Government Fat Cats Bulk Up on Taxpayer Dollars

Many taxpayers have seen little economic gain in recent years but the salaries of government education bureaucrats “have exploded” as the Sacramento Bee reports. Sarah Koligian of the Folsom Cordova Unified School District gets $240,000 and Christopher Hoffman of Elk Grove Unified bags $330,951, more than the $324,029 of Sacramento State University boss Robert Nelson. Next year it will balloon to$342,232,and the whopper salaries come with benefits such as car allowances, travel pay and such.

School board bosses try to make the case that the superintendents are like the CEOs of major corporations and should be compensated accordingly. The comparison might be valid if Costco got customers’ money even if they decided to shop at Walmart. A government bureaucracy with captive clients and guaranteed state funding is not equal to a corporation in any way. The huge salaries of bureaucrats, taxpayers should note, are not tied to any gains in student achievement, reductions in truancy, or savings in administrative costs. Instead, as we have noted, the huge salaries and outlandish raises are based on comparisons with other school districts. So no wonder the state sometimes fails to release salary information, even when requested to do so.

Government monopoly education is a collective farm of ignorance, mediocrity and failure. In this system, taxpayer dollars must trickle down through multiple layers of bureaucratic sediment. They money keeps coming, regardless of results and the biggest beneficiaries are superintendents, essentially bagmen and public relations specialists. Twin Rivers Unified boss Steve Martinez bagged raises of $25,000 in 2014 and $20,000 in 2015. That helped boost his 2013 salary by 43 percent to the current level of $308,112, and this year the district increased his retirement contribution from $7,500 to $21,000. Taxpayers remember, it’s all for the children.

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Teachers With Guns

What should be done about school shootings? After the horrible shooting in Parkland, Florida, President Trump suggested that some teachers carry guns. "We need to let people know, you come in to our schools -- you're gonna be dead."

Anti-gun activists were horrified. But they probably didn't know that many teachers have brought guns to work with them for years.

Some teachers at the Keene Independent School District in Texas carry concealed weapons at school. "We know our staff and our teachers are gonna go" defend students, Texas' Keene Independent School District superintendent Ricky Stephens told me for this week's online video. "Do we want them to go with a pencil or go with a pistol?"

Stephens acknowledges that an attacker might have heavier weaponry than his teachers' handguns. "It's not much, but it's better than nothing," he argues. "If you go there with nothing, you have no chance of stopping anything."

His teachers saw how in Florida the "school resource officer" simply waited outside during February's school shooting.

"It made me mad," a teacher in Stephens' district told us. She's glad she carries her gun. "We have to have a fighting chance if something should happen." For my video, superintendent Stephens asked us to obscure her identity. He doesn't want potential attackers to know which teachers are armed.

Opponents of armed teachers fear that guns will create new dangers. But even though teachers carry at hundreds of schools, I could find only one instance where one of those guns hurt a student. A California teacher accidentally discharged his weapon at the ceiling. A student was cut by falling debris. That's it. One minor injury.

By contrast, armed school staffers have stopped school shootings. In Pearl, Mississippi, an assistant principal held a boy who killed two classmates at gunpoint until police arrived.

No one knows how often armed teachers deter shootings. The media can't cover crimes that are never attempted.

Of course, the media distort proposals to allow teachers to carry. One commentator shouted, "Teachers should not be required to protect!"

But no teacher is required to carry. It's voluntary. Those who want to can bring their guns to school.

On MSNBC, pundits criticized President Trump for advocating "arming" teachers, as if he'd proposed a federal program. He didn't. He just talked about "armed educators." Since lots of teachers already carry guns, all a school has to do is allow some to bring their weapons to work.

The Keene district, however, does go further. "The school purchases the gun, and we register them to (some of) our teachers," says Stephens. Those teachers get 80 hours of firearms training and are paid an extra $50/month.

I gave Stephens grief about creating a "new government program." Why not just let teachers bring their own guns to school? Stephens explained that he wants teachers trained on the same gun "so if a gun is dropped, another teacher will know how to use it."

