McCrory and the future policy advisors celebrate on election night
Source: Charlotte Observer photo donated to the. N.C State Archives
Young Republicans who helped elect North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory have been rewarded with big salaries in his new administration. Matthew McKillip was named this week as chief policy adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Aldona Wos. Records show the 24-year-old received a $22,500 raise in April, bringing his salary to $87,500. Before joining state government in January, McKillip worked for McCrory’s 2012 campaign and spent 11 months as a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Records show 24-year-old DHHS Communications Director Ricky Diaz got an even bigger raise in April, boosting his state salary to $85,000. Diaz campaigned for McCrory after working for one year in the office of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Gov. Pat McCrory gave his cabinet secretaries pay hikes as large as $13,200, far more than anything afforded to typical state employees in recent years. The Republican’s cabinet makes a combined $1.1 million – an 8 percent increase from his Democratic predecessor.
“I’m trying to make it at least where they can afford to live while running multibillion-dollar departments,” McCrory said in an interview. GOP lawmakers changed state law last year to give the governor the power to determine cabinet salaries, a change from the previous year when all eight secretaries made $121,807, as set in state law. The additional money will come from other areas in the agency budgets.
Meanwhile, back in the real world outside the American Enterprise Institute and wing nut welfare circles:
After 13 years of teaching, Anastasia Trueman has had enough.The former Lynn Road Elementary math coach resigned on July 27. Even working two jobs, Trueman said several years without a raise forced her to walk. “I have to take a stand somehow, and one of the ways I can do that is by quitting,” Trueman said. “I hate that I have to do that because it’s hurting the kids more than anybody, but if I really cannot sustain a living then that’s what I have to do.””It is a long time coming, and I think it’s important to note this issue with teacher compensation didn’t happen overnight,” Eric Guckian, McCrory’s senior education advisor, said. “It certainly didn’t happen in the last six months, and it’s a priority of our administration to change it to a compensation system that is performance-based and values our educators and values our students.”
Not buying it. She is a math coach after all:
Trueman, however, said she doesn’t feel valued. “They talk about we’re doing all this reform and the one percent raise — well, since I’ve been frozen on a salary since 2009, what’s one percent going to do for me?” she asked.”They gave us one percent last year and then hiked up our healthcare.”
all this reform
There’s that word again. Unlike McCrory’s political patronage hires she has actual experience, 13 years, but I’ve watched 15 years worth of experiments with Milton Friedman’s theories on ed reform in Ohio so I have an advantage there. She’s on the right track ignoring the jargon and looking at the numbers. For some reason that no one in Ohio can figure out, 15 years of ed reform in Ohio turns out to mean less funding for public schools and race to the bottom wages for teachers. (pdf)
They might have to burn the village to save it North Carolina, so don’t let the smoke get in your eyes. Follow the money, and keep on turning out for Moral Mondays:
For the thousands who turned out for Moral Monday in Charlotte’s Marshall Park, every protester had one thing in common: Making their frustration with Raleigh and their voices heard.
Monday’s protest is the latest stop for the movement that has drawn thousands of people to weekly demonstrations in Raleigh. Charlotte had its turn and people came from every walk of life.
Cynthia Lank, of Charlotte, came with her two daughters. “I’m just furious,” she exclaimed. “I am so frustrated with what has gone on in our legislature this year. I’m furious for our students, for women, for people, for old people, for sick people. I just feel like the state of North Carolina has taken a huge step backwards.” Iola Gardner, another protester who came straight from work, agreed. “With all the changes in the general assembly, it’s just ridiculous,” she said. “I’m here for education, I’m for the suppress the vote — people need to know what’s going on.” For the Rev. William Barber, the protests are part of a major North Carolina movement, uniting coalitions fighting for social, economic and environmental justice over what he calls Republican legislators’ divisive measures.As president of the North Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Barber is now coordinating demonstrations in the state’s 13 Congressional districts. Demonstrations were also carried out in the North Carolina communities of Burnsville and Manteo.
rikyrah
Kay,
you are a gem.
I can’t say it enough..bringing this home and obvious to our faces
Baud
@rikyrah:
Seconded. Kay is the best blogger I’ve come across on the Internet. It’s a disgrace she’s not more well known.
tybee
a niece of mine was delighted, 6 or 7 years ago, to obtain a teaching job in north carolina. she said it was the best state for teachers in the south by a long shot.
for several years we’ve listened to her talk about what’s happened to education in NC.
she quit last fall and she now teaches in colorado.
Bobbyk
Look these republican assholes got elected somehow. What did people expect?
