New Jersey Left Behind:

Lots of press on NJEA’s bill for lobbying last year: $6.8 million, far more than any other lobbying group in NJ. At about 200,000 members who pay an average of $730 in annual dues, that’s about 5% of each teacher’s contribution. Pennies in the grand scheme of things. And yet…here’s NJEA Spokesman Steve Wollmer sounding a tad defensive in the Star-Ledger: “We spent that money. We felt we had to. The governor was putting out a lot of what we feel was misinformation on education and our members demanded we set the record straight”
and in NJ Spotlight: “It was unprecedented, but so is the severity of the attacks by this governor. Our membership insisted on it, and our leadership did, too.”
and in the Asbury Park Press, “It’s like a fight between two heavyweights; you land some punches, and everyone gets hurt. Our And we acknowledge that numbers for NJEA are down. But that’s not going to stop us from telling the truth.”

Locally, the Wisconsin Education Association’s $2,143,588 topped lobbying expenditures from January, 2009 to July, 2010

Tom Jacobs:

As numerous states — most prominently Wisconsin and Ohio — consider curtailing the collective bargaining rights of their workers, the debate has largely focused on money and power. If public employee unions are de-authorized or restricted, what impact will that have on state budgets? Tax rates? Political contests?
When it comes to teachers, however, this discussion bypasses a crucial question: What is the impact of collective bargaining on students? A study just published in the Yale Law Journal, which looks at recent, real-life experience in the state of New Mexico, provides a troubling answer.
It finds mandatory collective bargaining laws for public-school teachers lead to a welcome rise in SAT scores – and a disappointing decrease in graduation rates. Author Benjamin Lindy, a member of the Yale Law School class of 2010 and former middle-school teacher, reports that any improvements in student performance appear to come “at the expense of those who are already worse off.”

Kim Grimmer via a Mary Battaglia email:

Six months ago, before Governor Walker’s recent initiatives had Sconnies questioning the level of pay of teachers and other public servants, McKinsey and Company, the international management consulting company, published a report on whether the United States was falling behind other industrialized nations in attracting and retaining the best possible teachers for its K-12 systems. The report was entitled: Closing the Talent Gap, Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to a Career in Teaching. One aspect that the report noted was that pay for public school teachers in the United States is too low to attract candidates from the top one-third of university graduating classes, and pay over teachers’ careers does not rise as fast as that of teachers in other industrialized countries.

Rochelle Riley:

As we debate Gov. Rick Snyder’s proposed budget and whether his constituents can survive it, we should note what the late French essayist Joseph Joubert said: “The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.”
That should apply to how we spend tax money. And at risk of death threats, I want us to converse more about education spending.
I find it curious and heartbreaking that whenever a governor proposes cuts to schools, the first outcry is what it will cost the kids.
Why pick on the kids first?

John C. Henry, Center for Public Integrity:

On the surface, the fight between the governor of Wisconsin and organized labor is about balancing state budgets and collective-bargaining rights. Behind the scenes, hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to top labor leaders as well as campaign contributions to Democrats could be in jeopardy.
Union treasuries – filled by dues paid by union members – not only fund programs benefiting union members and their families. The money they collect also pays six-figure compensation packages for labor leaders and provides millions of dollars for Democratic causes and candidates.
The Center for Public Integrity found compensation for leaders of the 10 largest unions ranged from $173,000 at the United Auto Workers to $618,000 at the Laborers’ International Union of North America, and almost $480,000 for the president of the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees. The latter is the target of GOP governors in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee and Kansas.
The union reports, filed with the Department of Labor, list compensation for all union employees and officers. Salaries make up the biggest portion, but other benefits can include tens of thousands of dollars for meal allowances, mileage allowances and entertainment. Health care and pension contributions are not specifically addressed.

Reuters:

In these challenging financial times — what I call ‘The New Normal’ — governments at every level face a critical need to cut spending where we can in order to invest where we must,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote to U.S. governors while offering “some options on the effective, efficient, and responsible use of resources in tight budget times.”
The $821 billion economic stimulus plan passed in 2009 included the largest transfer of federal funds to states in U.S. history, with much of the money targeted toward healthcare and education.
The plan runs out this year and the states, which are only seeing a modest uptick in revenue as they still struggle with the fallout of the recession, are looking for places to cut to keep their budgets balanced.

Alyson Klein:

The administration had wanted to see those programs consolidated into a new, broader, $383 million funding stream aimed at improving literacy. Now it appears there may be a lot less available money for that effort.
The measure also gets rid of all funding for the rest of the year for the $88 million Smaller Learning Communities program, which was slated to be funneled into a broader program aimed at improving educational options.
And it scraps the Leveraging Educational Assistance Partnerships, or LEAP, program, financed at $64 million.
The bill also defunds a lot of programs that are right now classified as “earmarks,” meaning money directed at one particular program or project. That includes a number of national education programs, such as Teach for America, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, National Writing Project, Reading is Fundamental, and the Close Up fellowship.

Zachary Coleman:

Gov. Pat Quinn defended his proposal to merge school districts on Wednesday, saying the money saved from cutting district administrators will put more teachers in Illinois classrooms.
Quinn said the state could save $100 million by cutting the Illinois’ 868 school districts to about 300. Illinois has the third-most school districts in the nation behind Texas and California, and about 200 districts have just a single school.
“We don’t need as many folks at the top level,” Quinn told reporters at the Capitol. “We need folks on the front line, in teaching, imparting knowledge and making sure our kids get 21st century education.”
Quinn said at least 270 superintendents earn more than his $177,412 salary.

