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Up the Down Pay Scale: Teachers vs. Football Coaches

2011; Wiley; Volume: 25; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1096/fj.11-0501ufm

1530-6860

Gerald Weissmann,

Youth Development and Social Support

Students Learning Human Development by Means of a Growth Chart (c. 1950). Image courtesy National Library of Medicine. Ms. Parker, a second-year high school biology teacher making $36,000, fears that under the proposed [Wisconsin governor] legislation class sizes would rise and higher contributions to her benefits would knock her out of the middle class. “I love teaching, but I have $26,000 of student debt,” the teacher said. “I'm 30 years old, and I can't save up enough for a down payment” for a house. Nor does she own a car. A blog posted Tuesday on WordPress.com urges University of Wisconsin football coach Bret Bielema to take a stand against Gov. Scott Walker's “Budget Repair Bill”…. “[the coach] received the approval for his” well-deserved “raise to an annual compensation of $2.5 million on Friday, the same day Walker unveiled his bill. Elsewhere, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said he is not worried how history will remember him “because if I have my way, there won t be any history teachers.” Several of the states in our Union are working to prevent a budget melt-down by curtailing the number, pay, and bargaining rights of public employees. Teachers, often the lowest paid of the lot, are among the first to get it in the neck. Wisconsin set the churlish standard, but half a dozen other states are also hassling the people who teach our kids. Legislatures in Alabama, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois are wielding a budgetary axe; in Providence, Rhode Island all the teachers were fired—to be rehired at lower cost (4). Teacher-bashing is so very now: New Jersey's macho Chris Christie has made himself a presidential contender by dressing down teachers at public meetings (4) and citizens complain about whining teachers who “do not work a full day, they have significant time off during the day, they have extensive vacation time, they can be granted tenure and they have a retirement benefits package that is the envy of all except top corporate executives (5).” Considering that the starting salary of an average K-12 teacher in Wisconsin is around $25,000 with an overall mean of $46,390 (6), teachers' wages are not exactly “the envy of all except top corporate executives.” That's why that Times story about Wisconsin biology teacher Erin Parker troubled me—and ought to trouble all of us in experimental biology. The kids in Erin Parker's class are our future. That's why it's time we made teaching an honored calling and in our kind of society that means paying teachers more. We may be proud of our great American Universities where the world sends its best to learn science, but at the lower rungs of the educational ladder, we're not doing well at all. Rude bias and anti-intellectual fervor have dismantled our once-proud public school system. A recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study documented that the United States of America is the only OECD country where 25 to 34-year-olds are not better educated than 55 to 64-year-olds and that our kids in K-12 are way down in the latest lists (7). Ranked against 65 other nations, American teenagers came in 15th in reading and 19th in science. American students placed 27th in math. Only two percent of American students scored at the highest proficiency level, compared with eight percent in Korea and five percent in Finland. The OECD found that high-performing countries such as Finland, Canada, and Singapore have nationwide programs for pre-primary education, similar to Head Start (7). In these nations, “collaboration with teacher unions has been a keystone in their successful efforts to improve student achievement (8).” Meanwhile, troglodytes in the U.S. have dismantled Head Start programs and scuttled long-standing agreements for collective bargaining. The low salaries of America's teachers and our slapdash pre-primary programs have not kept our budgets balanced. In fact, only Luxembourg spends more money per pupil for education than does the United States (7). “Education” money does not flow to teachers. Wisconsin, like most of the other states, spends less than one third of its $9 billion dollar education budget on teacher's salaries (9). As the OECD reported, a good part of what passes for education money in the U.S. goes for “athletic facilities and transportation (7).” In this context, it seems fair to ask why the University of Wisconsin's football coach—a public employee—was guaranteed a yearly compensation/salary of $2.5 million by a state, the governor of which has just signed a bill to prevent teachers from bargaining for salaries one hundredth of those paid to a Big Ten coach. It's a question of priorities, and it's clear from the pay scale who's up and who's down in public esteem. Big-time collegiate football in the United States is an industry indigenous to the United States. The Universities of Stockholm, Edinburgh, or the Sorbonne— among other world-class institutions—do not accept applicants on the basis of their capacity to catch a sphere on the run. They do not support million-dollar arenas for weekend spectacles. Their non-academic employees do not receive more pay than the university president or vice-chancellor. Nevertheless, those universities have managed to thrive by sticking to the mission of an academy: teaching, research, and the dissemination of knowledge. Ambrose Bierce got the difference right in The Devil's Dictionary: “ACADEME, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. ACADEMY, n. [from ACADEME] A modern school where football is taught (10).” Benton Spruance (1904–1967), Spinner Play (1934). Image courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum. For over a century now, big-time college football has overcome serious challenges from the high-minded. In 1905, as the deaths of 18 collegiate football players were reported, Theodore Roosevelt “took up another question of vital interest to the American people: he started a campaign of reform of football (12).” He called a conference of the presidents of the major football schools of the day—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc.