Mark Bergen and Josh Eidelson:

Every day, tens of thousands of people stream into Google offices wearing red name badges. They eat in Google’s cafeterias, ride its commuter shuttles and work alongside its celebrated geeks. But they can’t access all of the company’s celebrated perks. They aren’t entitled to stock and can’t enter certain offices. Many don’t have health insurance.

Before each weekly Google all-hands meeting, trays of hors d’oeuvres and, sometimes, kegs of beer are carted into an auditorium and satellite offices around the globe for employees, who wear white badges. Those without white badges are asked to return to their desks.

Google’s Alphabet Inc. employs hordes of these red-badged contract workers in addition to its full-fledged staff. They serve meals and clean offices. They write code, handle sales calls, recruit staff, screen YouTube videos, test self-driving cars and even manage entire teams – a sea of skilled laborers that fuel the $795 billion company but reap few of the benefits and opportunities available to direct employees. Earlier this year, those contractors outnumbered direct employees for the first time in the company’s twenty-year history, according to a person who viewed the numbers on an internal company database. It’s unclear if that is still the case. Alphabet reported 89,058 direct employees at the end of the second quarter. The company declined to comment on the number of contract workers.

Richard Eisenberg:

Between a third and a half of people age 45 to 59 and a quarter of those 60+ went without needed health care in the past year due to its cost, according to a troubling new survey from the West Health Institute and NORC at the University of Chicago.

“We were surprised by the magnitude of the findings,” said Dr. Zia Agha, chief medical officer at the West Health Institute, a nonprofit applied medical research organization based in San Diego. “And 80% of the people we surveyed had health insurance, so just having insurance does not make you immune to health care costs.”

The researchers at West Health Institute and NORC at the University of Chicago (a nonpartisan research institution) interviewed 1,302 adults. Their findings were released at the American Society on Aging’s 2018 Aging in America conference in San Francisco.

Age 45 to 59 skipping health care
Specifically, the survey found these results for people age 45 to 59 (members of Generation X and boomers) as a result of health care costs:

Related: $37B and growing back door electronic medical record taxpayer subsidies since 2009.

Cezary Podkul and Heather Gillers:

The only speaker standing between state budget officers and the opening cocktail hour at a Washington conference was the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. What he said left no one in a celebratory mood.

Medicaid costs, said then-Secretary Michael Leavitt, were projected to grow so fast that within 10 years they would “crowd out virtually every other category of spending.” State spending on higher education, infrastructure and safety, he predicted, would all get squeezed.

Nearly 10 years after that October 2008 speech, Mr. Leavitt’s prediction—part of HHS’s first-ever annual projection of Medicaid’s costs—is looking prescient.

As state and local officials prepare their next budgets, many are finding that spending decisions have already been made for them by two must-fund line items that barely mattered when baby boomers such as Mr. Leavitt were growing up: Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for the poor and disabled, and public-employee health and retirement costs.

These days, they consume about one out of every five tax dollars collected by state and local governments. That is the highest share since Medicaid was created in 1965. Postretirement health benefits, which are harder to quantify, add to that burden and have cumulatively cost states more than $100 billion since 2008, according to government financial disclosures compiled by Merritt Research Services.

David Arsen, Thomas A. DeLuca, Yongmei Ni and Michael Bates:

Like other states, Michigan has implemented a number of policies to change governance and administrative arrangements in local school districts deem to be in financial emergency. This paper examines two questions: (1) Which districts get into financial trouble and why? and (2) Among fiscally distressed districts, are there significant differences in the characteristics of districts in which the state does and does not intervene? We analyze factors influencing district fund balances utilizing fixed effect models on a statewide panel dataset of Michigan school districts from 1995 to 2012. We evaluate the impact of state school finance and choice policies, over which local districts have limited control, and local district resource allocation decisions (e.g., average class size, teacher salaries, and spending shares devoted to administration, employee health insurance, and contracted services). Our results indicate that 80% of the explained variation in district fiscal stress is due to changes in districts’ state funding, to enrollment changes including those associated with school choice policies, and to the enrollment of high-cost, special education students. We also find that the districts in which the state has intervened have significantly higher shares of African-American and low-income students than other financially troubled Michigan districts, and they are in worse financial shape by some measures.

Michigan offers an interesting case of a state with a highly centralized school finance system in which the state sets per pupil funding levels for each district, and most operating revenues follow students when they move among districts or charter schools. Districts have very limited authority to raise additional tax revenues for school operations from local sources. Consequently local responses to financial stress focus primarily on efforts to reduce spending.
Roughly ten percent of Michigan’s 550 districts had operating deficits at the end of each fiscal year from 2012 to 2014. Thus far, three districts, each predominantly African-American and urban, have been placed under an emergency manager’s control, including the state’s largest district, Detroit Public Schools. Two more predominantly African-American districts were dissolved soon after PA 96’s passage. State review teams have recently declared financial emergency in two additional predominantly African-American, urban districts that are currently operating under consent decrees.2 These recent laws and their implementation provide state officials with much greater authority to reshape not only the finances and operations, but also the educational programs in districts serving many of Michigan’s highest-need students. They simultaneously greatly diminish the power of local citizens and educators in these districts to shape education service provision.

Although it has received limited attention, financial accountability could assume growing prominence in the accountability movement. Legislation such as Michigan’s emergency management law changes the politics of state intervention and governance reforms by providing state officials greater legitimacy to intervene in local districts (Arsen & Mason, 2013). To be viewed as legitimate, it is necessary to define the heart of the educational problem as administrative incompetence or the failure of local democratic governance structures. The legitimacy of state takeovers on academic grounds is sometimes undermined by concerns that test-based accountability penalizes schools for failing to overcome disadvantages related to students’ poverty over which they have little control. State takeovers of “academically failing” districts might be criticized, therefore, as unfairly targeting districts that face the greatest educational challenges or “blaming the victims” (McDermott, 2007).
In contrast, administrators and elected representatives in any local community, rich or poor, can be expected to handle public funds honestly and competently. If local officials lack the basic administrative competence to balance their budgets (like everyone else), it is hardly surprising that they also lack the capability to educate their students. By framing school failure in terms of financial accountability, state policy makers may undercut traditional education actors’ legitimacy over academic affairs and establish more politically salient grounds for changes in the control and operation of local schools.

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student…

Molly Beck:

The polling also showed 60 percent of public sector employees favor returning to collective bargaining, compared with only 39 percent in the private sector. Nearly 70 percent of union members favor bargaining, while only 38 percent of non-union members support it. Those polled in the city of Milwaukee and Madison media markets favor collective bargaining while the rest of the state, to different degrees, do not, Franklin said.

Timing the message
“(Focusing on Act 10) would be a good primary tactic but for the general election, I don’t think so,” said Joe Heim, a longtime political science professor at UW-La Crosse. “By the general election, the union people and anybody who opposes Act 10 would know exactly where they are going. If you are trying to get some crossover supporters who generally think Act 10 was not a bad idea, but don’t necessarily like Walker, reminding them of that time is not a good idea.”

Republicans have touted how the law saved state and local governments billions of dollars, though that’s based mostly on provisions of the law separate from bargaining that required public employees to contribute to pension and health insurance premiums. Democrats say it has contributed to a statewide teacher shortage, though school districts are facing shortages across the country.

“You don’t need to remind anyone of it,” Heim said. “Time to move on and I would hope the Democrats are smart enough to look forward.”

A spokeswoman for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin did not respond to a request for comment on whether the issue will be prominent in the 2018 campaign.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Walker’s campaign cited Act 10 as the catalyst for a “Wisconsin comeback” that resulted in $5 billion in savings to local governments.

