The salary schedule for Madison teachers is frozen for the next school year.
But teachers will still get raises.
That’s because, outside of the general salary schedule, Madison teachers are financially rewarded for their years of experience and for the higher education coursework they complete toward advanced degrees.
These “step and lane” raises, as they are called, will average 2.3 percent next school year for Madison teachers.
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad and two School Board members didn’t know what this figure was when they met with the State Journal editorial board three weeks ago.
One School Board member even suggested the average teacher raise for years of experience and higher education credits would be so small it was hardly worth considering.
But a 2.3 percent raise sounds pretty good to private sector workers who have endured real pay freezes, furloughs and layoffs for years now because of the recession and slow economic recovery. The school district calculated the 2.3 percent figure last week at the State Journal’s request.
Updated with a new link (and a Google Cache archive pdf) sent by a kind reader’s email. Here is the original, non working link.
A kind reader emailed an updated link to this article along with a cached version from Google.
fyi – the 5.8 percent pension contribution is 5.8% of gross income, but that amount is then deducted from net income. So it is a larger percentage of NET income. Also, fyi, my understanding is the amount of money that has gone into the retirement fund is deferred compensation, so all employees affected by this are now paying 100+% into their retirement accounts. (See article – http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2011/02/25/the-wisconsin-lie-exposed-taxpayers-actually-contribute-nothing-to-public-employee-pensions/)
The WSJ article is incomplete as is the comparison of numbers – don’t make any attempt to compare like professions. They certainly did not look at changes in working conditions, etc., as a starting point and put dollars to that. And, they say absolutely nothing about executive pay, bonuses on Wall Street and in fortune 500 companies, which dwarf any of the amounts from WI workers – public or private.
Teachers are taxpayers, and teachers are consumers in the economy as are all public and private workers. Shame on us workers for putting done at one another – how foolish and short-sighted we are.
Not only was Walker’s administration sloppy with his falsely named budget repair bill, he did not need to resort to a “nuclear” option to get changes started. He did not even try to make his case clearly and succinctly. And, he rather made it about pitting WI citizens against one another rather than bringing us all into the boat in a sense of the need for shared austerity as David Brooks wrote about (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/opinion/22brooks.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss), but that would require leadership and some kind of analysis.