—and little by little, new rules were imposed, limits were set on the carnage, and today's NCAA emerged. Northwestern, Stanford, NYU, and Columbia even banned football altogether—but just for a while (13). College football is a highly organized commercial enterprise. The athletes who take part in it have come up through years of training; they are commanded by professional coaches; little ifany personal initiative of ordinary play is left to the player. The great matches are highly profitable enterprises (14). The Foundation's 1929 report was based on three years of work and visits to more than 100 campuses. Titled simply American College Athletics, the 350 page document received immediate front-page attention in The New York Times. The paper was shocked, shocked, to hear that college sports were tainted by “Bounties, Subsidies, and Slush Funds” used to overpay professional coaches who had the power to decide (horrors) which undergraduates might attend the university (15). Students were recruited and given “subsidies” to play (horror, again). Horrified denials were loud and strong from the universities, among them officials from Stanford, Michigan, Alabama, and NYU: “No Discrimination for Athletes, Columbia Dean Asserts,” while John L Griffith, the athletic commissioner of the Big Ten, complained that “the report is unjust especially to Wisconsin and Minnesota (16)”. The result: no change. And now, for eighty years, recruiters have remained free to peddle college admissions to kids who play football very well. Why has the practice continued of distributing “Bounties, Subsidies, and Slush Funds” over the years since the Carnegie report? Well, for one thing, major conference football has become a significant part of our entertainment industry, if not the educational process. Its supporters claim that athletic eminence yields monetary gain, alumni support, and national acclaim (17). Not so, say recent analysts of the college football business. In 2002, James Schulman and William Bowen (ex-president of Princeton and then head of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) published an encyclopedic study of American athletics: The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values (18). The book had an academic thrust and an economic edge. According to Schulman and Bowen, the problem begins with a recruiting process that forms an “athlete culture” entitled to special treatment. The jocks are separated from other students by training tables, dorm assignments, and course selection. They are different in other respects: average SAT scores for athletes and non-athletes admitted to Ivy League schools differ by as much as 300 points. But Shulman and Bowen make a crucial point that overcomes perceived wisdom. After a close look at costs for recruiting, scholarships, coaching, and other personnel—indeed all operating expenses, they conclude that “As a money-making venture, athletics is a bad business (18).” Even at the big-time programs, college sports are likely to lose money for their schools. The University of Michigan loses $2.8 million on athletics despite averaging 110,000 fans at each home football game. Another statistic: since the 1970s, former athletes have been less generous alumni than other graduates, and so the financial gains from winning via alumni support are diminishing over time. Graduates who make the largest gifts to their alma maters favor a de-emphasis of sports (18). The Bowen report has been confirmed by other studies showing that the billions of dollars generated by television and advertising revenues generally do not go back into scholarly activities: a recent USA TODAY analysis found that “more than $800 million in student fees and university subsidies are propping up athletic programs at the nation's top sports colleges, including hundreds of millions in the richest conferences (19).” In fact, the median shortfall of athletic revenues in the most profligate of Division 1A schools was $11 million in 2009, up from nearly $10 million the previous year (20). Table 1 shows where some of that money goes. It compares the salaries of football coaches with those of university presidents in two samples of institutions, the big-time NCAA Division 1A (ranked in order of coaches' salaries) and the lowly NCAA Division III (ranked according to the salary of their presidents.) Some Division III schools have no football teams at all and compete with powerful opponents such as Carnegie Mellon and Case Western Reserve as part of the University Athletic Association in softball, soccer and the like. The Division I group pays the five top football salaries in the country, Division III pays very little, or nothing. Notably, coaches in Division I are paid roughly five times more than the presidents of their universities. Also of interest: presidents of universities in Division III are paid slightly more than their peers who run big-time football schools. It may not be coincidental that the overall “U.S. News Best College Rankings” of the football schools in Group IA are significantly lower than those with no major football effort. And while some have argued that the U.S. News & World Report rankings do not reflect educational excellence, James Shulman (of the Bowen report) has stoutly defended the practice, noting that in the absence of U.S. News & World Report, the only quantifiable game in higher education is sports. “It does fill that gap much better than if sports is the only ranking you have out there,” Shulman says of the U.S. News & World Report survey (24). I'd agree: since the survey ranks Harvard as #1 and the University of Reno-Nevada at #179, the rankings cannot be entirely random (23). If the salary of a university president is the reward for having reached the top of the educational ladder, what about those at its bottom, those underpaid K-12 teachers? Uniformly, those on the lowest rung get the lowest pay, but with a slight regional difference. The five football schools in Division IA (Table 1) are located in Alabama, Iowa, Ohio, and noble Wisconsin, states the governors of which are chipping away at teachers' salaries. Schoolteachers in those states earn a mean salary of $44,000, versus $51,000 in the home states of the schools in Division III, but it's still barely a living wage (25). Our lessons in Smellie's Philosophy [Of Natural History] was extremely interesting about the “Order of Insects”etc. Spiders are called Arachnides. Miss Fuller wanted us to tell her if we knew why? As none did know, she told us that Arachnides was the name of an ambitious young lady, who wanted to weave as fine as the goddess of Minerva, in a short time, she said, she could which made the goddess angry, and turned her into a spider (26). “Miss Fuller” was Margaret Fuller, who taught natural history (science), Greek history, Latin, and English poetry to boys and girls. Her father had died the previous year and she was trying to make ends meet before she dared to launch her career as a writer. She loved teaching, her students reciprocated, but she also knew how low in repute her occupation was held. She wrote to a friend “You must not get an ugly picture of me because I am a schoolmistress (27).” The schoolmistress went on to become one of the major figures of 19th century American social thought, journalism, and prosody; she was the “Schoolmistress” to whom Oliver Wendell Holmes dedicated The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table.” Holmes said of his walks with the schoolmistress: “Books we talked about, and education. It was her duty to know something of these, and of course she did (28).” She knew enough, but wasn't paid nearly enough. Margaret Fuller's salary for the year in Providence was $ 1,000—that's $23,000 in today's currency (29). Teachers needed better pay then, and they need better pay now. Today, many believe that it's inevitable for coaches of the sports/industrial complex to rake in salaries one hundred-fold greater than schoolteachers, but that can change ifwe will it to change. Remember that a generation ago the tobacco/industrial complex was peddling cigarettes at football games.