applauding the governor’s efforts to break up the public school monopoly and create more competition in the realm of education, teachers’ unions and their glimmering, rank-and-file, sunshiney left-liberal apologists are lambasting him for “assaulting our children’s schools.” Thousands of dollars are thrown at TV ads “exposing” Walker’s dastardly, clandestine plot to “privatize” the school system in the shadows of the night, without any oversight from the public. He “hates” poor children, and wants them to go without a quality education. Of course, public schools don’t provide anyone with a quality education, for that matter. And so-called “free” schooling, despite what we’ve been told, isn’t free at all. It costs billions of taxpayer dollars a year, and is infinitely more expensive in the long-run than a system of completely market-run, voluntarily-financed schools would be. I explain the dynamics here.

If schools were forced to compete with one other for paying customers the way Wal-Mart is forced to compete with K-Mart and Target, bad schools would see their profitability stumble and have to improve their standards – or else run the risk of falling into bankruptcy. If students emerged from their classrooms drooling like doofuses, parents could just take their money to a better school – instead of being forced to pay fees to all schools, through their taxes, regardless of quality. If your performance as a teacher isn’t up to scratch, you’re fired immediately because it hurts the school’s bottom line. Competition makes things better because it forces school administrators to remain attentive to the needs of students and their families, rather than slouch around and watch the educational system go up in flames as the tax-dollars keep rolling in. Market discipline encourages, and requires, constant innovation. Methods and approaches to teaching have to improve – always. Facilities have to be expanded. Textbooks, computers, and other materials have to be updated constantly. Grades, test scores, graduation rates – all of these things have to be kicked up a notch with each passing generation. It’s the only way to keep up with the demands of a growing and competitive marketplace. Competition pushes up the quality of services, and applies downward pressure to prices. Things get progressively better even as they get progressively cheaper. The free market system works.

With the abysmal state of public education as we know it today, what can be done about it? The truth is, our public schools can’t be “fixed.” The only way to solve our problems is to take drastic measures against their expansion. Their budgets must be severely strained. Their monopolistic privileges must be mercilessly attacked with the elimination of compulsory financing laws, mandatory attendance, and school zoning ordinances, as well as the possible introduction of tax credits for parents who want to send their children to a private school or educate their child at home. And public schools, I’m not at all disheartened to say, must be abolished once and for all.

Education should be left up to the forces of the free market, not because it’s unimportant, but because it is so vitally important. Scott Walker should be commended, not depicted with a Hitler mustache, for moving the Wisconsin educational system forward.