The costs of education

I wanted to follow up on my most recent post regarding education spending. As I had expected many commenters took issue with my assertions about teachers pay.

First there is the standard complaint that my source is bias even though the link provided was to a government agency that took its data from the Bureau of Labor and statistics (BLS). Regardless it should be noted that according to the BLS the increase in pay for education over the past decade is 0.2% while categories like business and financial operations (3%), Architecture and engineering (4.5%) Healthcare practitioners (11.4%), and Management (13.2%) have all seen much higher increases.

This of course leads to the next standard complaint that maybe teacher pay is stagnant but pension and healthcare costs are the real problem.

While the cost of increased pensions is a major contributor, attributing these costs to current teachers as an "increase in benefits" is inaccurate. First the employee contribution portion has been increasing steadily for the past several years. Second the teachers union does not set this rate. Lansing does.

There are a number of reasons for this increase and they have nothing to do with greed by the current teachers.

Back in 1991 John Engler decided that the state no longer needed to prefund the pension fund and funneled this money elsewhere. Unfortunately this decision led to a shortfall in the pension fund which taxpayers and teachers are now being asked to cover.

The dot-com crash also put a strain on the system and again rather than take their medicine and make the necessary changes it was agreed that reserves would be used to cover the shortfall.

Of course the Republican legislative agenda has also contributed to the problems. The push for more private schools has left less teachers contributing for more retirees. According to an article on Mlive "A decade ago, there were roughly 2.5 school employees paying into MPSERS for every retiree drawing benefits. The ratio this year is 1.23 employees for every retiree." This number is also a result of the Republican austerity measures which led to as many as 350,000 less teachers in the US since 2009.

So while the per pupil costs of pensions are increasing the benefits to current teachers are not. If anything they are decreasing due to the additional contributions currently required to make up for past mistakes.

As far as healthcare costs are concerned, again while per pupil spending is affected by healthcare costs it is bizarre to blame educators for the increasing costs in the healthcare industry. The cost of text books have increased by twice the rate of inflation over the past 20 years. Are teachers somehow to blame for this as well?

The reality is that teachers are not getting better insurance now than a decade ago. They are getting the same or less coverage and contributing a higher percentage of their salary for it.

So why are per pupil costs on the rise? Like the cost of text books the cost for special education has risen by twice the rate of inflation. The same is true of gasoline which makes transportation more expensive than 10 years ago. Additionally between 2000 and 2007 infrastructure spending for public education hit record highs and the cost for keeping up with technology is a never ending quest.

In Michigan teachers are already making less and contributing more. So while there are a number of reasons that per pupil spending has increased, it is a fallacy to suggest wages and benefits for teachers are the cause.