Where Should Education Dollars Go?

Teachers are essential to modern society. Santa Barbara teachers most certainly deserve to be paid fairly for their work.

Santa Barbara Unified School District (SBUSD) is currently involved in negotiations with the Santa Barbara Teacher’s Association (SBTA). The conflict reached a point where teachers were participating in a work slowdown, not participating in activities that were not required by their contract. School kids got involved in the debate, with thousands walking out to back their teachers.

This raises several issues. What is a fair wage for teaching in Santa Barbara? Is it right to potentially harm the education of kids to increase adult pay? And is it proper to involve kids in that debate?

We all want to pay teachers well, but financial reality is every dollar put into a paycheck is a dollar that can’t be used to pay support staff, buy new instructional materials, run buses, provide programs for underserved kids, or fund any number of other vital programs and services.

When weighing financial priorities, we’ve got to put “improving education” first. The recent release of 2023 Smarter Balanced testing shows barely 50 percent of SBUSD kids proficient in English and less than 40 percent proficient in math. Every spending decision the district makes has to be considered through a lens of what that does to improve education.

The Economic Policy Institute’s annual study says a fair wage is that which provides “teachers with compensation commensurate with that of other similarly educated and experienced professionals.” Fortunately the U.S. Census Bureau provides data we can use to find out what “similarly educated” residents of Santa Barbara County make and publishes that data by educational attainment.

The California Department of Education publishes data on education levels by district. The latest data available shows 41.5 percent of SBUSD teachers have a bachelor’s degree and 58.5 percent have more advanced degrees.

Weighting the Census Bureau numbers accordingly (and adding to accommodate a teacher’s additional year of training) we see the median county resident with education comparable to a SBUSD teacher makes $87,274.

To look at actual teacher pay the best data source is SBUSD’s own payroll records. Fortunately we have those, obtained using a legal Public Records Act request and published on the Transparent California website.

This data shows the median total pay of SBUSD teachers in 2022 was $93,900. But that doesn’t give us a complete picture of how a teacher’s pay compares to a private worker because it leaves out the contributions made to the teacher’s retirement.

According to Vanguard the average company contributes 4 percent of the employee’s salary to a 401K retirement account. Adding a 6.2 percent normal Social Security contribution gets us to a total contribution of 10.2 percent of pay.

In contrast, SBUSD teachers will have 29.93 percent of their salary contributed to their retirement this year. That’s 19.73 percent more contributed toward retirement than private workers are given. If a private worker got that much and put it into their 401K, over a 30-year career they would likely end up with more than $3 million. A private worker wanting to fund their own retirement equally would need to make about $110,000/year to match the take-home of an SBUSD teacher.

The S.B. Teacher’s Association contract specifies teachers arrive 30 minutes prior the start of school and stay after a reasonable amount of time to take care of student needs. With the school day starting at 8:30 a.m. and ending about 3 p.m. and assuming a 30-minute lunch period, the total contracted work hours are 6.5 hours per day.

Private industry standard workday is eight hours, which means teachers have 1.5 hours a day extra before they reach what a private employee just considers “a normal day.” Is asking them to help kids with that time “unpaid work”?

The SBTA proposal asks for a 15 percent raise next year and 8 percent the following. If we apply this to the current median of $93,900, in two years a private worker will have to make $134,000 to match the income of an SBUSD teacher.

Past history in California schools have clearly demonstrated increasing pay does nothing to improve education. Shouldn’t the district be looking at what can be done with our education dollars that would help education rather than helping adults?

Pandemic-related reductions in education time created huge learning loss. The work “slowdown” has the potential to do the same. When did it become acceptable to do damage to our kids for personal financial gain?

Do the kids who walking out know the details of a teacher’s current compensation and work schedule? They should ask their parents how that compares to theirs.

The key question is this: Do we spend education dollars increasing the size of paychecks, or improving education?

Joe Biden says, “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.” Santa Barbara parents know what they value, these are just facts to help in that decision. Parents need to decide whether higher pay for adults is more valuable to them than improving the education of their kids.

Todd Maddison is the Director of Research for Transparent California, a founding member of the Parent Association advocacy group, and a longtime activist in improving K-12 education.