Protesting Milwaukee Teachers Earn Triple the City’s Per Capita Income

posted at 10:46 am on February 20, 2011 by Howard Portnoy

The way Chris Wragge of the CBS Early Show describes the situation—“schools [in Wisconsin] have been closed”—you’d think a blizzard had descended on the region. In point of fact, the closures are the result of teachers walking off the job to protest Governor Scott Walker’s demand that public workers do their part to help balance the budget.

In order to help the state overcome a $3.6 billion budget shortfall, teachers, like other unionized employees, are being asked to cover a portion of their pension and their health care costs. And they don’t like it. Stephen Stromberg, writing in the Washington Post, provides a compilation of some of the signs protesters are carrying outside the Capitol in Madison:

Care about educators like they care for your child

RAPE Is Never ‘a Good Choice’! (Raping public employees is not the way to balance the budget)

And, lest there be any doubt about which side of the ideological divide the protesters come down on:

Why Do Republicans Hate People?

In defense of his cost-cutting plan, Walker said on the Early Show:

[I]t is a modest request of our employees…. [W]hat we’re asking for is still a lot less than what most of our average taxpayers are paying [for health and pension benefits].

Of course it could be argued that one man’s “modest” is another’s “massacre.” Will these benefit cuts create a hardship for Wisconsin teachers?

Not, it would seem, if they work in the state’s largest city, Milwaukee. The video below was compiled by the MacIver Institute for Public Policy, a Wisconsin-based think tank. According to Deb Wegner, Manager of Financial Planning for the Milwaukee Public School System, who appears early in the video, the average salary for an MPS teacher is $56,500. This amount, a voiceover reveals, is:

more than double the city’s average salary. More than the city’s median income. The U.S. Census Bureau reports the per capital income in Milwaukee from 2006 to 2008 was just over $19,000. Median family income was almost $43,000.

Later in the video, Wegner notes that

the cost of a teacher, plus benefits, will be $100,005 in fiscal ’11….

One might argue that Milwaukee’s nearly 7,000 teachers and educational assistants are entitled to their generous salary/benefit packages. After all, as one of the above-described protest signs implies, “educators” in Wisconsin “care for your child.”

But a second video from the MacIver Institute suggests teachers in Milwaukee are doing a less than stellar job with their young charges. Of students in grade 10, only 41% are proficient or advanced in reading, and 28% are proficient or advanced in math.

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