Tracy Putrino:

A tentative school budget of $83.3 million was approved by the Board of Education on March 3.
The budget includes a tax levy, the amount to be paid by taxpayers, of $73,158,200 million. The tax levy is a 1.75 percent increase over last year and below the 2 percent cap permitted for school districts. With debt service of $1,940,222, the total tax levy is $75 million.
For a property assessed at $411,663, the borough average, it amounts to a $181.93 annual increase or $15.16 a month, according to Superintendent of Schools Bruce Watson.
“We still have three weeks to work on it,” said Watson during his presentation. “We can still change it.”

Amy Hetzner and Erin Richards:

State and local funding for general Wisconsin public school operations would drop 5.5% in 2011-’12 while Milwaukee’s private-school voucher program could be poised for a massive expansion under Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal, one that slashes $834 million in state K-12 education spending over the next two years.
The governor’s 2011-’13 budget proposal would phase out the income requirements of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, eliminate the enrollment cap on student participation, and allow Milwaukee families to use their publicly funded voucher to attend any private school in Milwaukee County that wished to participate in the program.
Walker also hopes to remove a requirement that students in the choice schools take state tests, possibly scuttling new efforts to gauge whether the private school choice program has meaningful impact on academic achievement.
“We’ve been saying for a month now that the second shoe was going to drop,” said Tom Beebe, executive director of Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools, referring to Walker’s recent push for major concessions on benefits from teachers and other public employees. “It wasn’t just dropped. It was thrown at the head.”

Daniel Bice and Ben Poston:

The 14 Wisconsin Democratic senators who fled to Illinois share more than just political sympathy with the public employees and unions targeted by Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-repair bill.
The Senate Democrats count on those in the public sector as a key funding source for their campaigns.
In fact, nearly one out of every five dollars raised by those Democratic senators in the past two election cycles came from public employees, such as teachers and firefighters, and their unions, a Journal Sentinel analysis of campaign records shows.
“It’s very simple,” said Richard Abelson, executive director of District Council 48 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “We have interests, and because of that, we attempt to support candidates who support our interests. It’s pretty hard to find Republicans who support our interests these days.”
Critics of Walker’s budget-repair bill say it would mean less union money for Democrats. That’s because the legislation would end automatic payroll deductions for dues and would allow public employees to opt out of belonging to a union.

Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators.

Gerald Seib:

The federal government isn’t simply bleeding money. Because of its addiction to red ink, it’s bleeding power, which is starting to flow away from the nation’s capital and out to the states. This is the little-recognized reality behind the remarkable political upheaval being seen in state capitals.
Republican governors such as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, New Jersey’s Chris Christie and Indiana’s Mitch Daniels are pursuing their own controversial fiscal policies out of what they consider financial necessity; they have budgets to balance, and little time and few options to do the job. But governors of both parties also have less reason to wait and hope for help from a federal government that, with overwhelming budget deficits, is losing its ability to offer financial goodies to the states.
For decades, the implicit deal between Washington and state capitals has been that the feds would offer chunks of cash, and in return would get commensurate influence over the states’ social policies. Now that flow of federal goodies has begun what figures to be a long-term decline, as the money Washington has available to pass around to the states is squeezed. Already the funds the federal government offered states as part of the 2009 economic stimulus package have nearly run out, and the budget-cutting that has begun in Washington is curtailing the other money available to dole out.

David Leonhardt

To be clear, I’m making an argument that’s different from “Government workers are overpaid.” I’m saying that they are paid in the wrong ways — in ways that make life easier on union leaders and elected officials, at least initially, but that eventually hurt both workers and taxpayers.
The best example is health insurance. Health plans for union workers and retirees are much more likely to require little or no co-payment, which leads to lots of medical treatments that don’t make people any healthier, and to huge costs. Ultimately, some of these plans will probably prove so expensive as to be unsustainable. Workers would have been better off accepting a less generous benefit package and slightly higher salaries.
The solution today is not to cut both the pay and the benefits of public workers, as would happen if workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere lost their right to bargain. Remember, public workers don’t get especially generous salaries. The solution is to get rid of the deferred benefits that make no sense — the wasteful health plans, the pensions that start at age 55 and still let retirees draw a full salary elsewhere, the definitions of disability that treat herniated discs as incurable.

Cara Matthews:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo introduced legislation Monday that would cap school superintendents’ salaries based on district enrollment, with a maximum salary of $175,000 a year.
The proposal sparked immediate opposition from superintendents and other school officials, who said the state gives local school districts the authority to set superintendents’ salaries.
Cuomo said his plan would save about $15 million a year. The best areas for potential savings include back-office overhead, administration, consultants and consolidations, he said.
“We must wake up to the new economic reality that government must be more efficient and cut the cost of bureaucracy,” he said in a statement. “We must streamline government because raising taxes is not an option.”

Steven Greenhouse:

Evaluating the success of the policy depends on where you sit.
“It’s helped us in a thousand ways. It was absolutely central to our turnaround here,” Mr. Daniels said in an interview. Without union contracts to slow him down, he said, it has been easy for him to merge the procurement operations of numerous state agencies, saving millions of dollars. One move alone — outsourcing and consolidating food service operations for Indiana’s 28 prisons — has saved the state $100 million since 2005, he said. Such moves led to hundreds losing their jobs.
For state workers in Indiana, the end of collective bargaining also meant a pay freeze in 2009 and 2010 and higher health insurance payments. Several state employees said they now paid $5,200 a year in premiums, $3,400 more than when Mr. Daniels took office, though there are cheaper plans available. Earlier in his tenure, Mr. Daniels adopted a merit pay system, with some employees receiving no raises and those deemed to be top performers getting up to 10 percent.
Andrea Helm, an employee at a children’s home in Knightstown, Ind., said that soon after collective bargaining was ended and the union contract expired, coveted seniority preferences disappeared. “I saw a lot of employees who had 20, 30 years on the job fired,” she said. “I think they were trying to cut the more expensive people on top to make their budget smaller.”