by Ann Coulter
In 2005, a Bronx public school teacher paid a homeless man with a history of mental illness to take the state teacher certification test in his place after the teacher had repeatedly failed the test. The test results drew suspicions because the homeless man did so well on the test. (That’s not a joke.)
Obviously, the solution is to keep paying teachers more. At least that’s the conclusion the courts keep coming to—which is probably why the Constitution did not give judges the power to tax. In the mid-1980s, a federal judge in Kansas City implemented liberals’ dream program to improve the public schools. The judge imposed a $2 billion tax hike on the citizens of Kansas City in order to build opulent public school campuses replete with Olympic-size pools with an underwater viewing room, 25-acre wildlife sanctuaries, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation facilities—and of course, higher teachers’ salaries. After twenty years of the perfect experiment in liberal education theory, there was less racial integration in the schools—the purported purpose of the plan—and black test scores hadn’t improved one jot. Somewhat amazingly, at one high school, the reading scores of black males were completely unchanged from freshman to senior year.
Between 1982 and 2001, spending on New York City public schools increased by more than 300 percent, clocking in at $11,474 per pupil annually. Only Washington, D.C., that hotbed of educational achievement, spends more per student. By contrast, the average tuition for private elementary schools is less than $4,000 and around $6,000 for private secondary schools.
And yet the New York State courts officially found in 2003 that graduates of New York City’s public schools are not competent to sit on a jury. The courts found that the schools were not providing children with such skills as “basic literacy, calculating and verbal skills necessary to enable children to eventually function productively as civil participants capable of voting and serving on a jury.” In response, the courts ordered that yet more money be spent on the same failing public schools.
It’s all academic to judges who send their kids to private schools anyway. They have no contact with all the things they extol, like public education and the marvel that is the New York City subway system. Rich liberals take the subway once a year and are stunned at how big it is. Liberals are quite confident that people in Queens will be happy with their decisions.
When not complaining about their low salaries, teachers say it’s not the money, it’s respect they want. A New Jersey public school principal complained to the New York Times that he has to leave the country to be “reminded of the high regard with which the rest of the world views his occupation.” According to the principal, back in America, “You’ll be at a party and someone will ask what you do. You’ll say you’re a teacher and they’ll say, `That’s nice,’ and move on.”’ They’re probably ashamed of how little they make compared with school principals.
It’s tough to make the case that teachers are not valued in American society—in addition to being paid more per hour than architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, space scientists, registered nurses, musicians, artists, and editors and reporters.
According to a Harris poll taken in 2005, teachers were ranked as the third most “prestigious” profession, tied with firemen and just behind scientists and doctors. This placed teachers ahead of military officers, nurses, police officers, and priests.’$
You would think there would be a little more humility in a profession where the main competition comes from nuns. Even nuns, who have taken a vow of poverty, aren’t lavished with praise the way public school teachers are.
When Jason Kamras received his National Teacher of the Year Award from President Bush in 2005, he hailed the other members of his profession for working “tirelessly every day doing wonderful and challenging work.” And he added, they “do so almost always without recognition.” Without recognition? Kamras was in the Rose Garden of the White House being recognized by the president of the United States of America. I’m guessing they don’t teach irony at schools of education.
But you know who does work tirelessly every day doing wonderful work and almost always without recognition? Electrolysists. Plumbers. Cooks. Cable guys. Farmers.
Maids. Deliverymen. In fact, just about everybody who’s not a celebrity works tirelessly every day doing wonderful work and almost always without recognition. The president does not give out a Fireman of the Year Award, Policeman of the Year Award, Plumber of the Year Award, Heart Surgeon of the Year Award, Physical Therapist of the Year Award. Apart from Hollywood actors, teachers are the most incessantly praised profession in America. Run a Google search of “Teacher of the Year” and you’ll get almost 40 million hits—more even than “Mother of the Year”!
The National Football League has a Teacher of the Year Award for teachers nominated by players, and awards the winner a trip to a bowl game and $5,000. Wal-mart runs an annual Teacher of the Year contest, awarding fifty schools a $10,000 grant and the national winner’s school another $25,000. The Veterans of Foreign Wars has a Teacher of the Year Award, giving teachers at three different grade levels $1,000 for themselves and another $1,000 to the schools. Toyota has a Toyota Family Literacy Teacher of the Year Award that awards $5,000 to the winner. The National Fire Protection Association has a Teacher of the Year Award. The World Affairs Council of Washington, D.C., has a Teacher of the Year Award. The California Masons have a Teacher of the Year Award. The Kirksville Chapter of Sigma Xi in Missouri has a Teacher of the Year Award. This is in addition to all the state Teacher of the Year Awards generally announced at a big ceremony with the governor. No wonder kids can’t read or write—their teachers are al-ways jetting off to some fancy event to pick up their Teacher of the Year Awards.
In California, teachers get discounted mortgages and car loans, and tuition reimbursement. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has a program that allows teachers to buy homes in re-vitalized areas at a 50 percent discount off the sale price. In other areas, discounts and special deals are offered to teachers by bookstores, office supply stores, computer stores, and cell phone companies.
