Today we live in a different country than we did even 10 days ago. Back then we were partaken with partisanship and infected with invectiveness. Now we watch with awe as the sitting president and the president-elect prepare for yet another peaceful, democratic transition of power. We strain to get a glimpse of the new First Family. We wonder where the girls will go to school. It's as if the mass catharsis of last Tuesday night's river of choked-up tears washed away all of the ugliness of the long election season.
So it is in that spirit that I respond to Leo Casey's post from a fortnight ago, when he accused me of taking up the "politics of resentment and fear" by pursuing "???divide and conquer' strategies designed to set working people against each other."
With pages right out of a Depression era playbook, he proclaims that public school teachers and retirees - not Wall Street financiers and the corporate benefactors of his rightwing political friends - enjoy unearned and undeserved privilege. Our sinecures? Nothing more than our health care insurance and our pensions. Father Coughlin and Huey Long meet the 21st century prophet of Fordham, Mike Petrilli.
Wow. I will assume that Mr. Casey got caught up in the pre-election madness and might now cringe at those words. (It's already happened to me in my short time as a blogger, writing with a wave of emotion that I later regret.)
Because how can anyone possibly argue that it's "divisive" to wonder whether we can afford the retirement promises made to America's public school teachers? Do folks across the political spectrum who worry about the solvency of Social Security also partake in the "politics of resentment and fear"? Of course not.
Here's what I wrote:
Within ten or fifteen years we're going to see the era of ever-increasing education budgets come to an end, as revenue is diverted to entitlements and more and more instructional funds are diverted to teachers' pensions and retiree health costs.
And:
Won't the teachers unions throw their weight around to ensure that education budgets don't feel the pinch? After all, they always say that they are working on behalf of "the kids." But they have their own generational warfare problem, because their most important and powerful constituencies are retired teachers and those nearing retirement age. Which is why we hear the NEA and AFT calling for tax increases rather than pushing for education spending over Medicare or Social Security. If they really were "for the kids," I suspect their position would be quite different.
Look, here are the facts. People are living longer, which is great. But it means that the ratio of retirees to workers is growing, both in our society as a whole and within the public education system. The pension promises that have been made to teachers (and to everyone under Social Security) were based on old assumptions about Americans' longevity. So eventually we're going to have to face some choices: either reduce retirement benefits, delay them, or raise taxes on workers to cover the costs. For education, that means either expecting teachers to stay in the classroom longer, to receive smaller (or 401(k) style) pensions, or to divert more resources from the rest of the k-12 budget in order to cover retiree costs. (Actually, there's a fourth option, which is to boost school spending dramatically to cover retirements without cutting into instructional expenses. But I suspect that will be challenging in an age when Social Security and Medicare costs eat up even more of the public dollar.)
If there are other solutions to the impending entitlement crisis that I'm not aware of it, I'm all ears, Mr. Casey. Seriously. I don't revel in the idea that our schools are going to have less to spend on teacher salaries or classroom materials and all of the rest. And I would love for everyone, including, even especially, teachers to have a secure and dignified retirement. I'm just not sure how we're going to pay for it all. If you do, please share. But keep the namecalling out of it, if you would. That's so November 3rd, and we live in a November 5th world.
