posted 02-18-2011 09:46 PM                  

The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class -- pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don't believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans hope to deflect attention from the big story. That's the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.

Republicans would rather no one notice their campaign to generate further tax cuts for the rich -- making the Bush tax cuts permanent, further reducing the estate tax, and allowing the wealthy to shift ever more of their income into capital gains taxed at 15 percent.

The strategy has three parts:

The battle over the federal budget.

The first is being played out in the budget battle in Washington. As they raise the alarm over deficit spending and simultaneously squeeze popular middle-class programs, Republicans want the majority of the American public to view it all as a giant zero-sum game among average Americans that some will have to lose.

The President has already fallen into the trap by calling for budget cuts in programs the poor and working class depend on -- assistance with home heating, community services, college loans, and the like.

In the coming showdown over Medicare and Social Security, House budget chair Paul Ryan will push a voucher system for Medicare and a partly-privatized plan for Social Security -- both designed to attract younger middle-class voters.

The assault on public employees

* Continue reading

The second part of the Republican strategy is being played out on the state level where public employees are being blamed for state budget crises brought on by plummeting revenues. Republicans view this as an opportunity to gut public employee unions, starting with teachers.

Wisconsin's Republican governor Scott Walker and his GOP legislature are seeking to end almost all union rights for teachers. Ohio's Republican governor John Kasich is pushing a similar plan in Ohio through a Republican-dominated legislature. New Jersey's Republican governor Chris Christie is attempting the same, telling a conservative conference Wednesday, "I'm attacking the leadership of the union because they're greedy, and they're selfish and they're self-interested."

As I've noted, this demonizing of public employees is premised on false data. Public employees don't earn more than private-sector workers when you take account of their education. To the contrary, over the last fifteen years the pay of public-sector workers, including teachers, has dropped relative to private-sector employees with the same level of education – even if you include health and retirement benefits. Moreover, most public employees don't have generous pensions. After a career with annual pay averaging less than $45,000, the typical newly-retired public employee receives a pension of $19,000 a year.

Bargaining rights for public employees haven't caused state deficits to explode. Some states that deny their employees bargaining rights, such as Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona, are running big deficits of over 30 percent of spending. Many states that give employees bargaining rights -- Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Montana -- have small deficits of less than 10 percent.

Republicans would rather go after teachers and other public employees than have us look at the pay of Wall Street traders, private-equity managers, and heads of hedge funds -- many of whom wouldn't have their jobs today were it not for the giant taxpayer-supported bailout.

Last year, America's top thirteen hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion each. One of them took home $5 billion. Much of their income is taxed as capital gains -- at 15 percent -- due to a tax loophole that Republican members of Congress have steadfastly guarded.

If the earnings of those thirteen hedge-fund managers were taxed as ordinary income, the revenues generated would pay the salaries and benefits of over 5 million teachers. Who is more valuable to our society -- thirteen hedge-fund managers or 5 million teachers? Let's make the question even simpler. Who is more valuable: One hedge fund manager or one teacher?

The Distortion of the Constitution

The third part of the Republican strategy is being played out in the Supreme Court. It has politicized the Court more than at any time in recent memory.

Last year a majority of the justices determined that corporations have a right under the First Amendment to provide unlimited amounts of money to political candidates. Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission is among the most patently political and legally grotesque decisions of our highest court -- ranking right up there with Bush vs. Gore and Dred Scott.

Among those who voted in the affirmative were Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Both have become active strategists in the Republican party.

A month ago, for example, Antonin Scalia met in a closed-door session with Michele Bachmann's Tea Party caucus -- something no justice concerned about maintaining the appearance of impartiality would ever have done.

Both Thomas and Scalia have participated in political retreats organized and hosted by multi-billionaire financier Charles Koch, a major contributor to the Tea Party and other conservative organizations, and a crusader for ending all limits on money in politics. (Not incidentally, Thomas's wife is the founder of Liberty Central, a Tea Party organization that has been receiving unlimited corporate contributions due to the Citizens United decision. On his obligatory financial disclosure filings, Thomas has repeatedly failed to list her sources of income over the last twenty years, nor even to include his own four-day retreats courtesy of Charles Koch.)