“The extreme Democrat candidates running in the wide-open field for governor have a choice: raise taxes to pay for undoing the governor’s reforms, or accept that he fixed the financial crisis their party created,” spokesman Brian Reisinger said.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Lauren Slagter:

Under the proposed three-year contract that would start in the 2017-18 school year, Bauman said teachers would advance a step on the salary schedule each year for the first two years – for the first time in the school district’s five-year history.

The proposed contract calls for re-opening salary negotiations in the 2019-20 school year.

The district also would increase its contribution to teachers’ health insurance. Currently, YCS pays $5,000 for an individual employee’s health insurance, $11,000 for a two-person plan and $13,000 for family coverage.

That leaves teachers with family coverage paying between $7,000 and $11,600 out of pocket each year for their health insurance, Bauman said, depending on which plan they select.

The proposed new contract would gradually increase the maximum amount the school district pays toward employee health insurance, saving those teachers with family coverage about $4,800 a year, Bauman said.

Teachers who do not receive health insurance through YCS would receive a $400 stipend.

In the 2017-18 school year, teachers would receive a $750 bonus and returning teachers would receive an additional one-time stipend of $600 due to the increase in the district’s student enrollment this fall.

Megan McArdle:

Katherine Stewart doesn’t like Donald Trump’s language about “failing government schools.” School choice, she suggests, has some unsavory ancestors. Libertarianism, for one, “for which all government is big and bad.” And (presumably) even worse: “American slavery, Jim Crow-era segregation, anti-Catholic sentiment and a particular form of Christian fundamentalism.”

One could quibble with some of Stewart’s summation 1 . But it’s certainly fair to note that people opposed to desegregation decided that one way to solve the problem was to get rid of public schools, allowing racists to choose a lily-white educational environment for their children. Maintaining Jim Crow is a vile motive, and it can’t be denied that that was one historical reason some people had for supporting school choice.

Only the proper answer to this is, So what? You cannot stop terrible people from promoting sound ideas for bad reasons. Liberals who think that ad hominem is a sufficient rebuttal to a policy proposal should first stop to consider the role of Hitler’s Germany in spreading national health insurance programs to the countries they invaded. If you think “But Hitler” does not really constitute a useful argument about universal health coverage, then you should probably not resort to “But Jim Crow” in a disagreement over school funding.

Ted Dabrowski, John Klingner

AFSCME’s demands ignore four significant facts about Illinois state-worker compensation:

• Illinois state workers are the highest-paid state workers in the country

• AFSCME workers receive Cadillac health care benefits

• Most state workers receive free retiree health insurance

• Career state retirees on average receive $1.6 million in pension benefits

It’s not fair that Illinois residents, struggling with stagnant incomes in one of the nation’s weakest economies, continue to subsidize AFSCME benefits to such an extent.

Many other unions that contract with the state have recognized that taxpayers can’t withstand higher taxes to fund workers’ pay and benefits. Officials from more than 17 unions, including the Teamsters, understand the depth of Illinois’ fiscal crisis and have been willing to compromise and come to affordable contract agreements with the state.

AFSCME, which represents a mere 0.5 percent of Illinois’ total labor force (35,000 state workers out of a total 6.5 million workers), is putting undue pressure on the state and its finances.

Karen

Overall, the district’s operating budget for the 2017-2018 school year would rise $8.4 million over the current school year to $389.7 million, according to the proposal.

The budget for the first time also will include spending made possible through a referendum that voters approved in November to permanently raise the district’s annual revenue limit authority by $26 million over four years.

Revenues also will be boosted by an extra $9.27 million through a new agreement with the city of Madison giving the school district access to surplus funds being generated by a successful Downtown tax incremental district.

Revenues from both sources will be “critically important,” Barry said, in funding instruction and stabilizing school staffing levels after back-to-back years of personnel reductions totaling about 150 jobs.

An increase in school funding from the state for next year also is possible, if Walker’s two-year budget plan — calling for $200 more per student in the first year of the biennium and $404 in the second year — is adopted by lawmakers this summer. However, the school district would only receive that added money, estimated at $16 million over two years, if the board complies with Walker’s concurrent directive to require employees to pay no less than 12 percent of their health insurance premiums.

Taxpayers fund the district’s entire budget, which was about $460,000,000 last year. That’s around $18k/student, far more than most K-12 organizations, despite long standing, disastrous reading results.

I wonder why Ms Rivedahl did not tell the complete story.

The Economist:

Pushing against Adolph Wagner’s law is another, newer tendency. Americans who recalled the Depression and the second world war tended to look more favourably on the redistribution of income. Ilyana Kuziemko of Princeton and Vivekinan Ashok and Ebonya Washington, both of Yale, have found that support for redistribution has dropped among retired people over the past few decades (see chart). One explanation for this is that people retiring now have no memory of the two big, unifying events of the 20th century. It may be no coincidence that this reluctance to redistribute, which comes out particularly strongly in the opposition among current pensioners to extending health insurance, followed a surge in immigration at the end of the 20th century. In the 1950s, immigration to America averaged 250,000 people a year; in the 1990s, it reached 1m a year.

Michael Puente:

The school system is struggling make payroll each month. It delayed checks to 700 employees, mostly teachers, in November. March is also likely to be a problem, school district staff said last week at a Gary School Board meeting.

It wasn’t always this way

Gary’s public school system was once one of the largest in Indiana and a model nationwide.

It educated a Nobel prize winning economist, an Oscar-winning actor, successful business leaders, entertainers and athletes.

“The Gary Community School Corporation is experiencing an unprecedented financial crisis unlike any school corporation has experienced in the state of Indiana,” Indiana State Sen. Eddie Melton told an education committee at the Indiana Statehouse this month. His district includes Gary.

“The district is struggling on a day-to-day basis to ensure payroll is met and that critical vendors, such as health insurance and bus services, are paid,” the Democrat said.

He and other Hoosier lawmakers are searching for solutions for Gary, including greater funding, forgiving outstanding state loans or appointing a fiscal monitor.

phys.org

Out of all age groups, children are still most likely to live in poverty, according to new research from the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Using the latest available data from the American Community Survey, NCCP researchers found that in 2015, while 30 percent of adults have low incomes, more than 40 percent of all children live in low-income families—including 5.2 million infants and toddlers under 3. Despite significant gains in household income and reductions in the overall poverty rate in recent years, 43 percent (30.6 million) of America’s children are living in families barely able to afford their most basic needs, according to Basic Facts about Low-Income Children, the center’s annual series of profiles on child poverty in America.

“While food assistance, public health insurance, and other programs have certainly had a mitigating effect on poverty for many families, the fact remains that in the United States young children have close to a one in two chance of living on the brink of poverty,” said Renée Wilson-Simmons, DrPH, NCCP director. “But being a child in a low-income or poor family doesn’t happen by chance, and neither should our approach to alleviating child poverty. In the coming weeks, hundreds of new leaders will take the helm at agencies responsible for implementing policies that touch the lives of poor children and affect their odds of success in life. It’s imperative that they do so with a real understanding of the disadvantages millions of Americans face from very young ages and what growing up poor looks like in America.”

Chris Rickert, using facts:

For context, Wisconsin employees who get health insurance through their work pay about 22 percent of the annual premium, on average, or about $1,345 a year for single coverage, according to 2015 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The average salary for a private- sector worker in Wisconsin was $45,230 in 2015, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Madison teachers made, on average, $55,600 a year last school year and contribute 3 percent of premium costs, or about $205 a year for single coverage. Bringing that contribution up to 12 percent would mean the average teacher contributing about $600 more per year for single coverage.