Keith G
@Baud: I think she is tops at value-added content. You read, you learn.
Just wanted to toss out a local news story that is hitting Houston this AM. Beau Biden is in hospital here for evaluation of a health concern last week.
rikyrah
More from North Carolina on the Voter Suppression Front:
Chill Chad Stanton @chadstanton9m
So Winston-Salem State University is having its polling place closed on a rumor because …voter fraud
Winston-Salem St. polling place next on GOP hit list
2013-08-19 17:26
The newly appointed Republican chairman of the Forsyth County Board of Elections says he plans to eliminate an early voting site at Winston-Salem State University, the Winston-Salem Journal reports.
Chairman Ken Raymond said he will move Tuesday to shut down the voting site at the historically black campus after hearing talk that a professor had offered students extra credit for going to the polls, which he said was a violation of the law. He offered no proof.
Last week, the Watauga Board of Elections voted to close the voting site on the campus of Appalachian State University in Boone.
Republicans on the Pasquotank County Board of Elections also voted last week deny an Elizabeth City State University senior from running for city council, ruling that that his on-campus address couldn’t be used to establish residency. The county chairman said he planned to challenge the voter residency of other students at the historically black school.
http://projects.newsobserver.com/under_the_dome/winstonsalem_st_polling_place_next_on_gop_hit_list
c u n d gulag
I lived in NC for most of the 00’s, and meet some great people down there.
WTF happened?
Did you think Republicans had learned a thing or two?
They’re incapable of learning!
To paraphrase the great Colbert, ‘They believe the same thing in 2013 that they believed in 2000, that they believed in 1980, that believed in 1964 – no matter what the f*ck happened in between!!!”
A whole boatload of them, still think IKE WAS A F*CKING GODLESS COMMIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
IKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And why would you want to put people like that in any position of responsibility?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
Phylllis
Wow, look at all the Black, Hispanic, and Asian people in that pict….
newtons.third
I am somewhat concerned about the teaching profession, as a member. I have started to hear stories about education professors telling possible new teachers not to get into the profession. Teachers starting to ask if they should take a student teacher from a college that charters schools. It is getting to the point that I can conceive of a time when teachers say en masse, that they have had enough, and suddenly, no teachers.
I know that I am sick of hearing that we are the bad guys, we are moochers and takers, we provide nothing to society. I am tired of having my devotion to my students used against me. I would hate to see a September come, and no schools open because there were no teachers. I care about my students too much to want that to happen. But I can see that happening down the road that we seem to be on.
Kay
@rikyrah:
I’ve said this before here, but I think this is a new front, a new low in suppression because they are using the voting restrictions they’re putting in to stop candidates. I haven’t thought about this angle before, but I’m not a civil rights or election lawyer. I get that it might not be different in a strict legal sense but it sure seems different, more damaging and far-reaching, in terms of suppression. I don’t even know how one would attack it as a stand-alone assault on minority candidates.
Botsplainer
Suppressing violent rage at this.
Waspuppet
Funny how certain people don’t need a character-building minimum-wage job before they make the big money, isn’t it?
cleek
@c u n d gulag:
redistricting happened.
Kay
@rikyrah:
I wonder if he had qualified for the ballot before they put the law in, or whether one could challenge the residency restriction based on “they’re changing the residency rules when disfavored people run for office”.
Mike E
Anecdotal, but 99% of people I talk to who voted for McCrory now regret doing so.
Keith G
@cleek: You beat me too it. While we cackled about (and in some cases waited for) coming demographic change, the GOP set about building sea walls to fight the oncoming tide. At the best, it will take another decade to undo the damage.
El Cid
This is what they do.
This is the NC state-level equivalent of Bush Jr & Cheney appointing all the young AEI & other booster hacks to run the nation-state we had just so utterly destroyed in Iraq, paying them big bucks to go and fuck up the lives of people they couldn’t care the least about.
Iraq, NC, it’s all the same to them.
NotMax
North Carolina*, you say?
81-year-old state Senator has had enough, quits after 15 years in office to work to fight the GOP agenda full-time.
Interview with Ellie Kinnaird on Maddow show from Monday (starts about 4 minutes in).
*How long before a movement to get rid of that damn Yankee-sounding ‘North’ and change the state to the unencumbered Carolina?
Kay
@El Cid:
Exactly. You notice where they were planted. HHS. Health and human services.
He’ll put someone qualified in to contract for sale of state assets and privatization.
gene108
This is good news.
The protests are moving beyond the “metro” areas like RTP, Charlotte, Greensboro, etc. and into the far flung corners of the state.