Some time this year or next, the Supreme Court will be asked to consider whether the nation's new healthcare law is constitutional. Watch your wallets.

The strategy as a whole

These three aspects of the Republican strategy -- a federal budget battle to shrink government, focused on programs the vast middle class depends on; state efforts to undermine public employees, whom the middle class depends on; and a Supreme Court dedicated to bending the Constitution to enlarge and entrench the political power of the wealthy -- fit perfectly together.

They pit average working Americans against one another, distract attention from the almost unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at the top, and conceal Republican plans to further enlarge and entrench that wealth and power.

What is the Democratic strategy to counter this and reclaim America for the rest of us?

posted 02-18-2011 10:29 PM                  

quote:

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Originally posted by ed monahan:
The Democratic plan is separate the intelligent folks from the Democrats.

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posted 02-18-2011 11:00 PM                  

[Milwaukee, Wisconsin] MacIver News Service – For the first time in history, the average annual compensation for a teacher in the Milwaukee Public School system will exceed $100,000.

That staggering figure was revealed last night at a meeting of the MPS School Board.

The average salary for an MPS teacher is $56,500. When fringe benefits are factored in, the annual compensation will be $100,005 in 2011.

MacIver’s Bill Osmulski has more in this video report.

http://maciverinstitute.com/2010/03/average-mps-teacher-compensation-tops-100kyear/

posted 02-18-2011 11:24 PM                  

By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY
At a time when workers' pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees' average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.

Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available.

The federal compensation advantage has grown from $30,415 in 2000 to $61,998 last year.

Public employee unions say the compensation gap reflects the increasingly high level of skill and education required for most federal jobs and the government contracting out lower-paid jobs to the private sector in recent years.

"The data are not useful for a direct public-private pay comparison," says Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union.

Chris Edwards, a budget analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, thinks otherwise. "Can't we now all agree that federal workers are overpaid and do something about it?" he asks.

Last week, President Obama ordered a freeze on bonuses for 2,900 political appointees. For the rest of the 2-million-person federal workforce, Obama asked for a 1.4% across-the-board pay hike in 2011, the smallest in more than a decade. Federal workers also would qualify for seniority pay hikes.

Congressional Republicans want to cancel the across-the-board increase in 2011, which would save $2.2 billion.

"Americans are fed up with public employee pay scales far exceeding that in the private sector," says Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., the second-ranking Republican in the House.

Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., says a pay freeze would unfairly scapegoat federal workers without addressing real budget problems.

What the data show:

•Benefits. Federal workers received average benefits worth $41,791 in 2009. Most of this was the government's contribution to pensions. Employees contributed an additional $10,569.

•Pay. The average federal salary has grown 33% faster than inflation since 2000. USA TODAY reported in March that the federal government pays an average of 20% more than private firms for comparable occupations. The analysis did not consider differences in experience and education.

•Total compensation. Federal compensation has grown 36.9% since 2000 after adjusting for inflation, compared with 8.8% for private workers.

posted 02-18-2011 11:33 PM                  

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/07 /inflated-federal-pay-how-americans-are-overtaxed-to-overpay-the-civil-service

An excerpt

Many news organizations have reported that the average federal employee earns more than the average private-sector worker.[1] Is higher federal pay justified given that the federal government employs a more skilled workforce than the private sector? Detailed analysis shows that the size of the wage discrepancies is not warranted:

The federal pay system gives the average federal employee hourly cash earnings 22 percent above the average private worker’s, controlling for observable skills and characteristics.

Including non-cash benefits adds to this disparity. The average private-sector employer pays $9,882 per employee in annual benefits, while the federal government pays an average of $32,115 per employee.

Overall, controlling for other factors, federal employees earn approximately 30 percent to 40 percent more in total compensation (wages and benefits) than comparable private-sector workers.

Federal employees enjoy job security irrespective of the state of the economy. Since the recession began, federal employment has risen by 240,000—12 percent. The unemployment rate for federal employees has only slightly risen from 2.0 percent to 2.9 percent between 2007 and 2009.