While spending more than most ($18k/student), Madison’s benefit spending is substantial. This, despite its long term, disastrous reading results.

Related: an emphasis on adult enployment.

Molly Beck:

The law, known as Act 10, required local governments who offer a state health insurance plan to their employees to pay no more than 88 percent of the average premiums. Walker’s 2017-19 state budget will now require the same of all school districts, regardless of which health insurance plans they offer.

That spells trouble for the Madison School District, which for years after Act 10 was enacted didn’t require staff to pay any portion of their health insurance costs.

The district does now require employees to pay something toward their monthly health insurance premiums, but the contributions do not reach the 12 percent threshold proposed by Walker. The contribution levels in Madison range from 1.5 percent for lower-paid staff to 10 percent for school district administrators.

“While we have not done an exhaustive review, we are only aware of the Madison School District that did not capture the reform savings,” said Walker’s spokesman Jack Jablonski.

Much more on the Madison School District’s healthcare costs (a long term issue, including WPS coverage).

The District spent 25.62% of its budget on benefits (!) in 2014.

Kim Soffen:

In his eight years as president, Barack Obama saw the nation through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, a major restructuring of the health insurance industry and a renaissance of civil rights movements. He saw political parties continue to polarize, tensions with Russia heighten and opioid abuse become an epidemic.

In preparing to face the challenges of the presidency, Obama laid out dozens of promises during his two campaigns. Now that he has moved out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we can evaluate: How have the results stacked up?

James Wigserson:

A new study says the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program will have a $473 million economic impact on the Milwaukee area by 2035 because of higher graduation rates for voucher school students compared to their peers in Milwaukee Public Schools.

“There are many well-known benefits of graduating from high school,” Will Flanders, co-author of the study and education research director for the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, told Watchdog in an interview. “You can have access to better jobs. You’re more likely to have health insurance and therefore likely to be in better health. You’re likely to have a better income and less likely to become reliant on social welfare programs.”

Molly Beck:

He said school districts can save money because of reduced health insurance costs for staff and can be creative in retaining teachers, like providing bonuses.

Humphries said in an interview that Evers was too focused on objecting to the expansion of private voucher and independent charter schools and not focused enough on raising student achievement and closing the gap in academic achievement between white and black students.

“When student learning — not politics — is our focus, there is nothing that we cannot do,” Humphries said Tuesday.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

Steven Brill

When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie’s father had been treated there 10 years earlier, and she and her family credited the doctors and nurses at MD Anderson with extending his life by at least eight years.
 
Because Stephanie and her husband had recently started their own small technology business, they were unable to buy comprehensive health insurance. For $469 a month, or about 20% of their income, they had been able to get only a policy that covered just $2,000 per day of any hospital costs. “We don’t take that kind of discount insurance,” said the woman at MD Anderson when Stephanie called to make an appointment for Sean.
 
Stephanie was then told by a billing clerk that the estimated cost of Sean’s visit — just to be examined for six days so a treatment plan could be devised — would be $48,900, due in advance. Stephanie got her mother to write her a check. “You do anything you can in a situation like
that,” she says. The Recchis flew to Houston, leaving Stephanie’s mother to care for their two teenage children.

It is unfortunate two recent articles on the upcoming Madison School District tax & spending increase referendum lack data, such as:

• Total Spending for the current budget ($449,482,373.22 more) – about $18,000/student. Chicago spends about $14,336/student, Boston $20,707 and Long Beach $12,671/student.
• Historic Spending Changes (spending increases every year)
• Academic Outcomes vs. Spending
• Comparison with other Districts
• Middleton property taxes are about 13% less than a comparable Madison home.

Doug Erickson:

To offset cuts in state aid and the tightening revenue caps, Act 10 eliminated collective bargaining over benefits. State employees and other public workers without an existing contract were required to start contributing to their pensions. Once a district’s collectively bargained contract expired, the district also could do things such as switch insurance providers, increase employee benefit contributions, and change work rules — all without needing union approval.

“It took the handcuffs off school boards,” Nygren said.

In Madison, Act 10 ushered in significant changes. Faced with the state-imposed cuts but before Act 10 took effect, employee unions agreed during contract negotiations to major concessions in 2011-12. That included a salary freeze (saving $4 million) and a requirement that employees begin contributing 5.8 percent of their salary toward their state pensions (saving $11 million).

The union also agreed to drop Wisconsin Physicians Service as an insurance provider in 2012, a $5 million savings. WPS was the most costly plan the district offered, and employees who had opted for it had been paying a portion of their monthly premiums.

Union members also had agreed back then to begin paying a percentage of the premiums for the three other insurance options, although the School Board chose not to go that route at that point. That changed this year. The School Board is, for the first time, now requiring all employees to pay something toward their monthly health insurance premiums.

The percentage varies by employee group, with teachers paying 3 percent (6 percent if they don’t participate in the district’s wellness program). This followed the expiration of the district’s final union contract over the summer.

Doug Keillor, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., the district’s teachers union, said Act 10 alienated public employees and took a “wrecking ball” to public schools.

“The district could keep cutting pay and could keep increasing health insurance contributions, so from that standpoint, the district has not transferred as much of the costs onto the backs of employees as they could,” he said. “But you have to first back up and say, ‘How do you build a quality public school district?’ A district needs to attract people into this profession and keep them. The Legislature didn’t give school boards the tools to do that.”

Sen. Leah Vukmir, R-Brookfield, a member of the Senate Education Committee, argues that most of the discussions about public school funding are wrongly framed from a perspective that more money automatically means higher student achievement.

“Our reforms are working,” she said. “We’ve given the school districts through Act 10 the tools to do more with the resources they have. Those districts that have embraced that are doing really well.”

Amber Walker:

Public education advocates are organizing in support of the upcoming K-12 operational referendum for the Madison Metropolitan School District, which is necessary to maintain a quality education for local students, they say.

On Nov. 8, the district is asking voters to permanently raise its revenue limit authority by $26 million.

The district proposes that this change happens incrementally over the next four school years. MMSD seeks an additional $5 million per year for the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 school years and an additional $8 million per year for the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years.

Commentary on redistributed state tax collections and spending.

Madison School District 2016 tax & spending increase referendum content. Channel 3000.

I’ve not seen total Madison School District spending data, much less history, amongst the referendum content.

Pat Schneider:

UW-Madison is cutting the work week of its student employees to no more than 29 hours to conform to requirements of the Affordable Care Act, a move some student workers say will make it harder for them to stay in school.

“With less hours, many students will have to juggle two jobs, and that will definitely hurt academic success,” undergraduate student worker Reid Kurkerewicz said in comments provided by the Student Labor Action Coalition (SLAC).

“UW-Madison student workers would love to work less hours so they can put their academics first, but Chancellor Blank refuses to pay a living wage, making that impossible for many working class students,” said Jia Gonitzke, an undergraduate student worker.

Student leaders at SLAC, whose mission is to engage students in labor issues, say they are concerned that not only student workers, but other limited term employees of the UW-Madison will see cuts to their hours so that the university doesn’t have to offer them health insurance.

Alana Semuels:

Locking out a university’s faculty right before the start of classes seems like a drastic step, but that is just what Long Island University (LIU) did this weekend, when it barred all 400 members of its faculty union from its Brooklyn campus, cut off their email accounts and health insurance, and told them they would be replaced. The move came three days after the union’s contract expired. Now, the faculty is furious, and planning rallies and pickets with support from the American Federation of Teachers. On Tuesday, faculty voted 226 to 10 to reject a proposed contract from LIU, and the faculty senate voiced their support for a vote of no-confidence in the university’s president Kimberly Cline, 135 to 10. Faculty rallied outside the university’s Brooklyn campus Wednesday with a giant inflatable rat as classes began, taught by non-union members.