El Cid
@Kay: The people whose lives they affect are an enemy population, an undifferentiated mass of organisms who stand in the way of things they want and who threaten a potential dangerous insurgency–i.e., they could vote to take away the power that the good kiddies have, unless the good viceroys take away their dangerous and irresponsible access to self-government.
Tone In DC
@rikyrah:
Thanks for this.
These people aren’t just foul, they’re pretty much desperate if they for trying all this rodent fornication.
Cacti
I lived in North Carolina for 11 years. It’s been kind of sad to watch it transform into upper South Carolina. Glad that the good folks haven’t been taking it lying down.
Seanly
What a huge collection of over-privileged douchebags in that photo.
Cacti
@Seanly:
Also, not a single black or brown face (other than the fake-bake lady) in a state that’s 30% black and hispanic.
Chief
I live in Miami County, Ohio. I live in the the 8th CD, represented in Congress since 1991, by the inept and ineffective John Boehner.
Education: I graduated from high school in 1958 as one of 43 students in the graduating class. Small school, small town in Massachusetts.
How this applies to education, and probably has nothing to do with the Republicans proclivity to cut salaries, follows. Very few of the teachers had a B. Ed. or a M. Ed. degree. The majority had a MS or MA from Columbia or Middlebury or Boston U. or The Sorbonne, Univ of Paris, France or Chicago Conservancy of Music.
My point is that perhaps we have far too many teachers who have “specialized” in education and do not know enough about the subject they are teaching.
schrodinger's cat
[email protected]
I think the economics profession which in general has followed the lead of Lucas and Friedman et al at the University of Chicago has a lot to answer for. We can trace the 30 year stagnation of the middle class to their economic theories.
cmorenc
I am SO glad both of my children have already passed through their 12+K years in the Wake County (Raleigh) NC public school system, having both had access to schools which were still excellent while they were there, before the wingnuts at the local and state levels took over the school system.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@newtons.third: That’s exactly what the profession needs in all the States where this crap is going on: a September where all the teachers refuse to work. That’s your bargaining chip for higher wages and better working conditions. That’s how it has always been done – you gotta fight for it if you want things to get better.
cleek
@NotMax:
sadly, that’s my district.
wvng
This sure feels like exactly the same mindset as that notable ideologically-driven disaster – the Coalition Political Authority in Iraq. Yes, because putting young ideologues in charge of things that require real-world experience and deep understanding always works out so well.
raven
@Chief: Oh, perhaps huh? Perhaps that’s silly?
Trakker
Thank you, Republicans, for being so PUBLIC with your assholyness in every state you’ve taken control of.
You could have worked slowly and quietly to implement your extreme policies and only a small group of activists would have pushed back. But no, you have to do it NOW!! – so you can enjoy feeling the outrage of the people you are screwing, the Democratic base.
The tea party are like 15-year olds who get drunk, spend the night screwing and then walk into the house the next morning with a huge sh*teating grin on their face in front of their irate parents.
Implementing extreme tea party policies is only part of what they want to do – the other part is enjoying the shock and melt-down of people they despise, not seeming to realize (or care) that their public orgy of destruction and celebration is also about to become a stake through their heart as they continue to p*ss off the middle class.
MomSense
Thank you, Kay. You are the best!
TR
Time to bring back tarring and feathering.
Fuck these assholes.
Liberty60
This is appropos-
An article in Strike! magazine by David Graeber about the the phenomenon of meaningless work, opposed to meaningful jobs like teaching.
He notes how people working at jobs whose purpose is ambiguous or absent are whipped up in oppositionto those with more defined work. Like how cubicle dwellers are encouraged to vent rage at teachers and nurses instead of the corporate lords.
The Moar You Know
@newtons.third: My wife’s district doesn’t take student teachers from charter sponsors, or from Teach for America.
There will always be teachers, however. For the same reason that there are always people willing to work at a McDonald’s – there are more people than jobs.
I did not imply that these would be good teachers, you will note. They won’t be. In Red America, that is a feature, not a bug.
boatboy_srq
@Bobbyk: Too many people expected that all the “waste, fraud and abuse” didn’t include their pet programs and benefits, and that all the finger-pointing was directed at those Other people. It’s fascinating how the Reichwing can sell “we’re gonna take it all away” to their constituents and make them believe there’s a “from everyone else” that follows the first part. And after that, they can sell these same
gullible foolstrue believers on the misperception that they’re in the pickle they’re in, not because of GOTea policies designed to screw everyone, but because those people still have it made while Good Caucasoid Hetero Xtian Patriotic Ahmurrcans™ are getting the shaft.Kay
@schrodinger’s cat:
We sure can. But, for some reason, we’re all about accountability for front-line people who make 40k a year and we insulate these Famous Thinkers and Theorists from any responsibility for their work
We need better theories.