Federal employees demonstrate with their actions that they receive better compensation in the public sector than in the private sector: They quit their jobs at one-third the rate of the private employees.

Bringing federal compensation in line with private-sector compensation would save taxpayers approximately $47 billion in 2011.
Of course, these averages mask large differences in pay across occupations and skill levels. Many federal employees in highly skilled occupations receive market wages. However, semi-skilled federal workers earn substantially more than they would in the private sector. Congress should not cut federal pay across the board—this would unfairly penalize the federal workers who earn market wages.

Instead, Congress should implement a pay-for-performance system with pay bands based on market signals of labor demand, expand the contracting of federal work to private companies, reduce the generosity of federal benefits, and end the near-absolute job security for underperforming federal workers. Doing so would not solve the country’s fiscal problems, but would be a solid—and fair—step toward a more responsible fiscal policy. The federal government should not overtax the general public to provide significantly above-average pay and benefits to those who work in the civil service.

posted 02-18-2011 11:44 PM                  

Adam Summers
May 10, 2010

There has been much debate over whether public sector employees are overpaid or underpaid, relative to their private sector counterparts, and how to make an "apples-to-apples" comparison of the compensation received by each since job functions are oftentimes quite different. The following seeks to address this issue in light of a new report that suggests that state and local government workers receive less total compensation than comparable private-sector workers, and to examine how issues not addressed in the study might affect those conclusions.

Are Public Sector Workers Overcompensated?

Several analyses of average wages and benefits in the public and private sectors reveal that state and local government workers earn more than private sector workers. According to the most recent Employer Costs for Employee Compensation survey from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of December 2009, state and local government employees earned total compensation of $39.60 an hour, compared to $27.42 an hour for private industry workers-a difference of over 44 percent. This includes 35 percent higher wages and nearly 69 percent greater benefits.

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau similarly show that in 2007 the average annual salary of a California state government employee was $53,958, nearly 32 percent greater than the average private sector worker ($40,991). In addition, as noted by reporter and Calpensions.com blogger Ed Mendel, in 2006 the state conducted a comparison of state and private sector compensation for the first time in two decades. While the Department of Personnel Administration survey did not include all job classifications, the analysis determined a number of benchmark job classifications and found that state compensation was greater than private sector compensation for clerical jobs, accountants, custodians, electricians, stationary engineers, and analysts, but lagged in medical occupations.

Moreover, data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis illustrate that average state and local government compensation has been increasing at a faster rate than average private sector compensation over the past 30 years (see the graph on page 89 of this Cato Journal article).

Are Public Sector Workers Undercompensated?

But according to a new study published by the Center for State & Local Government Excellence and the National Institute on Retirement Security, these aggregate compensation comparisons are misleading. The authors, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee economics professors Keith A. Bender and John S. Heywood, assert that state and local government workers are better educated and have more work experience, on average, than do private sector workers, so it is natural that their overall average compensation would be higher. "Thus," they conclude, "the fact that public sector workers receive greater aver­age compensation than private sector workers should be no more surprising than the fact that those with more skills and education earn more."

Furthermore, after attempting to control for such variables, they find that state and local government workers actually earn less than their private sector counterparts. According to the analysis, state government workers earn an average of 11.4 percent less than private-sector workers of similar education and work experience and local government workers earn 12.0 percent less. Due to the greater benefits received by public sector workers, the gap narrows when these benefits are factored in, to 6.8 percent and 7.4 percent, respectively. (Even this appears to underestimate the cost of the benefits provided government workers, as discussed below.)
The Difficulty of Compensation Comparisons

As the report notes, it is difficult to do a real "apples-to-apples" comparison of public and private sector compensation because public sector job descriptions and duties may be very different from those in the private sector, and vice versa, so oftentimes there are no good positions to compare to in the other sector.

It would be interesting to take a closer look at the education statistics. Knowing the percentage of workers with a college degree, for example, is helpful, but not all college degrees are equal. Some fields of study are more rigorous than others, and some universities and colleges are more prestigious than others. One who earns a degree in a more rigorous field, or who attends a more prestigious (and usually a more costly) university, would expect to earn a higher salary after college than one who did not. While data with this level of detail do not seem to be available, it would be interesting to see if there are any differences in these more specific educational categories between public and private sector employees.