Labor historians say they can’t recall an example of a university using a lockout against faculty members. Kate Bronfenbrenner, a Cornell professor of labor relations, says they’re particularly unwise in the service sector, or any sector where a company has clients such as students and donors to placate. More typically, she says, lockouts are used in the industrial sector, where customers are removed from labor practices.

Even so, she said, such a move rarely works. “Historically, lockouts are bad PR in every industry,” she said. When an employer locks out workers, the media and the public are typically on the side of the workers, she explained, because workers are available for work but employers aren’t allowing them to. “Lockouts normally backfire,” she said.

Sara Matthiesen

he National Labor Relations Board delivered a win for labor this month, ruling that graduate students at private colleges are also employees. The action overturned a 2004 decision involving Brown University that until now allowed administrations to insist that collective bargaining would imperil students’ academic pursuits. A number of media outlets have helped circulate a particularly damning quote that describes the Brown decision as having “deprived an entire category of workers of the protections of the Act, without a convincing justification.” If you haven’t read the decision in full, you should. The quote is just one of many statements that will resonate with any academic who sees herself as a worker.

But one sentence in particular is especially relevant to the coming inevitable struggles between precarious academic laborers and administrators. “Labor disputes,” the board notes simply, “are a fact of economic life.” Such an unequivocal statement about the academy as a place of labor is a surprising and rare admission; far more common are descriptors of academic work as a “labor of love,” “an intellectual pursuit,” and “a life of the mind.” Unlike many academics, the NLRB decision refuses to romanticize academe. This romanticization of academic labor is one of the most effective ways to obscure its actual costs. In contrast, the NLRB posits the equivalent of: “Hello! Would you please treat the academy as just another realm of economic life?!” This is exactly what we should do.

Let’s start with the subject of the NLRB decision: graduate student workers at private colleges. What would it mean to treat graduate students’ working conditions as “facts of economic life”? For starters, it would mean calling graduate students’ “stipends” what they actually are — paychecks. It would mean attaching actual terms to these paychecks, so that if graduate students work more hours in the lab or teach beyond their class load, they are compensated for their additional labor. It would mean approaching things like health insurance, dental care, and family leave as benefits that should be available to all employees rather than as benevolent gifts that the administration can give or take away depending on the political climate.

Julian Ring and Madeline Stocker:

Over the next three weeks, 177 faculty and staff must decide whether or not they want to take the College up on its offer to retire early in exchange for a relatively hefty severance package.

The deal, which administrators are projecting will save the College between $1.5–3.5 million per year, is known as a voluntary severance incentive package and is the first step in the administration’s long-term plan to cut spending while slowing the rate of tuition increase.

The payout is relatively straightforward. If a qualifying faculty or staff member — one who is at least 52 years of age, has held their position for 10 years or more and for whom the combination of age and service is a minimum of 75 years — chooses to take the deal, the College will pay the retiree one year’s salary and waive health insurance premiums for the first year after retirement.

“The places I’m familiar with that have done it have found that it’s really been a win-win,” College President Marvin Krislov said. “It’s helped people retire in a way that preserves their dignity and gives them some extra money, and it helps the institution in that it allows for predictability.”

Related: “An emphasis on adult employment“.

Angus Deaton:

The finding that income predicts mortality has a long history. Nineteenth-century studies include Villermé1 on Paris, France, in 1817, Engels2 on Manchester, England, in 1850, and Virchow3 on Upper Silesia in 1847 through 1848. Modern analyses include the Whitehall study of British civil servants, whose status was measured by income,4 as well as similar findings for other European countries.5 Indeed, the mortality gradient by income is found wherever and whenever it is sought. Virchow’s statement3,6 that “medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine at a larger scale” has lost none of its resonance. By contrast, the medical mainstream, looking back to Koch rather than Virchow, emphasizes biology, genetic factors, specific diseases, individual behavior, health care, and health insurance.

Olga Khazan:

The AP recently asked 1,033 adults what they thought of “Medicare for All,” a cornerstone of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.

When asked their view of “single-payer” health care—what such a system is often called—the respondents seemed to like it. “A slim plurality of 39 percent supports replacing the private health insurance system with a single government-run, taxpayer-funded plan that would cover medical, dental, vision and long-term care, with 33 percent opposed,” the AP’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Emily Swanson write. Just 26 percent, meanwhile, support the existing Obamacare law.

Diane D’amico:

Almost 200 employees under family-plan coverage received $18,500 each, according to information obtained by The Press of Atlantic City through an Open Public Records Act request. The annual premium cost for family coverage under the district’s private plan is almost $37,000 and includes medical, dental, prescription and vision coverage.

By contrast, under a 2010 state law, employees who get their health benefits through the School Employees Health Benefits Program, or SEHBP, can receive no more than 25 percent of the annual premium costs, or $5,000, whichever is less. Just more than half of all school districts are in the state plan.

The high cost of the district’s private insurance plan has caught the attention of the state Department of Education. While the district was approved for an additional $20 million in state aid in November, that approval agreement came with instructions to reduce health insurance costs.

Via Laura Waters.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):

Over the past few weeks, discussions have been occurring throughout the District about MTI’s upcoming MTI Recertification Elections. One of the most frequently asked questions by newer staff, those who are not aware of MTI’s many accomplishments on behalf of District employees, is “what is at risk if we lose our Union?” To answer, one only needs to look around Wisconsin to see what has happened to employees of other public employers where employees no longer have a collective voice in the workplace.

Act 10 enabled public sector employers to unilaterally establish what employees pay toward health insurance. In many school districts, employers increased the employee’s take-home share to 12% of the premium. Such decreases an employee’s pay up to $220 per month. MTI worked with the District last year to keep to ZERO the health insurance contribution for MTI- represented employees. And, the Union will be working with the District again this year, via the Joint MTI/MMSD Wellness Committee, to collaboratively identify potential sources for health insurance savings rather than implementing a premium co-pay. MTI-represented employees are among the very few public employees in Wisconsin who are not obligated to pay 10-12% toward health insurance premiums. What MTI achieved puts an additional $50 to $171 of take- home pay in each MTI member’s pocket each month, depending on whether they carry single or family health insurance.

For long-time teachers, educational assistants, clerical-technical staff and security assistants approaching retirement, MTI’s Contracts and the new Employee Handbook provide retiring employees with 100% of the value of their accumulated sick leave for the payment of post-retirement insurances. Many school districts have capped or reduced such benefits, given the unilateral authority granted them by Act 10, forcing longtime employees to work longer in order to afford post-retirement insurance premiums.

Madison Teacher’s, Inc. (PDF), via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email.

Last week’s MTI Solidarity! contained an article about a teacher strike in Seattle. Among the issues were wages not keeping up with inflation, “no state increase in funding for health care,” providing teachers with a greater voice regarding standardized tests, management’s proposal for a longer workday without additional compensation, and other quality of education issues.
As more details become available, the Union’s victories are obvious, including a 14.3% wage increase over three years (which includes a 4.8% cost-of-living adjustment paid by the State over two years). What a contrast to Wisconsin. The State of Washington will contribute to wages via a cost-of-living increase and contribute toward the cost of employees’ health insurance.

Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant criticized the legislature and its lack of support for education. She said, “The educators’ demands are completely reasonable….For too long the legislature has ignored the needs of the children and bent over backwards to give corporations handout after handout. Boeing executives got a special session. Where is the special session for education? Teachers are faced with stagnating salaries, overcrowded classrooms, too many standardized tests, and inadequate resources. It’s high time the legislature did their job, stop ignoring the mandate by voters to lower class sizes and raise teachers’ pay. Fully fund education now!” We need more legislators like Sawant in Wisconsi

Chris Rickert:

In other words, it’s wrong for a school board member to vote specifically on policy affecting his finances, but OK to vote on a budget including that very same policy.

There are probably people in other parts of Wisconsin who would object to a local school board that gives itself big, immediate raises and to a school board member who votes on a budget that continues to excuse him from doing something the majority of workers already do — help pay for their health insurance.

But this is Madison, and as long as the board keeps its politics liberal and its teachers union happy, it’s doing a pretty good job.

Related: School Board member Ed Hughes (2005):

This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Notes and charts from the Districts’ most recent 2015-2016 budget document (5MB PDF):

Our 25,364 students are served by 4,076 Teachers & Staff (6.22 students per District employee).

Salaries and Wages
For 2015-16, MMSD has collective bargaining agreements in place with its represented employee groups, including teachers, aides, clerical, and custodial staff. The teachers’ collective bargaining agreement is based on a traditional salary schedule, including compensation components for additional years of service (step movement) and additional professional development (lane movement). In addition,

the Board approved an increase of 0.25% per cell for all teachers (cell increase). Together, the additional compensation for step movement and cell increases provides an average increase of 1.75% to employees, plus a reserve for lane changes of $400,000, for a combined budgetary impact of $4.5 million on district salaries. This budget proposal includes funding for these wage and salary commitments. MMSD’s other employee groups will experience similar increases in compensation.
Health Insurance

MMSD offers an attractive employee benefits plan to its employees. The district spends over $61 million per year on health insurance premiums, which is approximately 15% of the total district budget. Each year, the risk of rising health care costs creates significant budget uncertainty for the district: each one percent increase in health insurance rates costs MMSD about $610,000. The implementation of the Affordable Care Act brings additional fees and responsibilities for employers, including the requirement to offer affordable and valuable coverage to all employees who work 30 or more hours per week, starting July 1, 2015. Although the exact impact of this requirement is not yet known, MMSD could be required to provide coverage to approximately 120 employees not currently eligible for health insurance benefits.
The district contracts for health insurance with three Madison area HMOs. Group Health Cooperative (GHC) has covers approximately 60% of MMSD employees, while Dean and Unity each cover approximately 20%. Negotiations are continuing for July 1, 2015 rate renewals. The district, in collaboration with employee representatives, are working to minimize the budget impact for 2015-16. An update on the current status of health insurance rate renewals will be presented to the Board in May.

This year, MMSD launched its employee wellness program, which was developed with the input of the employee unions. A team representing a broad spectrum of employees has been selected to design the program activities and support district wellness. In addition, employees are asked to sign up for biometric screenings and health risk assessments, which will provide information that can be used to develop programs that meet the needs of MMSD employees and help curb long-term health care cost increases.

Mitch Henck Comments on Madison’s Spending and Tax Practices:

David Blaska

Voters just approved a $41 million spending referendum. Now the Madison Metro School District says it needs to cut $10.8 million to cover a deficit. This is after rewarding its unionized teachers and support staff with a 2.5% pay increase in the budget approved late last year.

Who is running this store? Hint: It ain’t the Koch Brothers.

The cuts will require eliminating 110 positions, mostly teachers. How does this help minority achievement?

The school board rushed to ratify union contracts four years ago while protesters were still camping overnight in the State Capitol. The district scheduled a special meeting on a Saturday morning with only the minimally required public notice. I attended that meeting, but the public — the three of us who found the meeting — were not allowed to speak. The contract required no teacher contribution to their generous health insurance coverage.

School districts that took advantage of Act 10 are not laying off teachers.

Madison is paying for this folly by collecting teachers union boss John Matthews’ dues for him. Some of that money finds its way back to finance the school board members’ election campaigns. Sweet deal for the union, wormy apples for the students and their families, self-tapping screws for the taxpayers.

I continue to find it fascinating that Madison plans to expand two of its least diverse schools: Hamilton and Van Hise, despite capacity elsewhere and the District’s long term disastrous reading results.

Chris Rickert:

Finances are always a consideration; they can also be an excuse. The district has cried poor at budget time for years, and yet somehow continued to find the money to, say, cover the full cost of union employees’ health insurance.

Board member Ed Hughes said he wouldn’t vote for Madison Prep because the district’s plan to address the gaps is better now.

“As compared to 2011, there is much more of a districtwide focus on addressing the achievement gap as well as improving outcomes for all students through an emphasis on a rigorous, coherent curriculum and great teaching in every classroom,” Hughes said.

The district’s shifting efforts to address the achievement gap is a story in itself.

After Madison Prep failed, then-Superintendent Daniel Nerad proposed a plan to address the gap that would have cost $105 million over five years. It was later whittled down to $49 million. Current Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham’s plan was advertised as costing nothing.

Greg Jones:

While these perceived dangers are admittedly more subtle than those that might accompany a rogue asteroid, they are worrying indeed. Automation might not wipe us out immediately, but it will almost certainly affect economies in Earth-shattering ways.

Forecasts differ on the specifics, but they generally point to automation being disruptive as far as traditional workplace roles are concerned. A recent Oxford University study put nearly half (47 percent) of all jobs at risk of replacement by automation in two decades. A Wired article puts the number at 70 percent by the end of this century.

Computers are getting smarter and stronger while employees, with their health insurance, pensions, and vacation time are becoming increasingly expensive. The writing is on the wall; plenty of jobs, at least as performed by humans, aren’t long for this world.

Pam Chickering Wilson:

In addition, the ACA requires that the insurance employers offer must be “affordable.” If the cost of insurance rises above 9 1/2 percent of a family’s income, the employer can face a fine of $3,000.

One more measure coming down the pike — to take effect in 2018 — is the so-called “Cadillac tax” for excessively expensive plans. The thresholds for this tax are $10,200 per individual and $27,500 per family.

Kuelz remarked that Jefferson is nowhere near these amounts yet, but these totals bear watching, as health insurance costs for school districts have been rising at around 8 percent a year, far ahead of inflation.

He said that some planning will be required to keep Jefferson insurance costs down so they do not rise over this threshold by 2018. After that year, the Cadillac tax threshold will rise in accordance with the rate of inflation.

“One calculation we have been making for school districts is, they are asking, what if you gave the money directly to the employees and let them go on the exchange?” Kuelz said.

Using current figures, districts would incur more costs by giving the money to the employees directly, he explained. For starters, these districts would lose a tax break. Then they would be subject to penalties. In addition, any money given to employees to cover these costs would then be counted as taxable income, which opens a whole new can of worms for both the employer and the employees.
Right now, such a move would drive a district’s costs up significantly, Kuelz said. But this might change as costs go down on the exchange.

Madison is contemplating changes to their employee benefits approach.

Mitch Henck:

This is Madison. I learned that phrase when I moved here from Green Bay in 1992.
It means that the elites who drive the politics and the predominate culture are more liberal or “progressive” than backward places out state.

I knew I was in Madison as a reporter when parents and activists were fighting over whether to have “Sarah Has Two Mommies” posters in a grade school library. Concerned parents weakly stated at a public hearing that first-graders were too young to understand sexuality of any kind.