Mike in NC
@Mike E:
I really want to see this asshole bounced after one term, or better yet impeached over some scandal that’s bound to surface.
I never get tired of reminding neighbors who voted for McCrory what a useless sack of shit he is.
boatboy_srq
@Chief: You don’t suppose that’s because so many of the more recent recipients of “MS or MA [degrees] from Columbia or Middlebury or Boston U. or The Sorbonne” might have found something more, um, profitable to do than teaching, do you?
boatboy_srq
@Botsplainer: Indeed. IOKIYAR, and IGMFY, all in one sentence.
Anoniminous
@Chief:
Median salary for mathematicians: $99,380
Median salary for scientists: $76,000
Median salary for engineers: $79,230
Median salary for teachers: $42,653
Answer your point?
The Moar You Know
@Keith G: “Demographic change”. The talisman of desperation that the Democratic party clings to. It’s a great talisman, promising that everything will be OK, and requiring no work or sacrifice in the bargain.
And like most objects of worship, it carries no actual power of its own save for the petty hopes of the bearer. Dems sit on their asses hoping Latinos are going to come to save the day, while Republicans keep winning from the bottom up.
I live in Car Thief Issa’s district. He’s there to stay, not because the overwhelming majority of potential voters are Republicans – hell, I’ll bet this district might not even be majority white anymore – but because my local Democratic party has far, far better things to do than to soil their hands doing any actual work.
Bostondreams
@Chief:
North Carolina is eliminating pay for any degree beyond the BA or BS.
boatboy_srq
@newtons.third: The only worry I have about a nationwide strike/sickout/whatever as you describe is that there are just enough wingnuts who would hoam skul their kids and just enough Xtian “academies” to make it look like an education system of some sort would survive the event. And then we’d have a generation brought up on six-day cosmology, four-element physics/chemistry, four-humour biology/medicine and the whole host of other
beliefs“Truths” embedded in their “education.”The GOTea: proudly leading Ahmurrca forward into the 15th Century.
schrodinger's cat
@Kay: Do you remember how @burnspbesq burns made a personal attack on me for raising this point, in one of your threads last week? That I had not stepped inside an econ class room. Talk about shooting the messenger.
ruemara
I hardly ever say this, but, thanks, Kay. You actually talk about very real, pertinent things and you also throw in the actions people can do. That’s important.
Shakezula
It’s hard out there for a pimp.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Thanks, Kay, for another of your always thoughtful and thought provoking posts. Even if the topic is really disheartening. Off to do my actual NAMI job, and getting our annual fundraiser off the ground. It’s a make or break year for us – we may be out of business at the end of 2014 if this event is good. There’s a Team Bella Q, and I can post a link…
Chief
@Anoniminous: Yes ! ! More than answered it.
And is that part of the problem. We do not value teachers enough?
Full disclosure: Our oldest, a daughter, had a severe learning disability. She now holds a Masters in Special Education. Her Bachelors was in Journalism and Media Writing.
Mike in NC
Semi-related note: South Carolina has seen harvests decimated by unusually heavy summer rains. 36 of 42 counties reporting crop losses of an average of 30% or more. Governor Nikki Haley has decided the state must pull itself up by its bootstraps.
Just kidding: she’s pleading for federal disaster assistance.
Kay
@schrodinger’s cat:
Speaking of, I thought about our conversation when I read this:
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/to-cut-fees-public-funds-seek-to-take-charge-of-investing-2/
A Canadian is behind this attack on the right of Wall Streeters to collect huge fees :)
Loviatar
But at least Anastasia Trueman can look forward to navigating Obamacare in state where Matthew McKillip heads up Health and Human Services and Ricky Diaz is his Communications Director.
Folks don’t forget when you cheer for Obamacare also be aware of all of its unintended results.
raven
(CNN) — Elmore Leonard, a legendary crime novelist and screenwriter who wielded sharp prose and created quirky misfit characters to captivate a legion of readers has died, his literary agent said Tuesday.
eta “The 1967 film Hombre starring Paul Newman was an adaptation of Leonard’s novel of the same name.”
You ever been hungry lady?
Mike E
@Mike in NC: I hear you about the “I told you” factor and it’s all I can do to keep from saying that daily. The TEA fuck ups speak volumes for me to not have to do that.
