A Slight of Hand Trick

My daughter broke her hand a couple weeks ago.  We took her to the ER.  We were told the break was so bad they couldn't set it then-she had to see an orthopedic surgeon.  She ended up needing surgery for two broken bones and a torn muscle.

We just got the first of the insurance statements.  It made me sick to my stomach- literally.  For just the ER visit and the pre-operational physical and blood work, the bill to our insurance was $3000.  Plus another $1000 for the anesthesia for the surgery.  But those bills don't even include the consultation with the surgeon, the actual surgery and the follow up care she's needing- those we have yet to see.

Now at the ER they took x-rays and gave her pain meds- and those costs seem within what I would have expected.  But on the bill there's an item marked "surgery," we looked up the code- it's basically the cost for the doctor to take a piece of cloth, wet it so it becomes stiff, place it under her hand and arm, and then wrap everything with an ace bandage to immobilize it- a splint.  That "surgery" which took less than 5 minutes cost over $200.00.  And then prior to surgery she needed a physical with her pediatrician.  She had been getting some bad bloody noses, so her doctor ordered some blood work to make sure her white blood cell count, etc was OK.  One test alone- over $400.00

I am going to be writing Scott Walker, Mary Lazich, Paul Ryan and Ron Johnson about this issue- this slight of hand trick that politicians are playing on us hard working middle class people.

We all know how these magicians- I mean politicians- work. They distract the American people by causing all this commotion over here.  "It's those greedy, lazy public workers who are causing your life to be so bad.  Let's get 'em."  Meanwhile, over there, the other hand holds the real "trick-" our dysfunctional health care system.  "Don't let the people see the reality of what's causing their problems, because then we'd actually have to go back to talking about health care reform."

I am not fooled by their slight of hand tricks- and I know neither are many other Americans.  Yet here we are, watching the same stupid magic trick over and over again and never calling their bluff.

Teacher Pay Losing Ground

I'm getting tired of defending my salary- and the myth that my husband and I, as educators, are somehow so much better off than other middle class working Americans.  We're not.  And when I find myself once again debating this issue with family members who really have no idea exactly what we do as educators, and exactly how much time and energy we put into our careers, I will be directing them to this:

The Economic Policy Institute issue #298 published on March 30th: 
THE TEACHING PENALTY

An update through 2010

"Trends in weekly earnings show that public school teachers in 2010 earned about 12% less than comparable workers, a gap equivalent to that found in our 2004 study. The weekly earnings disadvantage for teachers relative to comparable workers grew by 10.5 percentage points between 1979 and 2010, with most of the erosion (8.2 percentage points) occurring between 1996 and 2001. This increase in wage disparity for teachers is particularly troublesome because the 1990s recovery was one of the few periods in recent decades of strong overall wage growth for workers."

And how do benefits fit in?

"We found that the average weekly pay of teachers in 2003 was nearly 14% below that of workers with similar education and work experience, a gap only minimally offset by the better nonwage benefits in teaching." 

Conclusion?

"If the policy goal is to improve the quality of the entire teaching workforce, then raising the level of teacher compensation is critical to recruiting and retaining higher quality teachers. Policies that solely focus on changing the composition of current compensation (e.g., merit or pay-for-performance schemes) without actually increasing compensation levels are unlikely to be effective. Simply put, improving overall teacher quality requires correcting the teacher compensation disadvantage in the labor market."E1

Back for More Fight

I'm back- after a hectic end of the year and some family issues- and ready to fight.

Good Test Scores = Good Teachers?

Yesterday JS Online ran a story about Senate Bill 95, saying it would allow "School boards across Wisconsin could use teacher evaluations - which rely in part on the results of students' standardized state test scores - as part of the reason for dismissing and disciplining educators, according to legislation considered by the Assembly and Senate education committees Monday."

This is similar to legislation going on around the country, the "value-added modeling" approach.

Like New York- where test scores will account for 40% of teacher's evaluations

And Georgia, where 50% of the evaluations are based on student test scores

And New Jersey

And Massachusetts

But do good test scores = good teachers?  Do good teachers = good test scores?  Is it really that simple of an equation- so simple that teachers' should be evaluated based on how well their students do on a test?

According to an article by the Economic Policy Institute, there are problems with using test scores to evaluate teachers.  "A review of the technical evidence leads us to conclude that, although standardized test scores of students are one piece of information for school leaders to use to make judgments about teacher effectiveness, such scores should be only a part of an overall comprehensive evaluation. Some states are now considering plans that would give as much as 50% of the weight in teacher evaluation and compensation decisions to scores on existing tests of basic skills in math and reading. Based on the evidence, we consider this unwise."

I would encourage everyone to read the entire study, which can be found here.  Here's one excerpt:

"For a variety of reasons, analyses of VAM results have led researchers to doubt whether the methodology can accurately identify more and less effective teachers. VAM estimates have proven to be unstable across statistical models, years, and classes that teachers teach. One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20% of effectiveness in the first year, fewer than a third were in that top group the next year, and another third moved all the way down to the bottom 40%. Another found that teachers’ effectiveness ratings in one year could only predict from 4% to 16% of the variation in such ratings in the following year. Thus, a teacher who appears to be very ineffective in one year might have a dramatically different result the following year. The same dramatic fluctuations were found for teachers ranked at the bottom in the first year of analysis. This runs counter to most people’s notions that the true quality of a teacher is likely to change very little over time and raises questions about whether what is measured is largely a “teacher effect” or the effect of a wide variety of other factors."

