And of course university presidents, deans, & other riff-raff get much higher salaries.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Jordan Hayes Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2011 9:52 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Wisconsin public servants already face acompensationpenalty
I spent some time (that I'll never get back) last night digging around for the source of the "$100,000 teacher" meme, with only shadowy references to an MPS Board Meeting. It turns out that the amount is some kind of aggregate of salary, benefits, and perhaps some kind of assignment of future pension costs -- it's not clear because there's no mention of the formula used anywhere. It does mention that the "salary" part is $56k, but again: no mention of what that means. Everyone's salary divided by the number of teachers? Regardless, WI appears to be 28th in terms of average teacher salary nationwide.
There *are* a few of those sites[*] that took the state data and let you search on various things like title, school district, and a vague "salary >= $100k" filter that results in a few hundred people in WI with salaries in the 6 digits -- although not one of them, of course, is a teacher. High-end compensation can get tricky, but it seems that even for administrators around the $100k mark they show a ~50% burden for fringe benefits. It seems unlikely that the "normal" way of calculating "burden" results in a much higher number for someone making $56k -- especially since the obvious culprit is pension and the non-union admin folks have a much more generous pension plan than the teachers.
I noticed in the MPS yearly financial reports, they assign proportional share of interest on debt to the "instructional" column of their accounting, which seems fine as far as it goes, but if this has trickled down into a report about "teacher salary" then I think we all know how much the report is worth.
It's almost as though someone said: you know what would really get the fires going? If we could tell people that teachers are making $100k!
Shazzam!
/jordan
[*] http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/dataondemand/33534649.html
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