At What Point Would a Public-Sector Salary NOT Be Too High?
A good newspaper retains columnists that you strongly disagree with. Even when it seems like the incessant blather they produce ought to be embarrassing. That’s how democracy works. I get it. So does the Globe & Mail.
For as long as anyone can remember, the teachers’ unions and progressive politicians have been a match made in heaven… But now, the money has run out. The relationship has hit the rocks, and things will never be the same again.
First of all, Margaret Wente, welcome to the 21st century. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but teachers’ unions and provincial governments have been “on the rocks” for years and years now. All unions, in fact. I dare you to list all the meaningful, lasting, and life-changing reforms that unions have pushed into legislation, in any province in this country, since let’s say 1990. Go on. I dare you. And then come back to me and tell me that the union movement is too powerful.
Wente’s main complaint is that teachers are overpaid (where have I heard this before?). Specifically, she says that Ontario’s teachers are overpaid and, even more specifically, that someone doesn’t deserve to get paid $92,000 a year “for teaching Grade 3 in Thunder Bay.” Ontario’s teachers are “among the best paid in the world,” and “we can’t afford it.” There goes socialist McGuinty with his heavy tax-and-spend socialism again, yes?
Let’s start from square one. According to the Lakehead school district’s collective agreement with the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, this is what grade 3 teachers (amongst others) in Thunder Bay got paid during the past school year:
Can Ontario afford this vast largesse? I suppose it depends. Despite the raving right’s annoyance at the Liberal McGuinty government for its sky-high taxes, here’s how Ontario’s income tax rate stacks up against those of other provinces. As you can see, Ontario’s top tax bracket pays 11% in income tax. That’s the lowest tax rate listed, except for Alberta. The Drummond Report which is forming the basis for Ontario’s current “crisis” austerity regimen is quite explicit on this subject: government revenue as a share of the economy is falling. Yet citizens’ expectations for government services are steady, if not rising. Is there a mismatch here? Anyone?
Surely the high point of this article is a paragraph in which Wente, who obviously excelled in the last math class she took, grapples with the great and enduring mystery of how, over the past 10 years, an average salary increase of 3% per year somehow morphed into an appalling 30% increase in salaries, and concludes that this devious gift to the unions must have been accomplished through some sort of salary grid-related hocus-pocus. (I’m sure there’s a legitimate point in there somewhere, which just didn’t come across clearly.)
At this point the only thing standing in the way of Ontario slashing teacher salaries is the rule of law, which, as right-wing governments across this country have demonstrated amply for years now, is fairly flimsy protection. And as we all know from economics (which perhaps the illustrious Wente also studied at some point), what you pay for a service is in no way related to the quality of that service. So let’s start cutting!
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Brian
Oh sweet Jesus, don’t torture yourself reading anything by Margaret Wente. There are boundaries to good taste, and her and Ibbitson are beyond it. Ol’ Margaret was practically dancing in the end zone telling sane people to suck eggs when Rob Ford won his election in her next column… you don’t hear her say much about that now. And John Ibbitson is still shilling for Harper to appoint him to the Senate in every column…
But that’s the Globe and Mail for you these days. Decrying the gap and growth of income inequality, while pillorying any proposal that sets out to address the imbalance (most recently by the PQ) as an attack on success and entrepreneurial spirit. One would hope they would put up or shut up at this point.
Sixth Estate
Brian — I’ve been told that professional journalists who publish their full name on their byline have more credibility than humble anonymous bloggers such as I. So it behooves me to report on the philosophical ruminations of those greater than myself.
spartikus
A question I often wonder myself – if you think salaries & benefits are too high…well, what do you think they should be? As in give a number, please. Never, ever seem to get a response. The would require good faith.
Wente mentions salaries for US teachers in passing. Is that what she wants? Does she want US education outcomes too?
“Think of what our schools and teachers could do if they were liberated from the dead weight of the education bureaucracies and the unions.”
Yes, think if we were “liberated” from a system that produces some of the best results in the world
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2010/12/07/tech-education-oecd-rank.html
The stupid, it burns, it burns.
kootcoot
People who excel at fuzzy thinking and fictionalizing facts, like Margie WentNuts and John Idiotson should stay away from math, because it tends to be a “hard” science and objective. Statistics can be gamed, but straight math, not so much! The fact that 2 plus 2 equals four is not a matter of opinion.
Of course either of the two sterling “thinkers” named above might be interested in a course about “irrational numbers,” though I’m pretty confident it would sail over their heads and be beyond their comprehension.
pogge
Has anyone figured out what Wente has against Thunder Bay? She seems to imply that a teacher there should make less than a teacher somewhere else.
jrkrideau
Did anyone notice a Page 2 correction about the average salary of US teachers? Tiny print but it was there and on the on-line version. Of course I only found it because I was trying to find where the comics were.
Come to think of it, Wente say In Ontario, the average teacher makes $83,500 a year. Of course, as Sixth Estate pointed out she does seem innumerate but average is ambiguous. Did she quote the mean or the median value?
No matter, but I noticed that she didn’t seem to want to discuss what other provinces are paying teachers. I found a quick summary of “2011 Canadian Teacher Salary Rankings: Provinces and Territories” comparing BC Category 5 max an min salaries with other provinces.
I have no idea what a Category 5 teacher is but maybe one reason that Wente didn’t mention other provinces is because at least from these figures, Ontario seems to be in the pack See http://www.mediafire.com/?q4aq319a5wqivai for a plot.
Some provinces have more than one point as they seem to have more contracts (a sampling of ndividual school boards vs province wide contracts it appears).
So overpaid compared to Louisiana or Alberta?
Sixth Estate
Thanks for pointing it out. I suspect she means the mean value, if only because I suspect when she talks about “averages” that’s the only number that comes to mind. I can’t speak to the accuracy of the figure because I can’t identify the original source; it seems to have become widely cited after being declared by the Ontario PCs.
It is somewhat relevant in view of the salary table I posted from the collective agreement. That table implies that if the average salary really is $83,500 per year (presumably salaries are higher in, say, Toronto than in Thunder Bay), it is because the great bulk of the teaching staff are in the latter years of their careers and/or are very highly qualified and thus in the top pay categories. Consequently it follows that the simplest solution for Ontario is to lay them all off and hire a bunch of inexperienced and poorly qualified teachers, no? I kid, I kid.
More to the point — category 5 is a reference to the BC pay grid. The Ontario grid I posted had A-1 through A-4. In BC, category 5 is equivalent to 5 years of full-time postsecondary study, leading to two diplomas (i.e. a bachelors degree plus a B.Ed, or a B.Ed plus a masters, or what have you). The other category numbers represent lesser levels of qualification, in descending order:
http://www.tqs.bc.ca/requirements.html
Provinces develop their own grids so there wouldn’t be a precise correlation in all provinces, but that would probably correspond to something on the upper end of the Ontario scale as well, either a 3 or a 4 (honestly not sure here).