Activists at the public meeting said the children needed to understand tolerance. One conservative parent said: “Why don’t we vote by secret ballot?” An activist said, “No, we want a consensus.”

The Madison School District official who was presiding agreed, and the controversial posters stayed on the library walls. This is Madison.

Now we have the Madison School Board. It has been historically run by the teacher’s union. The same was true after Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 was passed, strictly limiting collective bargaining for public employees.

Three weeks before the state Supreme Court would rule on the constitutionality of the law, the union-owned School Board rushed through a teacher’s contract that largely ignored Act 10. Unlike any other school district in the state, the contract made sure Madison teachers were not required to share the cost of their health insurance premiums. Unlike any other school district, Madison collects union dues from teacher paychecks for its leader, John Matthews.

By the way, I would not want him in a dark alley with me.

The problem is the Madison School District has a projected budget shortfall for 2015-2016 of $12 million to $20 million, according to last week’s State Journal. About $6 million could be saved by making aggressive health care costs, including requiring staff to contribute toward insurance premiums, renegotiating contracts with health care providers, and making plan changes. That’s according to Michael Barry, assistant superintendent of business services.

In fact, the district spends about $62 million on employee health care costs, which are expected to grow by 8.5 percent next school year. Shockingly, Madison School Board member Ed Hughes said: “If we’re talking about taking not a scalpel, but a machete to our programs given the cuts we’ll make because we’re the only school district in the state that’s unwilling to ask employees to contribute to their health insurance, I think that would be an impression that we would deservedly receive ridicule for.”

Even board member Mary Burke said: “We would be irresponsible to the community where basically 99 percent of the people pay contributions to health care” if the board made up the savings with cuts to staff and heath care.

So now what? The contract expires in June 2016. Conservative blogger David Blaska sued to force Madison to live under Act 10. A local judge ruled last week Blaska did have standing as a taxpayer to carry out his lawsuit as he is joined by The Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty.

Madison teacher’s union leader John Matthews said by making employees contribute to health care premiums, the district is effectively asking them to pay for iPads and administrators. Huh?

Todd Berry of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance told me 90 percent of state cuts to education were covered by savings offered to school districts under Act 10 by changing work rules, by employee contributions to retirement and health insurance premiums, and by altering health plans.

That might fly for the rest of the state, but then again, this is Madison.

Much more on benefits and the Madison School District and Act 10.

A focus on “adult employment“.

David Blaska:

Like the Sun Prairie groundhog, the Madison school district’s teachers contract has come back to bite the taxpayer. The Madison Metropolitan School District is looking at a $20.8 million budget deficit next school year.

Good Madison liberals worried about the state balancing its budget can now look closer to home.

To balance the budget, the district will most certainly have to raise taxes again; last year’s increase was a hefty 5.4%. It will probably cut programs. It may even lay off teachers. To ease the blow, will it ask those teachers to contribute to their excellent health coverage like 99% of the rest of the world?

This is the school district that thumbed its nose at Wisconsin law, the school district that eschewed using the flexibility given it by Wisconsin Act 10, the 2011 collective bargaining reform. Madison is the only district that collects union boss John Matthews’ dues for him, the only district that requires fair share payments, the only district that does not require its employees to contribute toward their very excellent health care insurance. A district that gave teachers longevity raises of 2% and 3% on top of free health insurance.

Much more, here.

Molly Beck:

Madison school officials are weighing property tax increases, significant program cuts and requiring employees to pay a portion of health insurance premiums to help close a huge budget deficit.

About $6 million could be saved by making aggressive changes to employees’ health care costs, including requiring staff to contribute toward health insurance premiums, renegotiating contracts with health care providers, and making plan changes, Michael Barry, assistant superintendent of business services, told School Board members Monday.

Overall, the district spends about $62 million in employee health care costs, which are expected to grow by about 8.5 percent next school year.

The budget shortfall for the fiscal year that starts July 1 was estimated in January at $10.1 million with the use of all of the district’s taxing authority. But it could jump by $4.1 million if state lawmakers accept Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to cut a special $150 per student funding stream for next school year, and keep revenue limits and general state aid flat.

Now district officials say the deficit in the roughly $400 million budget could be as much as $20.8 million or as low as $12.2 million for the 2015-16 school year, depending on how much of the school district’s unused taxing authority the board agrees to use.

Much more on Madison’s benefit plans and conundrum, here.

Ruth Robarts, writing in 2005:

However, the administration’s “same service” budget requires a revenue increase of more than 4%. The Gap for next year is $8.6M.

Next will come a chorus of threats to slash programs and staff to “close the gap”. District staff will come on stage bearing long lists of positions and programs cut in previous years to close the gap. The mood will be ominous when the curtain comes down on Act 1.
On March 7, Act 2 opens with the administration revealing— with great reluctance— the annual “Cut List”. On the Cut List will be programs that motivate our kids to excel at school, such as fine arts, extracurricular sports, environmental field trips, and classes for students with special talent. Also on the list will be staff positions that assist kids with special problems, such as choosing classes and colleges, overcoming difficult home circumstances, learning job skills, or having special educational needs. School custodians may again appear on the Cut List, but not central administrators. “We have no choice” is the theme of Act 2.

Molly Beck

District spending would increase by 4.8 percent during the 2015-16 school year, largely based on staff pay and a projected health insurance rate increase of 9 percent, according to the district’s projections, and is expected to exceed district revenues by $10.1 million.

Spending grows annually, yet, reading results have long been disastrous.

Related: Madison’s Superintendent “reverts to the mean.”

Via a kind reader’s email.

Despite spending double the national average per student and delivering disastrous reading results – for years – Madison’s Superintendent pushes back on school accountability:

The Wheeler Report (PDF):

Dear Legislators:

Thank you for your efforts to work on school accountability. We all agree that real accountability, focused on getting the best outcomes for all children, is important. From our first review of the bill introduced today, it is clear there is a lot of work to be done before a school accountability bill can be passed.

There are several parts of this bill that need more thoughtful consideration to be the type of real accountability that our students and families deserve:

– using multiple tests that would not fairly compare public and private schools

– requiring charter conversion rather than creating a true path to improvement

– assigning letter grades that do not accurately communicate how a school is performing

– removing control from locally elected school boards.

We need an accountability bill that supports our efforts to produce the best results for all children rather than a flawed one that is rushed to pass in order to make a political point.

I would urge you to work with districts to develop a true accountability system that holds all schools to the same standards and supports them in getting the best results for children. We have not yet been given the opportunity to work with you but we would welcome it. I would be happy to answer any questions, give input or discuss with you more.

Thank you for your time and consideration. Sincerely,

Jennifer Cheatham, Ed.D.
Superintendent, Madison Metropolitan School District

A further example, try to find total spending in this 2015-2016 Madison Schools’ Budget slideware document (PDF).

Auto-pilot spending and governance practices continue:

General Fund expenditures will increase by approximately 4.8%, based on existing wage and salary commitments and an estimated health insurance rate increase of 9%, unless budget actions are taken to intervene

A Budget Gap of 2.8% (2% Revenue vs. 4.8% Expenditures) or $9-$10 million will occur unless budget actions are taken to intervene

Note the use of “General Fund”. The document neglects to mention total spending, or recent increases in redistributed state tax dollars to the Madison Schools.

A party insider recently mentioned that the “days of Dane County Democrats harvesting tax dollars from around the state and spending them here, are over”.

I further recall lunch a few years ago with a long time Madison elected official: “Always blame the State”.

Wolfram: Reverting to the mean.

