Budget: Teachers 'mocked,' wealthy go free
Students participate in class at an East Rockaway school. Credit: Kathy Kmonicek
Although surely well-intentioned, the authors of "Budget cuts at heart of poor schools" [Opinion, March 23] are long on emotion but short on facts. It has been proven that more spending does not produce better educated students.
Since 1970, inflation-adjusted federal education spending has tripled, while achievement has remained stagnant. Seemingly, the only result of the tremendous increase in spending on education in the last 40 years is a bigger bureaucracy and more public school employees.
New York spends roughly $18,000 per pupil on education -- Long Island's average is higher -- while the national average is roughly $10,000. New York is facing a projected shortfall of more than $2 billion in 2012. School aid and Medicaid are the two largest single items in the state budget. It would be impossible to bring fiscal sanity back to New York without reining in spending on education.
Margaret Read Federico
I am growing increasingly disheartened at Newsday's apparent mocking of the tragic situation many of our Long Island teachers are confronting. I am referring to the chalkboard graphic and front-page headline, "Hard Times + High Taxes = Lower Raises" [News, March 27]. It is so easy to use teacher salaries as a scapegoat.
Lately, I feel like a character from Arthur Miller's "The Crucible." Indeed, there is a witch hunt going on. I will not waste time and energy justifying my salary to anyone who is not a teacher; you will simply take the opportunity to remind me that I only work 180 days a year (albeit, we do not get paid for the summer and struggle to make it until September), work only seven hours a day, etc. I've heard it all before and am tired of it.
I would just ask you to seriously ponder what message you are sending to your children by informing them that their teachers, who also wear the "hats" of therapists, surrogate parents, nurses, college advisers, tutors, interventionists and mediators are overpaid? Think about the impact that teacher bashing will have upon your child's performance in the classroom. This is a catastrophe in the making.
Jennifer Motl
Editor's note: The writer is a teacher at Bay Shore High School.
Somehow your headline makes it seem as if teachers are being shortchanged by the budget crisis. Far from it. For years, despite ever-increasing tax rates, they insist on their raises while ignoring the fact that those paying the taxes have, in many cases, not seen a raise for years. Moreover, they have refused to delay their raises for a couple of years, even to save the jobs of their fellow teachers. What kind of arrogant selfishness is this?
For far too long the public has bought into the mantra, "it is for the children." Nonsense, as the teachers' actions have demonstrated. They act for themselves and themselves alone.
It is time that the districts stand up to the ongoing blackmail and categorically state, enough is enough. Not only can we afford no more, it is time that you, the teachers, start contributing to your own benefits.
Richard M. Frauenglass
Teachers are doing their part to share the sacrifice while the rich get richer. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonprofit research organization, those New Yorkers who earn $56,000 to $95,000 a year pay 11 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while those who earn more than $633,000 pay only 8.4 percent, even with the "millionaire's" tax surcharge.
New York's top personal income tax rate was cut by more than 50 percent after 1976, before it was raised modestly in 2003 and 2009. The affluent have benefited greatly for three decades, even as their windfall has compounded to contribute significantly to the state budget crisis.
Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Rockville Centre) loves to criticize Democrats, but he and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo are on the same page when it comes to their mutual aversion to taxing the rich. And their justifications are consistent as well. The wealthy, so offended by taxes the story line goes, are leaving New York in droves.
The statistics counter their argument. According to the Fiscal Policy Institute, another nonprofit research organization, after a surcharge was placed on New York's top personal income tax, the number of filers in the top bracket increased by nearly 80 percent between 2003 and 2008.
Guy Jacob
Out East with Doug Geed: Wine harvests, a fish market, baked treats and poinsettias NewsdayTV's Doug Geed visits two wineries and a fish market, and then it's time for holiday cheer, with a visit to a bakery and poinsettia greenhouses.