Oddly enough, public school teachers aren’t offered discounts on condoms, even ones sold for use just on school grounds. They should take that up at the next NEA conference.
It’s all about respect, people. One teacher who managed to find time to write a letter to the editor—despite the long, long hours teachers work—to complain that her salary was “very sad indeed,” proposed yet more goodies that could be given to public school teachers, such as day care “for teachers only.” Just don’t say teachers already have plenty of benefits or the Democrats will accuse you of hating teachers. You must weep with admiration at the mere mention of “teachers.” Soon one of every five people in America will be part of the “education” industry and the rest of us will work to support their salaries and benefits.
In 2004, New York City investigators secretly filmed five assistant principals whiling away their days at Lord & Taylor, Macy’s, Kmart, and Duane Reade. About the same time the courts were concluding that New York public schools could not even produce a competent O.J. juror, the five “educators” were caught on tape arriving late, leaving early, and spending the time in between shopping. They could afford it: New York City taxpayers were paying them between $65,000 and $106,000 per year to do nothing. The five assistant principals had been reassigned to administrative duties after some reshuffling in the public schools eliminated their jobs. They refused to perform any of the tasks assigned to them on the grounds that the tasks were not within the job description for “assistant principal.” Apparently, buying ballet tickets and shopping at Lord & Taylor were within the job description.
In January 2005, New York public school teacher Frances Levine was arrested for attempted murder in connection with a brutal attack on the principal of her school.
According to police, Levine’s boyfriend attacked the principal, Wanda Rivera-Switalski, outside her Queens home early one morning, riding up on
a motorcycle and slashing her with a box cutter so many times she needed more than a hundred stitches. Before the attack, Levine was overheard haranguing her boyfriend, saying, “When are you going to do it? She already has fired three of my friends. Quit procrastinating.” You know a school is hurting when the teachers can’t even get murder assignments completed on time.
Levine’s salary at the time of the attack was $57,804.
In April of that year, a Brooklyn teacher earning $69,359 per year was arrested on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for possessing illegal “gravity knives,” which can be opened by the force of gravity alone. When the police ran his name, they discovered he had also been arrested in 1993 for disorderly conduct and in 2001 for possession of marijuana, resisting arrest, and obstruction of governmental administration. In other words, he had a criminal record so extensive he might actually have had trouble landing a job with the New Orleans police department. After his earlier arrest, the teacher had simply been reassigned.
In July, the superintendent of the Yonkers school district was indicted for perjury and evidence tampering for trying to cover up his appointment of a twenty-four-year-old friend of his daughter’s to a $90,000-a-year job with the school. He later pleaded guilty.
Also in July, Matthew Kaye, a high school social studies teacher in Queens, faced disciplinary action for calling in sick eleven days in December and February when, in fact, he was pursuing his real job in professional wrestling. I’d long suspected that professional wrestling was fake. Who knew that teaching was, too? The school discovered this deception by the simple expedient of reading Kaye’s wrestling website.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the city teachers’ union, defended Kaye, saying it was the fault of low teacher salaries: “Teachers frequently have second jobs or second careers because you just can’t make it on a teacher’s salary these days.” By his own account, the thirty-one-year-old Kaye was making $42,000 a year, more than double the median income in the state for a one-person family. When he realized he might lose his lucrative teaching job, he said, “I’d work overtime without pay. I told them I’d do anything I could to keep my job.”
In addition to grand theft, disorderly conduct, weapons charges, and attempted murder, there were also 180 claims of sexual abuse by New York City public school teachers in 2005—all before May. One involved a male public school teacher in Queens having sex with two female students, sixteen and eighteen years old. A male public school teacher on Staten Island was charged with flashing teenage girls over a period of several months. Two female teachers at the High School for Health Professions and Human Services in Manhattan were caught having sex with male students; one of the two was pregnant with a student’s child. Another female public school teacher at a Brooklyn public school—who was twenty-seven years old and earning $45,583 a year—was caught passionately kissing a fifteen-year-old student alone in her classroom. Some of these “stay in school!” campaigns have simply got to be rethought.
Analyzing the data from a survey by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, statistics professor Charol Shakeshaft estimates that between 1991 and 2000, roughly 290,000 students were subjected to physical sexual abuse by teachers or other school personnel. In her report for the U.S. Department of Education, Shakeshaft says that about one in every ten American children has been sexually abused in some way at school.
Compare that with Catholic priests. A study by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said that 10,667 allegations of sexual abuse of children had been made between 1950 and 2002. Multiply that by four to account—generously—for unreported cases and it comes to 821 children abused by priests per year. Priests: 820 abused children per year; educators: 32,000 abused children per year. For those of you who went to public schools, 32,000 is greater than 820.
It’s not just New York City—the school district that spends the second most money per pupil—where the educators are committing major felonies. In the school district that spends the most per pupil, Washington, D.C., members of the Washington Teachers’
Union stole nearly $5 million from union coffers. According to the Washington Post, the education bureaucrats used the money to purchase “Escada hand-bags, Ferragamo shoes, St. John knits, Baccarat vases, Rosendorf-Evans furs, Herend plates and a 288-piece set of Tiffany silverware” (or as the teachers’ union referred to these items, “school supplies”). Some of the union money was used for a $2,000 donation to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign and a $9,000 donation to the Democratic National Committee, which was later returned. The president of the union hired the union handyman to be her personal chauffeur, for which she paid him a salary of $125,000. Perhaps Randi Weingarten could start citing this case to complain that even chauffeurs earn more than teachers!