Logistics will sort all of this out. Constituent service is a universal metric. Wake county hired 200 extra school bus drivers to ensure that last year’s day 1 debacle isn’t repeated. Other counties won’t be so able, so a lot of holes will be quite apparent.
Oh, the clown responsible for the bus calamity runs the DOT now. Heh.
Kay
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
O/T in my own post, BUT:
This is NOT the conventional wisdom. We’re hosting Ed FitzGerald at a gathering this weekend and after I finish haranguing him on school privatization I’m gonna try to find out of his campaign thinks Kasich is in worst shape than national media would have us believe.
Last week, Kasich was running around touting The Ohio Miracle and all the dopes were nodding along. What gives with this approval rating?
schrodinger's cat
@Kay: Wall Street lost of lot of its credibility because of the credit crisis. The invisible hand of the markets is going to slap them eventually.
Anoniminous
@Chief:
IMO, not valuing teachers is part of the problem; another part is salary level; another is more difficult to solve: a person who graduates with a degree in maths, science, or engineering wants to do math, science, or engineering, going into teaching – except at the university level – precludes working in the field, there’s no time.
(And run along little sentence, run along)
Hunter Gathers
@Kay:
I imagine because not everybody reads the papers that service Kasich’s cock. That and the anti-choice bullshit he signed a while back. BTW, has anyone figured out if that budget banned certain kinds if birth control (specifically, IUD’s) yet? There was quite a bit of confusion over that.
El Cid
If these people could get away with it, they’d send the kids home, sell the schools off for scrap, and take the whole ‘education’ budget and just hand it back to their election funders, their big property, developer, hog & poultry slaughtering, & other corporate peers and keep a pile to play with for their bright young Carolinian Provisional Authority scouts.
Chris
The thing that gets me about this is that these are public employees. It’s a common argument on that side of the aisle that teachers, DMV workers and other “useless bureaucrats” should be held to a much higher standard in terms of their salaries and rights (e.g. right to unionize) because their salary is being paid by everyone’s taxes, that comparisons between their salaries and those of CEOs aren’t valid because CEOs aren’t being paid with everyone’s taxes, that it’s unconscionable that the public sector would pay better than the private one because the public sector is being financed by everyone’s taxes…
Apparently, that only applies if you’re a lowly teacher or DMV worker, though. Political cronies can be lavished with as much money as the public treasury contains and it ain’t no thing. They’re Very Important People, after all. You can’t expect them to be paid like workers and peasants.
Kay
@Hunter Gathers:
No, I was on “tax cuts and public education cuts”. I never got to the contraception issue.
I wonder if it’s raising taxes on lower income people while cutting taxes for rich people. That same scheme was wildly unpopular in Louisiana when Jindal put it in and his numbers are terrible too.
Ben Cisco
I’ve been here for almost 20 years, and it is both depressing and infuriating to see just how far we’ve been dragged down by this batch of NeoConfederate assholes.
Early primary voting starts Thursday, and the word needs to get around.
Everyone who can needs to GO VOTE.
While you still have the right.
Kay, thanks for the time and effort you put into this.
NCgumbo
As someone who has lived in NC since 1998, I am horrified to see the state moving backward on so many fronts. It really feels like an assault. In N.C. in 2010 there was a perfect storm of Tea-Party enthusiasm on the national level, an unfortunate lack of organizational follow-up from OFA once the presidential election was over, and, perhaps most crucially, backlash against a corrupt Democratic establishment in the state. The fact that it was a census/redistricting year has turned an unfortunate situation into a catastrophe.
Very few N.C. voters, even the ones who voted GOP, expected or wanted the radical policies the GOP is enacting. McCrory expressly ran as both an economic and social moderate, going so far as to say he would enact no new restrictions on abortion. The people of NC, much like the people of Wisconsin, were lied to by the GOP candidates. It’s no coincidence that in both Wisconsin and North Carolina right-wing billionaires (Kochs/Art Pope) are bank-rolling the regressive changes.
McCrory’s approval levels are now in the 30s, and the General Assembly is down there with him. Thousands of us are working to try to undo the mess, but it is going to take years, given the amount of destruction they have caused, and given how horribly gerrymandered our state now is. In 2012, for example, a majority of North Carolina voters voted for the Democratic candidate for congress, yet somehow, Republicans won 9 of 14 districts. This carried over into state-level races as well, and is how we ended up with a veto-proof GOP majority in the General Assembly.
These people are interested in one thing – power. Power for themselves and for their already powerful financial backers. They will stop at nothing to get it and hold it, and we need to push back, and push back hard.
