Monadnock School Taxpayers Association News

Last week, the New Hampshire Retirement System released a list of all 23,500 state pensions and what type of employee (police officer, firefighter, teacher or other state employee) received them. The list showed that 11 retirees receive pensions of more than $100,000, and 20 make between $90,000 and $100,000. Twenty-four of those 31 retirees were police officers, four were firefighters, one was a teacher, and three were local-government employees.

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It’s class warfare!

Fed-up parents and teachers who saw the explosive education documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” yesterday were left either seething or in tears — and calling for revolutionary change after the film’s Big Apple debut.

“The passing along of children through the system is just disgusting,” said Barbara Levinson, 63, who was crying by the film’s end. “Every child should be treated as an individual.”

Viewers were also rocked by the work’s portrayal of the teachers unions’ protection of subpar educators.

PROTESTING TEACHERS GIVE ‘WAITING FOR SUPERMAN’ AN ‘F’

William Varoli, 36, Glendale, Queens; is unsure whether to send daughter to public school.

“The laws as they stand can protect ineffective teachers who are bad — I’m disappointed in what the union’s become,” said Patricia Jordan, who won state teacher of the year in 1993.

“Effective and wonderful teachers are stifled by the ones who are problematic and hard to get rid of,” she fumed.

The movie, from directors of “An Inconvenient Truth,” takes aim at teacher tenure and “rubber rooms” for teachers facing disciplinary action. It profiles five kids who enter charter-school lotteries.

One parent, from Harlem, is struggling to pay for Catholic school for her daughter Bianca, and another, from The Bronx, is fighting to keep her son Francisco on track in public school.

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The downturn that some have dubbed the “Great Recession” has trimmed the typical household’s income significantly, new Census data show, following years of stagnant wage growth that made the past decade the worst for American families in at least half a century.

The bureau’s annual snapshot of American living standards also found that the fraction of Americans living in poverty rose sharply to 14.3% from 13.2% in 2008—the highest since 1994. Some 43.6 million Americans were living below the official poverty threshold, but the measure doesn’t fully capture the panoply of government antipoverty measures.

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A bipartisan endorsement in Pennsylvania.

This is an encouraging season for education reform, and the latest development is a bipartisan political breakout on vouchers in the unlikely state of Pennsylvania.

Last month, and to widespread surprise, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dan Onorato came out in support of school vouchers for underprivileged kids. Mr. Onorato said that education “grants”—he avoided the term vouchers—”would give low-income families in academically distressed communities direct choices about which schools their children should attend.”

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How trillions in fiscal and monetary stimulus produced a 1.6% recovery.

So two months before an election, and 19 months after the mother of all spending programs, President Obama said yesterday he’s rolling out one more plan to stimulate the economy. We’ll discuss the details when they’re released, but the effort itself is a tacit admission that his earlier proposals have flopped. As the autumn economic debate gets underway, it’s important to understand how and why we got here.

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Those of us who remember using our own legs for transit now run the risk of sounding Abe Lincolnesque.

If you think the first week of September means kids skipping off to school, you might want to check your calendar—for the century. The way you got to school isn’t the way they do.

Take the bus. Sure, about 40% of kids still ride the cheery yellow chugger, but in many towns it doesn’t stop only at the bus stops anymore. It stops at each child’s house.

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Several state and local retirement funds have balked at disclosing the pensions of individual government workers, triggering lawsuits that claim taxpayers have the right to such information.

The showdown comes amid growing scrutiny of public-sector pensions as voters, many struggling amid the recession, increasingly question how tax dollars are spent in states and cities facing budget shortfalls and service cutbacks.

The California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, a group that advocates for pared-back pension benefits, sued the San Diego County retirement fund in August after it refused to provide the names of retirees collecting annual pensions of $100,000 or more. While other counties have released similar information, San Diego maintains that state law prohibits it from doing so.

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While politicians have opposed the right to strike, public-sector labor leaders have focused on pay increases and constitutional guarantees.

This weekend we celebrate Labor Day in a country divided between two kinds of workers. The first is the private-sector worker, the vulnerable one who rides the business cycle without shock absorbers. The second worker, who works for the government, lives a cushioned existence in which terminations take years, pension amounts are often guaranteed, and recessions are only thunder in the distance. Yet worse than this division is the knowledge that the private-sector worker will pay for public-sector comfort with ever higher taxes.

How did we get here? Over the course of the past century, officials and politicians of both parties have sought to shut unions out of government or, when that failed, constrain their power within government. Early 20th-century strikes by police and other public employees were effective but proved politically damaging. Over time, the unions opted for a more quiet form of coercion—what might be called compensation coercion. Their success in this area brought them to the privileged ground they hold today.

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Benches that talk, a Cocoanut Grove auditorium, and a marble slab engraved with quotes from Ted Kennedy.

At $578 million—or about $140,000 per student—the 24-acre Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex in mid-Wilshire is the most expensive school ever constructed in U.S. history. To put the price in context, this city’s Staples sports and entertainment center cost $375 million. To put it in a more important context, the school district is currently running a $640 million deficit and has had to lay off 3,000 teachers in the last two years. It also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country and some of the worst test scores.

The K-12 complex isn’t merely an overwrought paean to the nation’s most celebrated liberal political family. It’s a jarring reminder that money doesn’t guarantee success—though it certainly beautifies failure.

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Back in March, voters nixed a new teacher contract for the Sanborn Regional School District, and among the voter complaints was the inclusion of an evergreen clause. If the contract were to expire, teachers would continue to get their step raises until a new contract was reached.

“No one should get a perpetual raise because of their job performance,” voter Charlton Swasey said.

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