NJ Education Report

All hail the Englewood School Board, which has courageously drawn a line in the sand between fiscal logic and inanity. North Jersey reports that negotiations between the Board and the Englewood Teachers Association have broken down because the teachers are demanding a 4.3% pay hike and no contributions to insurance plans, while the Board is holding firm on its offer of 2.7% and some sort of minimal health insurance contribution. The Board has also asked for “structuring pay on a merit system.”

It’s hard to get any traction with NJEA on a movement to halt sky-high percentage increases for teachers; each local district bargains with not much more than a slingshot, while local teacher associations have the the NJEA Goliath wielding heavy artillery. When negotiations hit a wall, State-appointed mediators and fact-finders rely on recent settlements to resolve disputes, so the final deal is inevitably self-perpetuating, even when economic conditions are in free-fall. The result is that when a local board like Englewood stands firm, it comes off as biblically virtuous and the local union comes off as intractably callous.

There’s a solution, though it’s not clear that NJEA even recognizes that it has a problem. Suggestion: take a page from Montgomery County, Maryland, and resurrect your image. That teachers union gets a plug from Thomas Friedman in the New York Times today:

I live in Montgomery Country, Md. The schoolteachers here, who make on average $67,000 a year, recently voted to voluntarily give up their 5 percent pay raise that was contractually agreed to for next year, saving our school system $89 million — so programs and teachers would not have to be terminated. If public schoolteachers can take one for schoolchildren and fellow teachers, A.I.G. brokers can take one for the country.

School districts in New Jersey are presenting their budgets to taxpayers right now, and each board recites the same tale of woe: in order to find the money for the typical 4% or 5% annual percentage increases, they’re cutting programs, necessary building maintenance, arts and music. How about a little shared sacrifice? How about a little recognition that the current increases are unsustainable?

Here’s NJEA’s chance to look heroic. In the end, it’s a far better strategy than looking like an A.I.G. broker.