The only hopeful news is that so many formerly apolitical people are suddenly up in arms over what is happening. I think the overreach just might come back to bite these jerks in the ass.
El Cid
The Teaparty Brotherhood won’t get all riled up about the NC occupation authorities getting their big time pay, but somebody’s got to stop these greedy black lazy teachers from stealing my tax dollars getting these lavish pensions which represent a portion of their upfront pay they never got, but fuck them, ’cause black & lazy.
boatboy_srq
@Phylllis: WIN.
grape_crush
I can just feel the diversity of the GOP coming off of that photo in waves…it’s like the heat you feel from the booth when you’re getting a fake tan.
The Moar You Know
@Liberty60: Good link, good piece, thank you for posting.
NCgumbo
And I forgot to say THANK YOU KAY for shining a light on what is happening down here. We can use all of the support we can get.
newtons.third
@The Moar You Know: Our district (admin) loves the local university that charters schools. But the individual teachers can say no to a student teacher.
But ultimately, our caring about our students is the lever that is used to move us. We know the impact of certain actions on our kids, and we don’t want to harm them. As long we care about them, it will be impossible to use the weapons at our disposal.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Mike in NC: We have in NC, too. My CSA finally just said, outright, that the cucumbers and squash drowned this summer.
Hunter Gathers
@Kay: I’ve never wanted to punch someone so hard in my life when he put that little boy in his lap when he signed that bullshit. I would say that his parents should be ashamed, but I’m pretty sure that they don’t have any shame to begin with.
gene108
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
In areas with teachers unions strikes happen. When I lived in Ann Arbor, MI we had strikes every other year and school started late.
In NC there are no teacher unions, which I think are illegal. Teachers may suffer the same fate as the air traffic controllers under Reagan, if they go on strike en mass, even if – like the air traffic controllers – their demands are genuine and they seem to have no other recourse.
Chief
@Anoniminous: I tried to convince my daughter to teach at a university while working on a Ph.D. Nope, she is at a public school.
Mnemosyne
@Chief:
boatboy_srq partially answered this, but the reason you had so many smart, talented women working at your small school in Massachusetts is that they were not permitted to enter other professions. They couldn’t become doctors or lawyers or even college professors, so they got their high-powered degrees and then came home again to teach.
Once the professions were unbarred to women and minorities, the quality of teachers went down because the people who once were forced to become teachers because they had no other career choice were now able to go into the professions they wanted. It’s nice that some of them decide to go into teaching anyway, but they do it knowing that it’s a conscious sacrifice of other, more lucrative professions.
I’m guessing that, given your daughter’s undergraduate degree and what’s happened to the newspaper business over the last 10 years, her career change was not entirely altruistic on her part. I’m sure she’ll be very good at the job, but I’m guessing even she would say that it’s a fallback position, not her first choice.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Kay: It’s amazing how the national media likes to tout the Fox News Personality and his tremendous success with his self – imagined clear mandate in Ohio. Oddly, actual people who live in Ohio seem to have a different understanding of the reality on the ground.
I suspect it has much to do with raising taxes at the bottom – real people have felt that effect, and the understandable perception that there’s footsie going on with tax breaks to corporate folks he knows personally or financially…
Bostondreams
@gene108:
You are right. Teacher unions are illegal here, which is another reason teacher salaries have been frozen since 2008.
mai naem(mobile)
Morning ho`s been making noises about kasich being a 2016 pres candidate. I just don’t understand that don’t these people realize that you need an educate d workforce to make money for rich people and to pay taxes to keep even a minimal bare bones government.
OT, I did not know Ted Cruzs real name is Rafael Cruz. We really
As dems need to refer to him by his real name because, you know, it sounds kind of like a certain kind of foreigner.
? Martin
Yeah, I’m pretty close to leaving my job as well. No raises in 5 years, but my retirement/healthcare costs have gone up to 7% of my gross, so I’m 7% down there plus another ~15% (compounded) down due to inflation over that time. I figure adjusted for those things I’m earning about what I did 10 years and two promotions ago.
cvstoner
Explain to me again how it makes sense to have a 24 year old kid running a multi-billion dollar department? Oh yes. Spread as much grift as you can while making government unworkable. Got it.
Got to hand it to the Repubs: they get the grift started early.
Chief
@Mnemosyne: I’ll explain “the guess.” She was the mom of two grown sons when she began her quest from a private university for a bachelors. I don’t think she worked much or even at all in her major. But, after she applied for and was accepted in a masters program, her husband took a job a few states away. She said, “Go. You knew I was accepted before you applied. I’m going to school.” (Or words to that effect. You gotta remember that she was raised in the Navy and I am a US Navy Senior Chief, (retired), so her vocabulary may be somewhat more colorful).
