Yesterday, a few hundred system employees vowed to
walk
out of classrooms on, fittingly, Oct. 31. These people, marshalled by organized
labor, said they would do so in protest of Industrial Tax Exemption Program
awards to ExxonMobil, if made at an Oct. 30 meeting of the state’s Board of
Commerce and Industry. However, the BCI
doesn’t have those requests on its agenda for that meeting, meaning a walkout
might occur at a later date after it finally does take up the matter.
Leftist groups blame these exemptions, which could
run into the millions of dollars annually of foregone revenue for the system,
for preventing salary increases. The latest (2015)
data of classroom teacher salaries in the system for nine months was $51,754 (excluding
benefits except for professional development funds), or almost $6,000 higher
than the state’s
median household income for that year.
Then, the system had just under a full-time equivalent of 3,000 teachers, although today it employs around 3,200 total. It’s unsure how many of the 445 who pledged to abandon their duties for a day were teachers.
Other issues, such as smaller class sizes, better
technology, new school buses, updated school buildings, and early childhood
education the congregants also brought up. But it appeared compensation seemed
the main motive for the threatened strike. As one participant put it, “Teachers
would like to be compensated for what we do. We put a lot of love and craft
into what we do.”
Perhaps, but whatever they do overall in the
aggregate doesn’t produce very notable outcomes. As
it has for many years, the system has drawn a ‘C’ performance score, but has
seen the overall score deteriorate since the last time the scoring metric was
re-centered. Meanwhile, it has slipped in overall state rankings compared to
other districts. Worse, EBRPSS American
College Test scores have fallen over the past five years, last year
declining to 18.5 (about
the 40th percentile) for an all-time low with all students taking
the exam.
The desire to threaten a walkout indicates why,
which only hampers children’s education by depriving them of an extra day of
instruction from their assigned teachers. Instead of harming children’s life
prospects, disaffected employees could work elsewhere, with some school
districts just miles away, or at charter schools potentially literally down the
street. Consider as well in the case of teachers that, on a monthly basis,
their income exceeds the state’s median household income by over $14,000 a year
with much more vacation time than practically any full-time employee in any
other industry.
Yet it seems this isn’t enough, and so they selfishly
wish to put their own wants ahead of the needs of children. And to continue producing
a mediocre education of relatively declining value, while getting paid more for
this, despite the fact that the district spent in 2015 over $12,000 per student
– an amount higher
than the averages of 33 states in 2016 and over $1,000 more than Louisiana
as a whole.
Such obtuseness doesn’t bode well for district
leadership to halt the slipping academic performance of the system. But it does
assist understanding of why employees contributing to a declining school system
would countenance a tactic that would prompt more of that declination in order
to enrich themselves personally.
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