Pennsylvania continues to lead the nation in teacher strikes even though Pennsylvania teachers are among the highest paid in the U.S.

Trying to make sense of this contradiction is one of the goals of Stop Teacher Strikes Inc., the Pennsylvania-based advocacy group working to prevent teacher strikes. (It's illegal in the majority of states for teachers to strike.)

In order to have a fair debate about teacher compensation, you have to start with the facts. How much do Pennsylvania teachers earn?

Stop Teacher Strikes Inc. has a link at its Web site to a database that lists 195,000 Pennsylvania public school employee names and salaries.

The searchable statewide database, which includes teachers and administrators, is accessible via www.stopteacherstrikes.org

The database originated at the Asbury Park Press Web site http://php.app.com/PAteachers/search.php

Another good source of information about public education in Pennsylvania is School Board Transparency.

From a recent press release issued by Simon Campbell, president of StopTeacherStrikes Inc.:

"With the most recent salary data (2007-2008) now released by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the Asbury Park Press has once again done an outstanding job at bringing searchable public information to millions of Pennsylvania residents. Any Pennsylvania public school student can now research the salary of his or her teacher to gain an understanding of Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know-Law, and appreciate the difference between public sector and private sector employees. Taxpayers can also review how much money all school employees make, to see how public money is being allocated. The publishing of this data may also help taxpayers understand why some public servants feel the need to eject children from their classrooms by going on strike for higher compensation.

Also profiled on the new "Pension Scheme" Web page of www.stopteacherstrikes.org is the manner in which Pennsylvania State Education Association President (PSEA) union president James Testerman is able to collect a teacher's salary for not being a teacher; thereby enabling him to obtain a taxpayer-guaranteed public employee pension plan for the nine years and counting he has spent working for a private organization. This scheme is also being used by other teacher union officials.

With the Pennsylvania school employee retirement fund in crisis and facing a massive shortfall in 2012-2013, the message is clear. If you don't actually work as a public employee, yet you want a defined-benefit public employee pension plan that taxpayers will bail out, just find a way to become a union boss."

StopTeacherStrikes Inc., the Pennsylvania-based advocacy group working to prevent teacher strikes, has posted a link at its Web site to a database that lists 195,000 Pennsylvania school employee names and salaries. The searchable statewide database, which includes teachers and administrators, is accessible via the StopTeacherStrikes home page www.stopteacherstrikes.org and at the Asbury Park Press Web site http://php.app.com/PAteachers/search.php

From Simon Campbell, president of StopTeacherStrikes Inc.:

"With the most recent salary data (2007-2008) now released by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the Asbury Park Press has once again done an outstanding job at bringing searchable public information to millions of Pennsylvania residents. Any Pennsylvania public school student can now research the salary of his or her teacher to gain an understanding of Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know-Law, and appreciate the difference between public sector and private sector employees. Taxpayers can also review how much money all school employees make, to see how public money is being allocated. The publishing of this data may also help taxpayers understand why some public servants feel the need to eject children from their classrooms by going on strike for higher compensation.

Also profiled on the new "Pension Scheme" Web page of www.stopteacherstrikes.org is the manner in which Pennsylvania State Education Association President (PSEA) union president James Testerman is able to collect a teacher's salary for not being a teacher; thereby enabling him to obtain a taxpayer-guaranteed public employee pension plan for the nine years and counting he has spent working for a private organization. This scheme is also being used by other teacher union officials.

With the Pennsylvania school employee retirement fund in crisis and facing a massive shortfall in 2012-2013, the message is clear. If you don't actually work as a public employee, yet you want a defined-benefit public employee pension plan that taxpayers will bail out, just find a way to become a union boss."

I received a flier over the weekend from four candidates running as a team for my local school board. I looked over the four-page flier and could not find a single reference to keeping property taxes from going up. Isn't that what we elect people to do on school boards?

School administrators have their own lobbying association in Harrisburg and typically do not live in the district so they don't care how high taxes go up each year. The teachers have the most powerful union in the state watching their back.

Who do the taxpayers have? Isn't the elected school board suppose to represent the interests of the beleaguered property owners who have seen their taxes go up 40 percent since Gov. Ed Rendell signed the casino gambling bill way back in 2004 with a promise that all Pennsylvania residents would see substantial property tax reduction?

If they're not looking out for the taxpayers of the district, what do the four candidates stand for?

According to their campaign literature, their platform consists of four items:

1) Responsive Budgeting (Translation: Rubber-stamp everything the administration wants to spend money on.)

2) Quality Education (Translation: Give the teachers' union everything it wants during contract negotiations.)