She moved in with her Mom & I for 3 years while she worked on her Masters. It was thoroughly enjoyable having a 40-something daughter in the house.
schrodinger's cat
@Chief: There is a glut of PhDs in almost all fields. Unless you are really interested in a topic and don’t mind taking a vow of poverty while in graduate school, I would suggest looking at other options.
Patricia Kayden
@c u n d gulag: Exactly. I wonder how many of those protesting on Moral Mondays voted for Repubs and are now having second thoughts.
RSA
@Mnemosyne:
Exactly right. And because of those professional boundaries, it turned out that you didn’t have to pay teachers all that much to get very good ones.
On the latter point, I sometimes hear complaints about the cost of education, and not just about administrative bloat. A lot of conservatives seem to believe that those low salaries from a few decades ago ought to persist today, even though they were artifiically low and teaching is highly labor-intensive–you can’t expect wages to go down because of automation, the way that it has happened in other industries.
Patricia Kayden
@mai naem(mobile): No more of a foreign name than Barack Hussein Obama. But I get what you mean. Cruz sounding more foreign would be a problem for many T’Baggers.
Davis X. Machina
@RSA:
Sure you can. The cure for Baumol’s disease is courseware. Some day all your children’s classes will look like this. Hire a couple of ed-techs at $11.00 an hour to hand out detentions and take attendance, and Bob’s your uncle.
Davis X. Machina
@? Martin: We’ll just amp up the volume of the guilt trip we lay on you about the children and all that math will go away…. (That’s how you spot the born teachers…)
? Martin
@Davis X. Machina: Yeah, well, I have my own children to take care of and the chart of my income and their expected college costs are going to wildly different directions.
Davis X. Machina
@? Martin: The second of my two darlings starts her senior year of college a week from tomorrow…
My HELP loan exposure exceeds the balance on my mortgages….both of them. I will be teaching long after I die, or the DoE will know the reason why.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Mumphrey, et al.)
Yeah, but if you’re a 47 year old single mother working two shitty jobs to stay in a shitty three room apartment, well, then, fuck you. You’re on your own.
Betsy
@cleek: And Citizens United.
Poeple, this is a PURPLE state. Citizens United enabled Art Pope, our own knock-off of the Kock Bros., to inject a million dollars and buy the election to turn this purple state red. So don’ be sayin’ “the backward southuners made it happen.” I’m looking at you, Wisconsin .. Ohio …
Betsy
@Mike E: Same here and I work in rural communities across the state … and if old white people in the sticks are fed up, well McCrony and the other GOPers are toast!
Betsy
I should also add that all these elected assholes are from out of state and the worst of the lot, half of them came here from up North. So there’s that.
johnny aquitard
@? Martin:
Left my job with with the public U here a couple years ago. The new gooper guv and lege naturally viewed government employees as takers and mooches and undeserving of pay raises (except for themselves, their cronies, and the police who crack down on protestors, natch). Factor in furloughs and after 3 years of GOP starve-the-beast bullshit I was making 10 percent less than when I had started.
I know of a 24-year-old kid with 18 months professional experience who got hired for senior academic staff position that stated 10+ years experience necessary. I left when I realized 1) the kid was a crony of the operations mgr, who was in turn a crony hire, 2) I was providing on-the-job-training for him for a job that was suspiciously similar to mine, and 3) he was hired in at 70 grand a year. (and yeah that was way more than my salary could ever be for my pay grade, despite having an actual 10+ years professional experience in the field.)
Republicans are very good at multitasking in that they found a way to sabotage public education and loot the public treasury at the same time.
johnny aquitard
@Patricia Kayden:
I think only for some ‘baggers. Most will accept him because they think he’s got the best chance to win. And because they will convince themselves he’s really the American Story epitomized, and that makes it possible to ignore the foreigner cooties (see: Der Ahnold)
Cruz holding dual (or possibly even 3) citizenships won’t be an issue. He just says “Well if I ever had it, which if I did I was unaware of, I will of course renounce it.” Note he won’t even actually have to legally renounce his canadian citizenship and most of them will be mollified.
Even now they tout Cruz announcing he’ll renounce his Canadian citizenship is proof enough he’s eligible over and above Obama because Obama never renounced his Kenyan citizenship.
See how that works with republicans? Dems must prove a negative, and they only have to say they’ll disprove a positive. What they believe, it is so.