It is also worth asking whether higher education levels are actually required to perform many government jobs. The Bender and Heywood study presumes that we should expect public employees to be paid more because they tend to be better educated than comparable private sector employees, but is this additional education necessary?

It may be that state and local governments hire more educated people not because job duties demand more education, but rather simply because they can, as they have access to the public's money and, as such, government budgets are not so constrained as private firms' budgets. In the private sector, firms have strong incentives to keep costs down and pay no more for labor than they need to. The public sector, by contrast, is infamous for its lack of efficiency, and budgets are determined by political means, resulting in budgets that are usually much different-and more wasteful-than those determined by economic means (see the discussion of public-sector versus private-sector productivity below). This is why governments typically achieve significant cost savings by outsourcing the provision of services to the private sector. Thus, it may be that governments are paying higher wages to better-educated employees not because those employees' educational skills are required to perform their job duties, but rather because they are overqualified for their jobs.

It is worth noting that private sector compensation might also be skewed higher by a relatively small number of very high income earners, such as large corporation CEOs and senior officers, entertainers, and professional athletes, for which there is no equal in the public sector.

Productivity Differences
Even taking the study's analysis as given, this does not mean that the value of an average government worker's labor is equal to that of an average private sector worker with similar education and work experience. This is because private sector workers tend to be more productive. As Cato Institute Director of Tax Policy Studies Chris Edwards notes in a recent paper, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) National Compensation Survey, private-sector employees worked an average of 2,050 hours in 2008, 12 percent more than the 1,825 hours worked by the average public-sector employee.

Even on an hour-for-hour basis, one would expect private sector workers to be more productive due to the lack of competitive forces in government. Private sector businesses face constant pressures of competition to innovate and improve their goods and services, lest they lose business to their competitors. Government agencies, by contrast, are typically monopolies protected by law, and thus are not subject to such competitive incentives and pressures. (There is a reason for all those jokes and complaints about the efficiency of post office and DMV workers.)

Job Security Differences

The notion that public employees are significantly undercompensated begs the question: if they are so underpaid, why would they agree to take government jobs when they could earn more by performing similar jobs in the private sector? Some might cling to the romantic idea of "public service," but public-sector employees are every bit as self-interested as private-sector workers, so this answer is wholly unsatisfying.

One major factor not discussed by the report's authors that could provide an explanation (setting aside the possibility that public-sector workers are actually overcompensated, relative to their private-sector counterparts) is the significant difference in job security. Government job security is famously, and notoriously, ironclad, oftentimes making it practically impossible to fire or lay off public-sector workers for the same reasons employees are terminated in the private sector, even in cases of poor performance or unethical activity. This job protection has tremendous value which is not captured in the Bender and Heywood report.

Whether for job security or other reasons, the attraction to government jobs is evidenced by job-quit rates. Lower quit rates indicate a lack of better job opportunities elsewhere. Indeed, as the Cato Institute's Chris Edwards points out (see pages 92-93), BLS data reveal that the quit rate is significantly lower in the public sector than in the private sector. Between 2001 and 2009, the public sector layoff and discharge rate is only about one-third of the private-sector rate. Surely, if government workers were so poorly compensated and were qualified to earn significantly more in the private sector, they would leave for those private sector opportunities and the quit rate would be much higher.

In California, the state's prison guards provide a good example of the lack of dissatisfaction with public-sector compensation. According to a February 2008 Legislative Analyst's Office report, correctional peace officer costs make up the largest share of General Fund personnel expenses. The approximately 30,000 state correctional peace officers make up nearly 10 percent of all state employees. The report described correctional officers' overall compensation levels as "very attractive," particularly considering that the job requires only a high school or equivalent education, and noted that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) boasts that the job "has been called 'the greatest entry level job in California'-and for good reason," and that "Along with the great salary, our peace officers earn a retirement package you just can't find in private industry." Perhaps this, along with the CDCR's inability to control sick leave and overtime benefits, is why the state receives roughly 130,000 applications to become a prison guard each year.