3) Improving the Quality of life for All Citizens -- Young and Old (Translation: Drive seniors out of the district with the highest tax rate in the county and prevent young people from being able to afford their first home by high taxes)

4) Preserving our Sense of Community (Translation: Fight any efforts to merge the smallest school district in the county with a neighboring district to save money, improve offerings for students and reduce property taxes).

I'm glad the four candidates dropped a flier in my mailbox to remind me which candidates I won't be voting for on Tuesday.

This just in from the office of state Rep. Todd Rock, R-90:

House Republicans, Public School Lockout Victims to Reintroduce Strike-Free Education Act

What: With approximately 22 Pennsylvania public school districts at risk for an immediate teachers strike; and an additional 126 public school districts facing the possibility of a strike before the end of the year, State Representative Todd Rock (R-Franklin) will officially reintroduce his legislation to protect every Pennsylvania child's right to an uninterrupted Strike-Free public education.

Also offering support for the Strike-Free Education Act (House Bill 1369) will be State Representatives Daryl Metcalfe (R-Butler) and Bryan Cutler (R-Lancaster); Simon Campbell, President of Stop Teacher Strikes, Inc.; Jill Basile, strike-impacted public school parent, Souderton Area School District; Rebecca Heller, School Board Director, Berwick Area School District; and Frank Scavo, School Board Director, Old Forge School District.

When: Wednesday, March 11
Time: 10:00 a.m.
Where: Capitol Media Center

LIVE WEBCAST: Log on to RepRock.com or RepMetcalfe.com beginning at 9:55 a.m. on Wednesday morning.

A Chester County organization is hosting a breakfast forum later this month to discuss ways Pennsylvania taxpayers can help end costly teacher strikes, something 37 other states have accomplished.

From a Chester County ACTION press release:

Pennsylvania remains the "Teacher Strike Capitol" of the U.S. In the past 7 years, PA has had 82 teacher strikes, more than all other states combined, including two strikes here in Chester County.

HOW CAN WE PREVENT THIS FROM HAPPENING AGAIN?

School board members will be up for election in 2009!

Our next Chester County ACTION Breakfast features Simon Campbell, President of Stop Teacher Strikes Inc.

Saturday, January 17, 8:45 am

Holiday Inn West Chester
943 South High Street,
West Chester, PA 19382

Make your reservations now—Members $25, Non-Members $30,
Table of 8 $150 ... yearly membership renewal $25 per family

CCACTION
PO Box 571
West Chester, PA 19381

Phone: 610-696-2590
E-mail: info@chestercountyaction.org

www.chestercountyaction.org

Pennsylvania continues to lead the nation in teacher strikes despite having some of the highest paid teachers in the country, according to The Wall Street Journal.

"No less than 42% of all teacher walkouts nationwide occur in the Keystone State, leaving kids sidelined and parents scrambling to juggle work and family, potentially on as little as 48 hours notice required by state law," the newspaper notes in an editorial published today.

A measure to restrict teacher strikes already passed in 37 states has been blocked repeatedly by Gov. Ed Rendell and Democratic state legislators.

The newspaper wonders if the $500,000 in campaign contributions Rendell received from the state's largest teachers' union has something to do with Rendell's reluctance to curb strikes.

From the WSJ editorial:

For too many teachers, the motto seems to be: When in doubt, walk out. The burden of enduring a strike then falls on families in which both parents need to work. The disruption is used as negotiating leverage by the unions, which know that parents will besiege school districts with calls begging them to settle. This amounts to a form of legal extortion. If Pennsylvania's teachers want to educate kids about justice and equity, they can start by ending a strategy that uses students as pawns to extract more taxpayer dollars.

Read the full editorial at the newspaper's Web site.

So much for bragging about public education.

Almost every press release from Gov. Ed Rendell, regardless of the topic, concludes with the following statement: "The Rendell administration is committed to creating a first-rate public education system, protecting our most vulnerable citizens and continuing economic investment to support our communities and businesses."

The latest news about test scores for Pennsylvania high school doesn't say much about a "first-rate" education system.

Despite billions of dollars poured into public education since Rendell took office, Pennsylvania students continue to score poorly in standardized testing.

And did I mention that Pennsylvania teachers are among the highest paid in the country? And did you know that Pennsylvania leads the nation in teacher strikes?

Six in 10 Pennsylvania High School Students Fail State Science Test

Two good reads about the growing power of teachers' unions and the continued decline of public education. Is there a connection? You bet.

