The Education Wars: Bill Gates Wages War on High School

Pretty soon high school will be only for the elites, and everybody else will work in jobs in "service" to their betters:

In 2006 dweeb oligarch, Bill Gates, funded the writing of a plan to undercut American public high schools and to create an outlet for working class students to test out of high school and into a voc ed after 9th or 10th grade. The plan was called "Tougher Choices for Tougher Times," and it offered a vision of high school as contract charter schools that are funded at the state level without local input or oversight. Here is a review of Tuckerism by EPI, and here is part of a post from last year on how the plan was moving forward, all the help of the prostitutes who run the NEA:

Did I say something about union sellouts earlier today? Bracey just posted at ARN the Ed Week link below that announces the NEA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers have split the spoils from the corporate charter school blitzkrieg that is now being unleashed against public education. They have agreed to support the Tucker Plan (Tough Choices or Tough Times) that was pumped out of the sludge tanks in 2006. See here and here and here for reviews of the plan.

Here is an article in response to that asshole Marc Tucker's recommendations. Tucker is also full of shit about teacher pensions, evidently not realizing many in some 15 states don't pay into Social Security:

Believing this, the New Commission proposes to end teachers' defined-benefit pension plans (funded in advance to pay retirees a guaranteed annuity) and substitute defined-contribution or cash-balance plans (in which employers make contributions to teachers' individual retirement accounts, but in which the size of each teacher's pension depends on how savvy an investor she becomes). This is supposed to cut schools' contributions in half, from 12% to 6% of salaries, thus matching the plans of "better private employers."

We have scoured the New Commission's report and find no evidence to support its claim that better private employers have a lower benefit load than school systems. Our own investigation suggests that the New Commission greatly exaggerates the relative superiority of teacher benefits and thus of the resources available to increase wages by reducing those benefits.

Pension contributions of many school districts do exceed those of many private employers, but all private employers also pay social security taxes on salaries paid to professional workers, who receive a defined benefit social security retirement annuity to supplement their 401Ks. Many teachers, however, are still not covered by social security, a fact that reduces the national average cost of teacher benefits.

The appropriate comparison would be between teacher and private sector total retirement costs, including payroll taxes (primarily social security). As our Table 1 shows, K-12 teachers and all college-educated professionals (most of whom are in the private sector) now have the same share of compensation— 11.5% — in overall retirement and payroll tax costs. If teachers must give up defined benefit plans, those without Social Security will be alone among professionals in lacking any defined-benefit safety net. There is simply no painless, cost-free way to boost salaries by raiding the benefits piggy bank.

The New Commission's recommendation shifts the risk of retirement insecurity from school systems onto teachers. That this has happened more generally in the American work force does not excuse adding teachers to this race to the bottom. The nation had a serious debate about this two years ago, when President Bush proposed a partial privatization of Social Security. The bottom line then and now is this: hoping to make all workers (or all teachers) successful players in the stock market ignores that there are always market losers.

Gates is a rotten, ignorant bastard.