Not surprisingly, there is very little turnover among California prison guards. A May 2006 California Policy Research Center report found that

Only 1,000 of California's 36,000 sworn peace officers left the CDCR [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation], an annual turnover rate of 3.6%. This is very low for public service generally and quite unusual for correctional settings, where burnout is typically a significant staff issue. California may have the lowest turnover rate of any state corrections department. In many states, by contrast, turnover rates among correctional officers hover around 20%. (see page 27)

Rising Numbers of Government Workers

Even if we were to assume that the productivity of public and private sector workers is equal, or that differences in job security were not a factor, this would not speak to the necessity or sheer number of government employees, and thus to the overall cost or necessity of government programs. Unlike the private sector, where decisions on the number and compensation of employees are driven by supply and demand and economic realities, the size and cost of government employees is driven by the political process. Thus, government employees' labor unions are constantly pressuring legislators (who are frequently indebted to the unions for campaign contributions and other help provided to get them elected) to increase workers' wages and benefits, and legislators are always creating or expanding government programs that may or may not be needed or effective. These pressures are independent of economic constraints, and are limited only to the extent that taxpayers refuse to consent to additional borrowing or tax increases.

This has allowed governments at all levels to continue to add employees even during the severe recession that has forced a significant contraction in the private sector. Between December 2007 and December 2009, the private sector lost more than 7.3 million jobs, yet the number of government jobs actually increased by about 100,000 (see figure below).

In California, even as the state struggled with the recession, plummeting revenues, and record budget deficits, and Gov. Schwarzenegger issued a supposed hiring freeze, the state continued to hire more workers. Incredibly, the state has added over 13,000 employees since the onset of the economic recession in 2008 and continued hiring even during the worst of the recession. According to a Sacramento Bee analysis of State Controller's Office data, between June 2008 and January 31, 2009, most state agencies either maintained or increased the number of full-time employees, resulting in a net increase of over 2,000 workers (not counting the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which always sees large drops in the number of its employees after fire season).

It should come as little surprise, then, that taxpayers are upset as they watch government union ranks swell as their governments face serious budget strains and private businesses and households have been forced to cut back to adjust to economic conditions and live within their means.

The implication behind the argument that public-sector workers are no better compensated than private sector workers is that taxpayers are getting their money's worth, but this is not necessarily the case. Even if public employee compensation is on an even keel with comparable private employee compensation, the government may still be employing more people than necessary to do the job or hiring people to perform tasks in which the government should not be involved in the first place. Such conclusions involve subjective determinations outside the scope of the Bender and Heywood report, but they should certainly not be overlooked in discussions of the cost of government services.

Public-Sector Pension and Retiree Health-Care Benefits Differences

As with job security, there is a value to the guaranteed nature of public sector benefits that is not captured in the Bender and Heywood report. In most states, including California, government workers' benefits are protected by state constitutions, and the benefits of current employees cannot be reduced. This is a protection that is not available in the private sector, where pension plans may be frozen, benefits may be reduced, and companies can go bankrupt, which could cause employees to receive fewer benefits than promised.

In addition, the value of public sector benefits seems to be understated. Granting that the BLS's Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) survey does not account for differences in worker education, job experience, or job duties, the survey can nonetheless prove instructive. The survey estimated that public sector workers, in aggregate, earned an average 35 percent more than private sector workers, and the Bender and Heywood report found that, after controlling for the aforementioned variables, public sector workers actually earned 11-12 percent less than comparable private sector workers. Yet, while the ECEC survey reported a much greater 69 percent advantage for public sector benefits, the Bender and Heywood total compensation gap narrowed only slightly, from 11-12 percent to roughly 7 percent (public employees received more benefits than comparable private-sector workers, but the difference was much smaller than that reflected in the ECEC survey). The relatively small impact of the greater benefits of public employees also appears to fly in the face of the fact that in California and elsewhere, many state and local governments have increased government employees' benefits by as much as 50 percent in the past decade or so, allowing many workers to retire as young as 50 or 55 years old with pensions equal to as much as 90 percent of their final salaries. These are benefits unheard of in the private sector.