And another:

"Adopting an invalid teacher evaluation system and tying it to rewards and sanctions is likely to lead to inaccurate personnel decisions and to demoralize teachers, causing talented teachers to avoid high-needs students and schools, or to leave the profession entirely, and discouraging potentially effective teachers from entering it. Legislatures should not mandate a test-based approach to teacher evaluation that is unproven and likely to harm not only teachers, but also the children they instruct."

Roger Tilles, a member of the New York State Board of Regents, recently made this position statement.  In it, he said, "If these value-added techniques were applied to other professions as they are being applied to teachers, it would mean that dentists be would evaluated not on their skills but only on how many cavities a dentist’s patients gets in a year or with a doctor on how many times his patients get sick in a year. Similarly, police are not evaluated on the number of crimes committed on their beat, nor fire personnel on number of fires in their jurisdiction. We would all acknowledge that such rating systems are at best incomplete."

And another study by RAND:  "Finally, our analysis and simulations demonstrate that VAM- based rankings of teachers are highly unstable, and that only large dif- ferences in estimated impact are likely to be detectable given the effects of sampling error and other sources of uncertainty. Interpretations of differences among teachers based on VAM estimates should be made with extreme caution."

Millions and Millions of Dollars

There's been some interesting talk about Wisconsin millionaires in the news.   

Here's some information from back in March.

And a blog post today from Will Blog for Food.

And yesterday this article came out: Wisconsin Millionaires Expected to Double in 10 Years.  Basically the article says that some millionaires lost that status during the recession and they are expected to get that status back as the economy continues to recover.  But this in itself is important to me and many other middle class Americans who are going to see their salaries shrink.  The article quotes Patrick Mehigan from Deloitte's tax branch in Milwaukee. 

“But for those that say that we're losing millionaires in Wisconsin because of whatever possible policy, I think this study would at least suggest that's not the case."

You know who "those" are, don't you?  Why our own Governor Walker and his far right Republican Congress!  And every other Republican politician in this country.

Republicans are always saying that taxing the rich will cause them to leave a state for another one with lower taxes.  But is that really true?  Not according to this post.  

"Earlier this month, the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts (PERI) released a study by Jeffrey Thompson that concluded that the availability of jobs, rather than relative levels of taxation, is the leading factor that causes people to move from one state to another. It also found 'that the impact of taxes on cross-state migration is very weak.'”

And here's some further information from the Wisconsin Budget Project.  It quoted:

"Evidence from surveys of migrating households, the existing economic literature, and the new analysis in this paper all suggest that taxes do not play any notable role in causing people to leave a state. The most important factors in influencing household migration are economic and family-related reasons. If anything, higher state income taxes are shown to decrease the numbers of people leaving a state. Taxes do appear to influence the choice of which state to live in once a person has decided to move, but the impact is modest. If states use the revenues from higher taxes to create jobs, reduce unemployment, and reduce property crime, the small negative impacts from taxes can be easily overcome.”

So see?  You don't have to harbor that sympathy for the rich anymore.  They will do just fine, no matter what state they live in and what taxes they pay.

Unions: All for One and One for All

You may have seen these statistics already.  They hit home the reality of what's happening to our middle class in America.  On this blog, Karla Walter, Senior Policy Analyst and David Madland, Director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, wrote:

"The middle class is markedly stronger when workers join together in unions.  The power of unions to create prosperity for working families is well recognized: Organized labor is one of the few voices for the economic interests of the middle class in our government. Unions were key to creating and protecting the social safety net."


Not only are middle class wages decreasing, but as I've demonstrated in previous posts, wages of the rich continue to increase, creating a wider and wider income gap in our country.


The Center for American Progress Action Fund published this article.  It said, 


"The essence of what labor unions do—give workers a stronger voice so that they can get a fair share of the economic growth they help create—is and has always been important to making the economy work for all Americans. And unions only become more important as the economy worsens."


And they provided this interactive map to see what's happening in your state.


Yet with all this data showing how important unions are to all middle class workers, here was the headline from JS online yesterday:  
Unions might drop state status

And here's what it said,

"If Gov. Scott Walker's union bargaining measure becomes law and forces do-or-die recertification votes for public employee unions, some large public unions might simply skip the votes and drop their official status with the state."


I am sad today.

Here's where we are headed middle class, right down to the bottom of the barrel...without a voice.  

Fight on!

Super PACs

Back in this post, I talked about the Citizens United ruling.

Russ Feingold has started a campaign to fight back- Progressives United.  I am proud to be a member of this group.

On April 28th Russ appeared on the Colbert Nation.  Besides providing some comic relief, it also does a great job of explaining the Super PAC.

Sign the pledge against the Super PACs here.