They can easily live with the contradictions, the logical fallacies, the hypocrisy and double standards, it’s what they do.
Sour Kraut
@wvng: @wvng,
This sure feels like exactly the same mindset as that notable ideologically-driven disaster – the Coalition Political Authority in Iraq. Yes, because putting young ideologues in charge of things that require real-world experience and deep understanding always works out so well.
This. One of our idiot media’s many great failures was not explaining to the American people the utter disaster that was the CPA, and then failing to link it to the chaos and death in Iraq in general. America’s best Iraq experts were deliberately kept out of country by Cheney’s office because they were considered insufficiently loyal to the Bush Administration.
If you really want to understand how bad it was, I highly recommend “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who saw much of the madness firsthand.
The Marines in Baghdad called the CPA “Can’t Provide Anything.” That pretty much sums it up.
Now it seems the GOP is poised to create a host of mini-CPAs all across America, which I’m sure will be just as successful.
liberal
@The Moar You Know:
I completely agree—but if we’re honest with ourselves, the Rethuglicans have a much easier task, given how much money gets thrown at them.
Though at the end of the day, your point wins—only way to overcome that is with elbow grease.
LIsa Mayhew
Thank you Kay! Your reportage on this ongoing disaster is excellent, props for keeping it upfront!
I am a middle school teacher in county just north of Wake. Over the last 2 years we have lost our art teacher and all other electives that cannot be offered online (keyboarding anyone?). We found out today that the county will not be hiring replacements for the scads of teachers who quit this summer; they will just squeeze more kids into one classroom. So, my original 8 teacher team has been whittled down to 4 this year, which means anywhere from 30-40 kids per class in a school that wasn’t built for such large capacity…. but that doesn’t matter now that the NC Legislature did away with the ban on large class sizes.
School starts next Monday and there are still teachers who don’t know where or what they will teach yet, with the county scrabbling to fill a $2 million dollar deficit. And of course, this year our newer, more punitive, teacher evaluation becomes active and all of our test scores will count for or against us.
To say morale is low is an understatement. Thanks for the positive energy, I will be doing everything I can this year to help throw these bums out … but it’s going to be a long shot I’m afraid ….
LIsa Mayhew
Thank you Kay! Your reportage on this ongoing disaster is excellent, props for keeping it upfront!
I am a middle school teacher in county just north of Wake. Over the last 2 years we have lost our art teacher and all other electives that cannot be offered online (keyboarding anyone?). We found out today that the county will not be hiring replacements for the scads of teachers who quit this summer; they will just squeeze more kids into one classroom. So, my original 8 teacher team has been whittled down to 4 this year, which means anywhere from 30-40 kids per class in a school that wasn’t built for such large capacity…. but that doesn’t matter now that the NC Legislature did away with the ban on large class sizes.
School starts next Monday and there are still teachers who don’t know where or what they will teach yet, with the county scrabbling to fill a $2 million dollar deficit. And of course, this year our newer, more punitive, teacher evaluation becomes active and all of our test scores will count for or against us.
To say morale is low is an understatement. Thanks for the positive energy, I will be doing everything I can this year to help throw these bums out … but it’s going to be a long shot I’m afraid ….
LIsa Mayhew
Thank you Kay! Your reportage on this ongoing disaster is excellent, props for keeping it upfront!
I am a middle school teacher in county just north of Wake. Over the last 2 years we have lost our art teacher and all other electives that cannot be offered online (keyboarding anyone?). We found out today that the county will not be hiring replacements for the scads of teachers who quit this summer; they will just squeeze more kids into one classroom. So, my original 8 teacher team has been whittled down to 4 this year, which means anywhere from 30-40 kids per class in a school that wasn’t built for such large capacity…. but that doesn’t matter now that the NC Legislature did away with the ban on large class sizes.
School starts next Monday and there are still teachers who don’t know where or what they will teach yet, with the county scrabbling to fill a $2 million dollar deficit. And of course, this year our newer, more punitive, teacher evaluation becomes active and all of our test scores will count for or against us.
To say morale is low is an understatement. Thanks for the positive energy, I will be doing everything I can this year to help throw these bums out … but it’s going to be a long shot I’m afraid ….
LIsa Mayhew
Dang sorry for the triple post, I’m using my school laptop LOL
JoyfulA
Gov. Corbett just hired a tea party organizer at $68,000 as liaison between the Department of Revenue and the legislature.
This is wrong on so many levels. We need someone doing such a job? Should someone be doing it who believes in doing away with the Department of Revenue? I thought we were broke.