In the Bender and Heywood report, the authors assumed that the determinants of benefit values-factors such as education, age, and other demographic characteristics-affect the results in the same way that the determinants affect the calculations of hourly earnings. The authors acknowledge that this assumption is debatable. If the determinants affect the comparability of benefits in a different way than they affect wages, then this could skew the results. Perhaps this could account for at least some of the apparent discrepancy.

Moreover, the report cannot account for expected increases in benefits that would result in greater compensation for public employees, relative to comparable private-sector employees. The report is necessarily a snapshot in time, as it would be impossible to predict all future changes to employees' wages and benefits. Yet, we can safely assume that health care costs, and thus the costs of employees retiree health care benefits, which have risen on the order of 10 percent a year for most of the last decade, will continue to rise, particularly since demand for health-care services will increase as the Baby Boomer generation enters retirement (and, it could be argued, the supply of health care practitioners might be reduced by increased government involvement in the health care industry, thus exacerbating these cost increases). Retiree health benefits are typically much more generous in the public sector than they are in the private sector, if they are provided at all in the private sector. In California, the state pays 100 percent of health care costs for retired state workers and 90 percent of costs for retirees' families. Barring any commensurate reductions to these benefits, which, unlike pension benefits, can, in fact, be reduced, we should expect to see the gap between public and private employee benefits widen and the differences in comparable public and private employees' total compensation to adjust accordingly.

Conclusions

While the recent study from the Center for State & Local Government Excellence and the National Institute on Retirement Security comparing public sector and private sector compensation levels correctly notes that aggregate comparisons of average public and private wages and benefits can be misleading, its conclusion that state and local government employees are undercompensated, compared to private-sector employees, is suspect at best. The analysis ignores the value of virtually ironclad job security and certainty of pension benefits, features that are notably absent in the private sector. It also overlooks the greater efficiency and productivity of private sector workers, which is a result of competitive pressures not experienced in government agencies. The conclusion that public-sector workers are more highly educated than comparable private sector workers, upon which higher pay and benefit levels is justified, is called into question by the fact that not all college degrees are equal (and may vary between public and private sector employees) and the possibility that governments are hiring overqualified workers because they face looser budget constraints than private companies (i.e., governments are overpaying for their labor).

There are other considerations outside the scope of the report that affect discussions of the cost of government services. Since retiree health care costs are expected to continue to rise rapidly, and public employees' retiree health care benefits are significantly greater than those of private sector employees, this will increase government workers' total compensation relative to comparable private sector employee compensation. Furthermore, even if we assume that public employees are underpaid, or at least not overpaid, that does not mean that the number of government workers is necessary or desirable, or that the cost and scope of government is not excessive.

The fact is that state and local government labor costs are continuing to escalate drastically. There is a reason why the City of Vallejo, California, cited skyrocketing pension costs as the chief cause of its fall into municipal bankruptcy, and why many other local governments in California and elsewhere are on the brink of bankruptcy. There is a reason why California's pension costs have been described as unsustainable by everyone from the chief actuary of the California Public Employees' Retirement System to Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, to Democratic State Treasurer Bill Lockyer. There is a reason that governments at the federal, state, and local levels achieve significant cost savings by contracting with private sector businesses to provide a wide variety of services previously performed by government workers. State and local governments in California and across the nation must address public employee compensation levels if they are to maintain any sense of fiscal responsibility, particularly in these difficult economic times.

Adam B. Summers is a policy analyst at Reason Foundation.

Adam Summers is Policy Analyst

posted 02-19-2011 06:15 AM                  

I went to college to become a teacher, secondary education.

I soon found out there wasn't any money in teaching, back in the early 70's. Teachers were making $4.4K to teach in small town, rural areas, where there were job openings.
Middle sized towns and cities were paying $5.2K per year, but there weren't any openings. Large eastern cities were paying $6.5K per year, with several openings, but they placed new teachers into the low income/ghetto areas to start their teaching careers. Not for me, I seen the movie Blackboard Jungle. A friend got me into learning meat cutting, and I started at over $11K per year. Easy decision,,,,live where I wanted and make twice the yearly income. I would rather have taught school, but not for half the income.