This isn’t just a problem of urban schools. Fun teacher felonies pop up in comfortable suburban school districts, too. In June 2004, an assistant superintendent on Long Island was charged with grand larceny for stealing over $1 million from school funds, which she spent on mortgages for four homes, a Lexus, several motorized water scooters, and a massive credit card bill. The “educator,” Pamela C. Gluckin, pleaded not guilty (but returned a quarter of a million dollars). One gets the distinct impression that Ms. Gluckin never needed to moon-light as a cocktail waitress.
One month later, a superintendent on Long Island was also accused of stealing over a million dollars from school funds to buy furniture, Caribbean vacations, and a $372,000 home in Nevada he shared with a male exotic dancer. The residents of the town were shocked, because, as the New York Times put it, the superintendent was “a progressive leader who spoke of social justice, made condoms available in the high school,” which, to my way of thinking, made him a prime suspect for this type of behavior. Between bouts of helping out his male dancer friend, he started a service program dedicated to the idea that “the privileged class should give something back”—most of all to him, apparently.
After all, he had two master’s degrees and a doctorate in education from Columbia. It’s not like he was a bus driver or something.
They are the hardest-working, most underpaid workers in America.
Most public schools are—at best—nothing but expensive babysitting arrangements, helpfully keeping hoodlums off the streets during daylight hours. At worst, they are criminal training labs, where teachers sexually abuse the children between drinking binges and acts of grand larceny.
With public schools like this, students are going to learn, if they are going to learn, because of their parents, not because of any inspiration they get from schools. Dwight Eisenhower, Abraham Lincoln, John Marshall—all these men were taught to read at home by their parents. Felix Frankfurter went to public school on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Undeterred by the large class size and trifling teacher salaries in his tenement neighborhood, he went on to graduate first in his class from Harvard Law School. So don’t tell me smaller class size is the key to educational achievement.
The “class size” shibboleth appeals to yuppies’ desire to have the best of everything.
The tiniest ratio of students to teachers is a status symbol that is supposed to indicate their commitment to education. Tell it to teachers in Japan, Brazil, and Korea, who routinely teach classes numbering fifty students or more and whose students beat ours on international comparisons. Reducing class size doesn’t improve educational achievement; it reduces the workload for each teacher.
How about extending the ratio measure of excellence to other professions, like mailmen and butchers? We must lower the ratio of mailmen to letters. The optimum number of letters for a single mail carrier to deliver is 500 letters a day. Our mail is too important! Or: The butcher/steak ratio is a shame to our nation. We have the highest ratio in the world of butchers to cuts of beef France has three times as many butchers per cut of meat.
But if you say that, you will be accused of attacking teachers. People talk about public school teachers with breathless zeal
, as if they’ll be shot by the Nazi SS if they are not enthusiastic enough. I defy anyone to tell me under a lie detector test that they would not have gone to exactly the same college and gotten exactly the same SAT scores if their entire high school student body had matriculated at the worst public school in New York City. At Harvard, 90 percent of the students come from families above the median income in America ($42,000 a year). Nearly 80 percent come from families in the top 20 percent ($80,000). As this indicates, kids from good families could be taught by lunatics in an insane asylum and they would still do well on their SATs. The professional classes can teach their own, except they can’t because they’re out working to pay taxes to support high teacher salaries. And students with bad parents are manifestly not being helped by the public schools. They could—if the schools could fire the bad teachers and reward the good teachers. But the teachers’ unions won’t allow that. The education establishment’s answer to its own incompetence is to demand more money so it can keep doing more of the same. The Democrats’ answer is to say teachers are the most hardworking, underappreciated, self-sacrificing people in the universe.
It’s well past time for liberalism to be declared a religion and banned from public schools. No other religion has the right to propagandize to children for twelve years, six hours a day. In 2001, the New York Times hysterically denounced the Supreme Court decision in Good News Club v. Milford Central School for allowing religious groups equal standing with other after-school groups. The Times complained that “children that young are unlikely to discern that the religious message of authority figures who come to the school each day to teach does not carry the school’s endorsement.” The school’s own “authority figures” are usually teaching the youngsters how to put condoms on zucchini, training them in the catechism of recycling, or telling them Bush is like Hitler. Sending a mixed message about government “authority figures” might interfere with the state’s ability to turn small children into Good Germans inculcated in the liberal religion. Allowing Christians to be one of many after-school groups induces hysteria not only because liberals hate real religion. It’s also because the public school is their temple. Children must be taught to love Big Brother, welcoming him to take over our schools, our bank accounts, our property, even our toilet bowls. There’s nothing the matter with teachers that a little less unionization and more competition couldn’t cure. But if liberals insist on making teachers the new priests, at least let’s make them take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience like all the other priests.