No “Speak Truth To Power” Moment: The Real Story Of Greed Behind The Anti-Teacher Union Attacks

When Eva Moskowitz and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal pile on in an attack on teacher unions, and Eduwonk’s Andy Rotherham, the National Association of Public Charter Schools and the Fordham Foundation’s Flypaper add their blogging imprimaturs, you know that this is not going to be a Mahatma Gandhi “speak truth to power” moment. What is remarkable is how much it has become a mirror image inverse, a “power attempts to silence truth” moment.

It hurts the interests of NYC school children, Moskowitz and the Wall Street Journal opine, when the UFT insists that those who do the work of classroom para-professionals in NYC public schools be paid the contractual salary and benefits of a para-professional and when the Baltimore Teachers’ Union insists that the teachers at a Baltimore KIPP school be paid their contractual salary. When teacher unions demand those contractual rates of pay and benefits, we are taking services away from students. Schools should be able to pay whatever the market will bear, the argument goes, and in tough economic times, the lower, the better. Make up for budget cuts in public schools by paying school employees less.

It’s time to say “enough is enough,” and tell the real story.

An entry-level paraprofessional working for the NYC Department of Education earns $21,713 a year. Now living on such a salary is not something within the realm of experience for this quintet, so for their benefit, suffice it to say that the US Department of Health and Human Services calculates the poverty level for a family of four at $22,050. Note that NYC para-professionals are predominantly women and of color, and often the sole financial support for their families.

Moskowitz’s salary is a modest 17 times larger than the salary she begrudges the starting para-professional. That puts her up there in Wall Street bonus territory, with the AIG bonuses of recent infamy. And her compensation comes from charter schools which are financed with public tax dollars. If the hypocrisy of such posturing does not completely turn your stomach, consider the fact that in the name of school children, Moskowitz is targeting some of the lowest paid of NYC school employees, the folks who struggle to make each pay cheque cover basic living costs of food, clothing and shelter. She has the chutzpah to invoke the interests of school children both to declare that $21,713 is too much to pay someone doing the work of a para-professional and to justify her own salary of $371,000. Patriotism is no longer the last refuge of the scoundrel: it will now have to take second place to invoking the interests of school children.

While Moskowitz was taking to the pages of the Daily News to carry on her war against the UFT, our leaders were meeting with parents and the Department of Education to find ways for the schools in question to continue providing important services to students. All agreed that those services must supplement, not supplant, existing school personnel, including para-professionals. That’s the sort of thing that folks who really care about school children and fairness do.

Or take the case of the Baltimore KIPP Ujima Village Academy. Missing from the Wall Street Journal‘s account is this little fact: the 33% salary premium for the extra time worked by KIPP Ujima Village teachers was not some sort of unilateral demand of the Baltimore Teachers’ Union, but a rate agreed to by both KIPP and the BTU.  KIPP management voluntarily entered into and signed a contract which set the 33% rate and kept the longer school day, week and year that KIPP saw as essential to its educational program. [KIPP schools generally have ten hour school days, six day school weeks and eleven month school years -- considerably more than 33% more time]. When KIPP and the BTU shook hands on the deal and the 33% rate, both sides estimated that an additional $120,000 would cover its costs and that such a sum was well within the school’s means. To put that sum in context, a few months earlier on September 9, 2008, the Baltimore Sun reported [$] that “[U. S.] Senator Benjamin L. Cardin and [U.S.] Representative Elijah E. Cummings presented a high performing charter middle school in Baltimore with a check for $243,677 yesterday. The money, federal funding secured by Cardin for KIPP Ujima Village Academy, will be used to support the school’s extended day, week and year.”

Note that in addition to public funds which come as revenue for its schools and government grants such as that secured by Cardin, KIPP nationwide has taken in more than $17.6 million from the Wal-Mart Walton Family Foundation over the last three years, and close to $120 million from various foundations since 2003. In each year of its existence, KIPP Baltimore has significantly increased its revenues and its end of the year bottom line balance, which is now close to $1 million on the positive side of the ledger. Moreover, KIPP Baltimore plans to open a second charter school in Baltimore in the coming school year. If we may be forgiven a little understatement, KIPP nationwide and KIPP Baltimore in particular are not exactly in the red.

But no sooner was the ink on that contract dry, than KIPP management decided it really shouldn’t have to negotiate such matters, and began a media campaign to that end. The program in the school was deliberately cut, and teachers’ hours cut in the most punitive way. To understand the full impact of what was going on, consider that KIPP Baltimore has a most interesting profile for an educational organization: it reports a total of 14 teachers, but 19 out of the classroom employees.  Key KIPP Baltimore leadership figures, such as the Executive Director and the Principal, are very well-compensated with multiple sources of income — Baltimore charter school base pay, KIPP salary on more than one line, and salary as corporate officers of KIPP Baltimore, Inc. Baltimore KIPP financial documents are confusing — perhaps deliberately so — but one thing is clear: while Baltimore KIPP is now saying that it does not have enough money to pay its teachers the 33% premium on the charter school base pay it just negotiated, it has had no difficulty paying the Principal an additional premium at least 45% of her charter school base pay in at least one year with another 30% in at least one year as a corporate officer of Baltimore KIPP.  But cuts were made only in teachers’ hours and in teacher positions.

And just to make sure that there was no misunderstanding about what they were doing, KIPP Baltimore administration sent a clear message. When the KIPP teacher who led the union in the Ujima Village school returned from a trip where he met with the KIPP AMP teachers who had just organized their school here in NYC, he was called into a meeting with management and told that his program and classes had been eliminated. His services were no longer needed.

There is an important moral here, just not the one that Moskowitz, the Wall Street Journal, Rotherham, NAPCS and Flypaper would have us draw. The oft-repeated complaint against teacher unions in those circles is that we stand in the way of education reform and innovation. But these battles have nothing to do with education; rather, they are all about money. The question they pose is simply this: are we to embark on a “race to the bottom” which targets the compensation of the most vulnerable of school employees, as this quintet would have it? Or do we insist that a quality public education system requires a foundation of fair compensation for the women and men who dedicate their professional lives to teaching and serving our school children, often at great cost and sacrifice to themselves?

Teacher unions have always been completely forthright that a central part of our mission is fairness and economic justice for the men and women who do the actual work of education. Now it is equally transparent that those who oppose teacher unions are pursuing an agenda of unfettered greed.

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