Crybaby teachers get their pay raises

OPINION:

Here’s a truth the left doesn’t want to hear — and the right doesn’t want to touch: Teachers, as a group, as a collective, as a unionized body, are oftentimes a bunch of crybabies.

The breaking news event that brings on this bit of blunt appraisal is that West Virginia lawmakers just announced they would in fact deliver the five percent pay raise that striking teachers have been demanding for days.

But calling out teachers for their crybaby tendencies is not so much a knee-jerk reaction to this West Virginia story as it is a reflection on years of covering teachers as a journalist, and arriving at that conclusion after reading and writing story after story of their similar crybaby nature. West Virginia is just the reminder of these times.

Fact is, when teachers don’t get their way, they frequently cry — and they do so by pretending as if their crying were justified because their whole lives are wrapped in a supposed “for the children” bow.

It’s a line of argument — and this is from first-hand experience, covering local budget hearings, local School Board meetings and local Board of Supervisors meetings, ad nauseam — that basically goes like this: We have the most important job in the world, so we should be paid much, much more.

This was the general budget demand every year in Prince William County, Virginia, at least for the time when I covered the School Board and local government. Like clockwork, teachers would file before the supervisors to show — mostly, demand — why they needed more money, why they needed more pay, why they couldn’t perform their jobs without higher salaries. The best were the occasions when the then-School Board head would announce his district was simply seeking to become a “World Class” education system, while suggesting that goal was being stymied by a third world budget — and all that, against a backdrop, no less, of computerized classrooms, hefty administration salaries and a superintendent’s dream-come-true benefits’ package that beat, in terms of dollars and cents, what the president of the United States earns in take-home pay.

I know all this because I used to “Freedom of Information Act” (or Sunshine Law, as FOIA was called in Virginia) the heck out of the schools to see what taxpayers were paying, so as to let taxpayers gauge the merit of the crying teachers’ salary hike requests. Turns out, starting salary for the teachers in Prince William — for teachers right out of college, no experience, only a Bachelor’s — was around $50,000 a year. That was a decade or so ago. It’s more now. Not a bad deal for a 20-something, fresh out of school, particularly when you add in the weeks of summer vacation each year. Right?

Still, teachers back then, fueled no doubt by their union representatives — which in Virginia couldn’t officially be called union representatives, because of the at-will employment status of the state — would cry about the inability of such salaries to allow them to live in the cushy in-county homes they wanted, and then explain to supervisors they deserved to earn more because they were essential personnel. They would point to school districts in more expensive areas, toward Washington, D.C., and wealthy Fairfax, to show how other teachers were being paid, and how they ought to receive these same amounts in their paychecks. Somewhere along this line of budgetary discussions would come the old “we’re for the children” approach, combined with the “we’re trying to provide a world class education” argument — as if massive salaries were the natural precursors to both.

As if a local school district really had to compete on a global scale.

But even with all that — this isn’t actually what makes teachers crybabies. After all, who doesn’t want more pay? But this is — this is what makes ’em Wendy Whiners: After posting the FOIA’d salary information online, for all the county residents to see, the School Board president at the time actually had the nerve to complain on the local cable television, for all the community to hear, that I personally was irresponsible and unprofessional for publishing teacher salary information. As if a journalist ought to know better than to inform the reader — the taxpayer. Anyhow, it was under his leadership, the school tried to change state law to water Virginia’s Sunshine Laws so that requesting agencies and entities couldn’t receive the names of employees, along with their salaries. The effort was unsuccessful, but think about that for a moment.

What the effort meant was that these school officials wanted a special exemption that recognized teachers as a different category of government workers — a class above and beyond the scrutiny of the peon, petty taxpayer. Above accountability, in other words.

Well, America just don’t work that way.

And demanding such special treatment is what makes teachers, collectively, in a group, as a union-fueled entity, a bunch of cry babies. It’s one thing to petition for more money; it’s one thing even to demand more money, based on arguments that show why more is warranted.

It’s another to demand and expect more pay just because others make more. And then it’s quite another to fret and whine when someone of First Amendment standing uses the First Amendment to let the people decide whether the calls for money money are justified. Power to the people, right?

West Virginia teachers have been striking since February 22 because lawmakers said they couldn’t afford the full five percent pay raise they demanded. Republicans in the Senate did pass through a four percent raise — but apparently, it wasn’t enough for uncompromising teachers, and they refused to go back to class. For the children, anyone?

Regardless, the governor then met with teachers and union leaders, and ultimately, lawmakers dug up the other one percent.

Now teachers are happy. Now they’re going back to school.

But here’s at least one voice that doesn’t automatically believe all teachers are always worthy of their raises. Sometimes — maybe not always, but definitely sometimes — teachers are just a bunch of crybabies who perhaps ought to have chosen a different career. Apologies to the good ones out there — and there are plenty, two of whom happened to be my own parents. But this just had to be said. Not all teachers are heroes or saints. Some are just in it for what they thought was going to be an easy job with lots of vacation times.

Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com, or on Twitter, @ckchumley.