I pushed back again. "Why create a program at all?" There's no epidemic of school shootings. In fact, non-gang, non-suicide shootings have declined over the past 25 years. It's media hysteria that makes it seem like there's an increase.

I said to Stephens, "School shootings are much less of a threat to students than driving, suicide, drowning, even suffocating!"

"Exactly right," he replied. "But we do train our kids in school how to not suffocate and how not to drown. ... One shooting is more than we would want."

Certainly Stephens' armed teacher program is cheaper than what my town does. New York City spends millions of dollars stationing police officers in schools. Here, and in most blue states, suggesting that teachers be allowed to bring weapons to school horrifies people.

"They don't understand," says Stephens, "a responsible trained teacher with a firearm is better than having a teacher with nothing."

It's good that America has 50 states and many school districts. That allows for different experiments. Politicians in New York City hire extra police officers, but in Texas, the staff at the Keene school district can serve and protect.

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Educational Fraud Continues

Walter E. Williams

Earlier this month, the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka The Nation's Report Card, was released. It's not a pretty story. Only 37 percent of 12th-graders tested proficient or better in reading, and only 25 percent did so in math. Among black students, only 17 percent tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7 percent reached at least a proficient level in math.

The atrocious NAEP performance is only a fraction of the bad news. Nationally, our high school graduation rate is over 80 percent. That means high school diplomas, which attest that these students can read and compute at a 12th-grade level, are conferred when 63 percent are not proficient in reading and 75 percent are not proficient in math. For blacks, the news is worse. Roughly 75 percent of black students received high school diplomas attesting that they could read and compute at the 12th-grade level.

However, 83 percent could not read at that level, and 93 percent could not do math at that level. It's grossly dishonest for the education establishment and politicians to boast about unprecedented graduation rates when the high school diplomas, for the most part, do not represent academic achievement. At best, they certify attendance.

Fraudulent high school diplomas aren't the worst part of the fraud. Some of the greatest fraud occurs at the higher education levels -- colleges and universities. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 70 percent of white high school graduates in 2016 enrolled in college, and 58 percent of black high school graduates enrolled in college.

Here are my questions to you: If only 37 percent of white high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 70 percent of them? And if roughly 17 percent of black high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 58 percent of them?

It's inconceivable that college administrators are unaware that they are admitting students who are ill-prepared and cannot perform at the college level. Colleges cope with ill-prepared students in several ways. They provide remedial courses. One study suggests that more than two-thirds of community college students take at least one remedial course, as do 40 percent of four-year college students. College professors dumb down their courses so that ill-prepared students can get passing grades. Colleges also set up majors with little analytical demands so as to accommodate students with analytical deficits. Such majors often include the term "studies," such as ethnic studies, cultural studies, gender studies and American studies. The major for the most ill-prepared students, sadly enough, is education. When students' SAT scores are ranked by intended major, education majors place 26th on a list of 38.

The bottom line is that colleges are admitting youngsters who have not mastered what used to be considered a ninth-grade level of proficiency in reading, writing and arithmetic. Very often, when they graduate from college, they still can't master even a 12th-grade level of academic proficiency.

The problem is worse in college sports. During a recent University of North Carolina scandal, a learning specialist hired to help athletes found that during the period from 2004 to 2012, 60 percent of the 183 members of the football and basketball teams read between fourth- and eighth-grade levels. About 10 percent read below a third-grade level. Keep in mind that all of these athletes both graduated from high school and were admitted to college.

How necessary is college anyway? One estimate is that 1 in 3 college graduates have a job historically performed by those with a high school diploma. According to Richard Vedder, distinguished emeritus professor of economics at Ohio University and the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, in 2012 there were 115,000 janitors, 16,000 parking lot attendants, 83,000 bartenders and about 35,000 taxi drivers with a bachelor's degree.

I'm not sure about what can be done about education. But the first step toward any solution is for the American people to be aware of academic fraud at every level of education.

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