Check out an editorial in The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that urges Pennsylvania residents to fight for the repeal of Act 84 of 1988, which made Pennsylvania a "compulsory union" state, allowing unions to bargain for extracting "agency fees" from workers who don't want to be members.

From Declaw the PSEA:

The Pennsylvania State Education Association causes untold damage to kids, taxpayers and the commonwealth. Few Pennsylvanians know how costly is this teacher union. But the public has the power to tame the beast.

With more than 185,500 members, 281 full-time employees and an annual income above $84 million, the PSEA is one of the state's wealthiest, largest and most politically active labor unions, reports The Commonwealth Foundation, a public-policy, free-market think tank in Harrisburg.

The PSEA has had cancerlike growth because of its ability to organize employees into collective bargaining units, influence legislation through its puppets that the union's political action committee helped to elect, and push for endless amounts of public financing for public schools, which usually ends up in union members' pockets.

And POLICY BLOG, the official blog of the Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives, an independent, non-profit public policy research and educational institute based in Harrisburg, has the numbers to show that "compulsory unionism doesn't benefit teachers, students, or taxpayers."

From POLICY BLOG:

There is no evidence for (PSEA Head honcho James) Testerman's claim that right-to-work states cannot attract teachers. And as for academic performance, right-to-work states (despite high levels of immigration) perform almost identically to compulsory union states on the NAEP test, and higher on the SAT.

Pennsylvania teachers are the fourth highest-paid in the nation, yet Pennsylvania continues to lead the country in teacher strikes.

And as POLICY BLOG notes, "Pennsylvania ranks near the bottom in SAT scores, and only 60% of black males graduate, according to one analysis."

Check out School Board Transparency and Stop Teachers Strikes blogs for more information.

It's a vicious cycle. People run for their local school board with the best of intentions, promising to put an end to runaway spending for public education and put a lid on property tax increases.

They get elected and check their brains at the door. They end up rubber-stamping every spending initiative introduced by the administration, including those palatial school buildings.

They "negotiate" contracts with teachers' unions that provide teachers with raises and benefits that other workers can only dream about. Some of the board members get voted out, but their replacements are no better. And so it goes.

Joseph J. Ryan, writing in The Intelligencer in Doylestown, has a suggestion: Eliminate school boards entirely. School boards have failed both students and the taxpayers, Ryan argues. In many cases, it's school boards that stand in the way of reforming a failing education system.

From Ryan's column:

School board responsibility begins with the effective education of their students and the financial interests of taxpayers; neither requirement is being addressed. School boards intimidated by union strike threats find placating the unions their primary function, the reason teachers' right to strike should be abolished. Postal, state and federal employees are forbidden to strike; 41 states have also disallowed teacher union strikes, why not Pennsylvania?

To correct public education's fiscal excesses, school budgets and the new craze, new school structures, should be put to a referendum. We are no longer dealing with nickels and dimes in Bucks County; some budgets are approaching $200 million a year, 66 percent of that figure consumed in excessive teacher salaries and bloated benefits.

America's teacher unions have successfully forged the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on a legally coerced taxpaying public, ever rising school taxes with no return on investment. In 2006-07, despite Bristol Township's consistently poor academic performance, the top teacher salary was $85,427, cost of benefits $28,475, total salary $113,902 for a 40-week work year, or $2,847 per week. Of that preposterous salary, teachers grudgingly agreed to pay an insignificant $45 toward a $1,250 monthly healthcare premium.

Nationally, taxpayers have contained the avaricious demands of the teacher unions. The first step is to abolish their right to strike; divest them of the tenure entitlement, a sanctuary for academic incompetents; rescind their right to due process, and put every union or school board proposal to a taxpayer vote.

Additionally, local school boards should be abolished. Similar to Hawaii, professionals in economics, the media, law, academia, the business and corporate communities should be appointed to a newly formed state panel and given unconditional jurisdiction in dealing with individual districts. They should be compensated consistent with their expertise.

Why does Pennsylvania have 501 school districts, with 501 school boards? Each school district has at least one superintendent making a six-figure salary who surrounds himself with an army of high-paid administrators. Imagine the savings by consolidating the 501 school districts by county. That would leave just 67 school districts. And that's just a start.

Read Ryan's full column at the newspaper's Web site.

Ever wonder how teachers manage to get such lucrative contracts every time they negotiate contracts with your local school board?

Curious about why your property taxes are so high?

Check out School Board Transparency at http://schoolboardtransparency.org/ to learn more about the secretive world of public school contract negotiations.

The goal of the blog is provide "Sunlight on Board-Union Contract Negotiations."

The blog was created by Fred Baldwin, who describes himself as "a recovering school board president."