Matt Connolly

In 1925, one of college football’s biggest stars did the unthinkable. Harold “Red” Grange, described by the famous sportswriter Damon Runyan as “three or four men rolled into one for football purposes,” decided to leave college early in order to play in the National Football League.

While no fan today would begrudge an All-American athlete for going pro without his diploma, things were different for Grange. The NFL was only a few years old, and his decision to take the money in the pros before finishing his degree at the University of Illinois was a controversial one. It was especially reviled by Robert Zuppke, his coach at Illinois.

As the story goes, Grange broke the news to Zuppke before promising to return to finish his degree. “If I have anything to do with it you won’t come back here,” Zuppke replied, furious that a respectable college man would drop out and try to make a living off playing a game. “But Coach,” Grange said. “You make money off of football. Why can’t I make money off of football?”

It’s a question that has underscored the development of modern college football ever since. Aside from scholarships and (some) health insurance, the players remain unpaid. They are also subject to draconian National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules that banish them to hell for such sins as signing an autograph for cash or selling a jersey. Meanwhile their coaches enjoy ever-swelling salaries, bonuses, paid media appearances, and other perks like free housing. According to Newsday, the average compensation for the 108 football coaches in the NCAA’s highest division is $1.75 million. That’s up 75 percent since 2007. Alabama’s Nick Saban, college football’s highest-paid coach, will earn a guaranteed $55.2 million if he fulfills the eight-year term of his contract.

Paul Fanlund

A nationwide exit poll on Election Day revealed that 70 percent viewed the economy as “not so good” or “poor.” Only 22 percent thought life for the next generation would be better than for this one.

Second, because those with the most education are doing better (and Madison is jammed with academic elites) we are not seen as suffering as they do, and that is noticed and resented.

Third, they see school teachers and other public employees with a level of retirement and health insurance benefits they no longer enjoy or ever did. (Among public workers, only cops and firefighters seem to get a pass for being comparatively well-compensated.)

Fourth, they are constantly told that government programs are distorted to help those who do not help themselves. Given the concentrations of minorities in the two largest cities, the racial subtext is always there. Many in outlying Wisconsin see themselves as distinctively hard-working and self-reliant and getting no government help. They do not perceive their own public education, Medicare, Social Security, highway infrastructure and so forth as the sorts of “handouts” they think flow to others.

This thesis is supported by the election results for governor, where Walker won in rural areas, small towns and suburbs, and Democrat Mary Burke mostly dominated in the dependable urban centers of Madison and Milwaukee.

Ryan Knutson & Theo Francis:

The American middle class has absorbed a steep increase in the cost of health care and other necessities as incomes have stagnated over the past half decade, a squeeze that has forced families to cut back spending on everything from clothing to restaurants.

Health-care spending by middle-income Americans rose 24% between 2007 and 2013, driven by an even larger rise in the cost of buying health insurance, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of detailed consumer-spending data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That hit has been accompanied by increases in spending on other necessities, including food eaten at home, rent and education, as well as the soaring cost of staying connected digitally via cellphones and home Internet service.

With income growth sluggish, discretionary spending on things like clothing and movies, live shows and amusement parks has given way.

Madison Teachers, Inc. PDF Newsletter via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):

Over the past few weeks, discussions have been occurring throughout the District about MTI’s upcoming MTI Recertification Elections. One of the most frequently asked questions by newer staff, those who are not aware of MTI’s many accomplishments over the years is, “what is at risk if we lose the Union?” To answer that question, one only needs to look around the State of Wisconsin to see what has happened in other school districts where employees no longer have a collective voice in the workplace.

In many school districts, employers have increased employee health insurance premium
contributions to 12%. Such an increase would decrease an employee’s pay between $61 and $212 per month, depending on the plan the individual has selected. Your Union is currently working with the District to collaboratively identify potential sources for health insurance savings rather than implementing a premium co-pay. The five Contracts for MTI represented employees do not now mandate any employee contribution toward health insurance.

For teachers who are new parents, MTI’s Contract provides paid time off during maternity leave via a combination of personal sick leave and Sick Leave Bank benefits. Non-probationary teachers also have the Contract right to take unpaid child rearing leaves of absence for a semester, a full school year, or up to two school years should they need or desire to stay home with their child(ren) for a period of time regardless of the child’s age. Those rights could disappear or erode without a Union to advocate for them.

For longtime teachers, educational assistants, clerical-technical staff and security assistants approaching retirement, MTI’s Contracts provide retiring employees with 100% of the value of their accumulated sick leave for the payment of post-retirement insurances. Many school districts have capped or reduced such benefits, forcing longtime employees to work longer in order to afford post- retirement insurance premiums.

Other school districts have added classes to the workday (without additional pay); extended the work year (without additional pay); required mandatory evening obligations (without additional pay); reduced benefits for disabled employees; eliminated planning time; pro-rated insurance benefits based on part-time status; eliminated just cause and due process protections against unfair discipline or dismissal; and destroyed salary schedules.

MTI encourages all represented employees to spend a few moments to page through their Collective Bargaining Agreement to see the entirety of the issues that the Union has negotiated for them over the past decades. Any or all of those negotiated items would be subject to employer discretion or whim without a Union as your collective voice. Standing together, we can continue to advocate for working conditions/learning conditions that educational employees and students need. Voting to recertify is the first step towards maintaining your collective voice at work.

Madison School District PDF:

For MMSD, the most important aspect of multi-year budget planning is the careful use of ‘unused tax levy authority’ which can be carried forward from one year to the next. For 2014-15, the budget has available just over $8.8 million of ‘unused tax levy authority’ which was carried forward from 2013-14.1

The 2014-15 budget calls for use of $5.1 million (or 58%) of this carried-over tax levy authority, with the balance of $3.7 million preserved and carried forward into the 2015-16 budget. Partial use of the carried-over tax levy authority was targeted early in 2014-15 budget development to support the new technology plan. It also supports the compensation increase included in this budget recommendation. We believe this is an appropriate extent of use and caution against any additional use of the $8.8 million in the 2014-15 budget year.
There are two primary reasons for this recommendation, both of which lie ahead in the 2015-16 school year and beyond.

First, greater use of ‘carried-over tax levy authority’ to support additional spending this year will decrease equalization aid next year. Equalization aid, which is the district’s second largest source of revenue (behind only property taxes) is based on a formula which contains disincentives for spending above a prescribed level (the ‘secondary shared cost ceiling’). For example, a sharp increase in shared cost per pupil in 2012-13 contributed to an 11% equalization aid loss in 2013-14.

Looking ahead to 2015-16, depending on the state budget, MMSD is expected to see a 5-10% aid loss next year. Additional spending in 2014-15 would only increase the expected aid loss. For every two dollars ($2) MMSD spends above the secondary cost ceiling, we lose one dollar ($1) in equalization aid.

Second, the 2015-16 revenue budget forecast is very uncertain. It is outside of the current two-year state budget, the framework which determines school district revenues. Therefore, we recommend carrying over the $3.7 million to provide sufficient revenues to meet the needs of the 2015-16 school year.

The uncertainty of 2015-16 revenues, along with anticipated cost pressures on next year’s budget, including health insurance costs and increased technology investments, to name just two factors, make it essential that unused tax levy authority is preserved and carried-over into 2015-16.

1. Facing a major aid loss in 2013-14, the district ‘under-levied’ by $8.8 million to hold the tax levy increase to 3.384% on 0.35% tax base growth.

The District continues to use a single data point analysis for “State Aid” or redistributed state dollars. The District received a substantial increase in state tax dollars during the prior year….

Much more on the District’s 2014-2015 budget, here.

We recommend adopting a Preliminary Budget for 2014-15 which includes the budget changes recorded in the companion document MMSD 2014-15 DPI Recommended Format for Budget Adoption. The changes are related to student fees and technology. With this recommendation we restate our strategy to address health insurance, salaries, and tax levy as a package in the fall Final Budget.

There are several advantages to addressing health insurance, salaries, and tax levy as a package in the fall Final Budget:

Key financial data, including enrollment, revenue limit, equalization aid, tax levy and tax base will be available in October.

The insurance committee will have time to meet with the HMO’s and build on the work accomplished by the administration this spring.

The wellness plan design can be further developed and factored into the larger discussion of health insurance and compensation.

A piecemeal approach to salary/wage increases, employee contributions to health insurance, the wellness plan, and the fall tax levy is unlikely to produce the best result.

Much more on the 2014-2015 budget, here.

Chad Alderman, via a kind reader:

The Census Bureau’s latest Public Education Finances Report is out, and it shows that employee benefits continue to take on a rising share of district expenditures.

The table below uses 20 years of data (all years that are available online) to show total current expenditures (i.e. it excludes capital costs and debt), expenditures on base salaries and wages, and expenditures on benefits like retirement coverage, health insurance, tuition reimbursements, and unemployment compensation. Although it would be interesting to sort out which of these benefits have increased the most, the data don’t allow us to draw those granular conclusions. But they do tell us that teachers and district employees are forgoing wage increases on behalf of benefit enhancements.

From 2001 to 2012 alone, public education spending increased 49 percent, but, while salaries and wages increased 36 percent, employee benefits increased 96 percent. Twenty years ago, districts spent more than four dollars in wages to every one dollar they spent on benefits. Now that ratio has dropped under three-to-one. Benefits now eat up more than 20 percent of district budgets, or $2,363 per student, and those numbers are climbing.

Much more on Madison’s 2014-2015 budget, here.

Tap the chart to view a larger version.

A few slides from the School District’s fourth 2014-2015 budget presentation to the Board:

I am surprised to see Physician’s Plus missing from the healthcare choices, which include: GHC, Unity or Dean.

The slides mention that the “Budget Proposal Covers the First 5% of Health Insurance Premium Increase”.

Madison Schools’ 2014-2015 v4 budget document (PDF).

Deeper dive:

2014-2015 Madison Schools’ Budget

Long term, disastrous reading results.

Healthcare costs have long been a somewhat contentious issue, including decades of expensive WPS coverage.

Questions about recent maintenance referendum spending.

Middleton’s property taxes are about 16% less than Madison’s for a comparable home.

Wisconsin per capita property tax data via the May 30, 2014 WISTAX Focus Newsletter.

The Madison School District (3MB PDF):

Five Priority Areas (just like the “Big 10”) but who is counting! – page 6:
– Common Core
– Behavior Education Plan
– Recruitment and hiring
– New educator induction
– Educator Effectiveness
– Student, parent and staff surveys
– Technology plan

2014-2015 “budget package” 3MB PDF features some interesting changes, beginning on page 92, including:

1. + $986,314 to other Wisconsin public school districts due to Outbound open enrollment growth and $160,000 for Youth Options (page 108)

2. + 5.3% Teacher & Staff Health insurance spending is $44,067,547, or 11% of total spending! (Page 92). Total teacher & staff benefits are $73,248,235 or 18% of total spending. Let’s compare (as best we can):

Madison: 18% budget web page. Note, Madison’s is likely higher than 18% as I did not count all “funds” beyond teachers and certain staff. I’ve sent an email to the District for a complete number.

Middleton: 15.7% 2013-2014 Budget (PDF) Middleton – Cross Plains School District Budget web page. Middleton’s document summarizes spending across all funds (Page 8), something that I did not find in the Madison document (Pages 110-123 summarize aspects of Madison’s spending).

Boston: 14.1% Boston Schools 2013-2014-2015 budget xls file) Boston schools’ budget information.

Long Beach: 15.9% (Long Beach Budget Document (PDF)) Long Beach budget information.

Madison Superintendent Cheatham cited the Boston and Long Beach Schools for “narrowing their achievement gap” during a July, 2013 “What Will be Different This Time” presentation to the Madison Rotary Club.

3. “Educational Services” (Page 96) benefits are $21,581,653 up 4.5%.

4. “Food Services” (Page 98) benefits are $2,446,305, up 4.2%.

5. 10.3%: MSCR’s health insurance cost increase (page 99). MSCR spending and property tax growth (“Fund 80”) has been controversial in the past.

The Madison School District’s per student spending has been roughly constant for several years at about $15,000. Yet, certain budget elements are growing at a rather high rate, indicating an ability to manage effectively by reallocating and raising tax dollars or the presence of a rather fluid budget.

“focused instead on adult employment”

Retired Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 Madison Rotary speech is always worth revisiting:

Zimman’s talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin’s K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Zimman noted that the most recent State of Wisconsin Budget removed the requirement that arbitrators take into consideration revenue limits (a district’s financial condition @17:30) when considering a District’s ability to afford union negotiated compensation packages. The budget also added the amount of teacher preparation time to the list of items that must be negotiated….. “we need to breakthrough the concept that public schools are an expense, not an investment” and at the same time, we must stop looking at schools as a place for adults to work and start treating schools as a place for children to learn.”

The price of budget spaghetti manifests itself via little to no oversight – see legitimate questions on the District’s most recent $26,200,000 maintenance referendum (another tax increase looms). These documents, while reasonably detailed, are impossible to compare to recent budgets.

The demise of Lawrie Kobza’s 2 page “citizen’s budget” will lead to growing cost of living and achievement gaps, including nearby Districts such as Middleton where a comparable homeowner spends 16% less on property taxes.

Steve Strieker, via a kind Michael Walsh email:

My first teaching contract 19 years ago at a Midwest Catholic high school grossed $15,000. My retirement benefits consisted of a whopping $500 401K. Cutting into my take-home pay was a $1500 annual premium for an inadequate health insurance plan with a high deductible and 80-20 coverage on remaining family medical bills.

Money aside, I was a good Christian soldier. I taught a full load with 3 or more preps, moderated the school newspaper, ran the service program, coached baseball, drove the school bus to athletic events, and volunteered for all kinds of school activities.

Considering money, I was a naive Christian soldier. I did not think finances mattered all that much. After growing up on the lower rim of the middle class, the $15 grand I grossed in my first year of teaching felt like a million dollars. When the family budget tightened as college loans came due and the family grew, I practiced my own personal “no excuses” policy and doubled down on work by milking cows in the evening and on weekends, painting houses in the summer, and working a variety of odd jobs. While many Americans were “moving on up” during the 1990’s, my wife (also an educator) and I shuffled funds around trying to survive on less-than-professional pay.

In these conditions, my teaching suffered. My professional goal of getting my masters degree by age 30 came and went. I recycled the same lesson every year. Innovation was limited to what I could concoct late at night or each morning before school. I was a resourceful teacher, but not a developing educator.

In the midst of this mess, one of my kids became seriously ill. She did a few tours in the hospital before some highly skilled and professionally-priced specialists got a handle on her condition. The medical bills mounted. Things became desperate.

So I made a desperate move. I sold my soul and left teaching for a year. I searched for funds in other fields. In the midst of this despair came some soul-saving, professional advice from my brother teaching in Wisconsin. He coaxed my wife (also an educator) and I to move to his neck of the woods, where we could earn professional pay and benefits by teaching in Wisconsin’s public school system.

Much more on Act 10, here.