LAUSD’s Parcel Tax Failure and the *Reasonableness* of Teacher Pay in L.A.

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) includes “most of the city of Los Angeles, along with all or portions of 26 cities and unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County. About 4.8 million people live within the District’s boundaries.” In 2018-19, LAUSD’s estimated enrollment was 694,096 students.

On June 04, 2019, voters within the LAUSD boundary could have voted to approve or reject Measure EE, a school parcel tax measure authorizing LAUSD to levy 16-cents-per-square-foot tax over 12 years to fund the LAUSD as follows, in brief:

Proceeds from the Tax shall be used for: lowering class sizes; providing school nursing, library, and counseling services and other health and human services for student support; providing instructional programs, school resources, and materials; retaining and attracting teachers and school employees; and providing necessary administrative services. …

This Measure requires a two-thirds (2/3) vote for passage.

The opportunity to vote was there, but oh so few chose to take it.

Measure EE failed, 45.68% to 54.32%. However, the greater failure of Measure EE is in its incredibly low voter turnout.  According to Los Angeles Almanac, 5.3M individuals were registered to vote at the time of the 2018 general election. So, even if all were not eligible to vote on Measure EE– even if only half were eligible– that would have been over 2.5M voters.

For Measure EE, only 304,321 voters participated (139,027 “yes”; 165,294 “no”).

One could think of that as one voter turning out for every two LAUSD students.

This appears not so much a rejection of Measure EE as it is a rejection of the right (and responsibility) to vote.

Unfortunately, low turnout is common in local elections. (In 2015, to entice voter turnout for a school board runoff between Bernard Keyser and Ref Rodriguez, LAUSD District 5 even entered voters in a lottery offering cash prizes. Even so, voter turnout was only 10%.) However, reading comments/opinions about Measure EE’s low turnout has introduced potential issues, such as an apathy that might be related to already high property taxes, a bloated LAUSD bureaucracy, as well as confusion around campaigning.

I haven’t seen any comments about LAUSD teachers being paid enough or overly paid.

In his June 06, 2019, Forbes piece about the failure of Measure EE, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) career think-tanker Frederick Hess does not address the issue of low voter turnout. Instead, he focuses mostly on the teacher salary component.

Hess implies that the average LAUSD teacher salary of $74,000 a year “strikes a lot of Americans as pretty reasonable.”

Let us take a moment to contextualize AEI and Hess.

The mission of AEI as listed on its tax forms is as follows:

The American Enterprise Institute is a community of scholars and supporters committed to expanding liberty, increasing individual opportunity, and strengthening free enterprise. AEI pursues these ideals through independent thinking and the highest standards of research and exposition.

It should be noted that in 2018, Hess drew a comfortable $235K (up from $197K in 2013) as an AEI “resident scholar,” which has our armchair educator hovering nowhere near that “pretty reasonable” $74K he mentions. Furthermore, AEI president Arthur Brooks garnered an amazing salary boost from 2017 to 2018, doubled from $1.1M to $2.2M, and executive VP David Gerson also doubling his salary, from $526K to $1.1M.

At the end of 2018, AEI listed total net assets of $321M.

Hess pens his think-tankery about education from a plush perch.

He suggests that “when things get real… things can look very different in a place like L.A.” As his evidence, Hess relies on a 2018 Education Next survey in which participants thought that average yearly teacher salaries were thousands lower than the actual average teacher salary in their respective states; when participants were then informed of the actual average teacher salary for their state and subsequently asked if they thought the actual average salary should increase, decrease or stay the same, “support for higher pay dropped sharply—from 67 to 48%.”

Hess closes his piece as follows:

It’s entirely fair to argue that schools deserve more funds. But advocates, educators, and supposedly disinterested reporters have a bad habit of portraying even seemingly reasonable outlays and salaries as outrageously low. When things get real, and signs, radio spots, anti-tax advocates, and local chatter starts to flesh out the messy details, things can look very different to voters in a place like L.A.

This doesn’t mean Americans are penurious or unconcerned about schools. It just may mean that, when push comes to shove, it’ll take more than cheerleading and scare tactics to convince them that the money will be spent wisely and well.

But did support for higher teacher pay drop in Los Angeles?

This is not a national question. Thus, the national-level survey Hess references cannot answer it, which makes referencing it pointless as pertains to Measure EE.

As for that “reasonable” average LAUSD annual teacher salary of $74,000, let us consider how those $74,000 L.A. dollars translate into a salary elsewhere.

Even with a Ph.D. and 24 years of full time experience, I do not make $74,000 as a St. Tammany, Louisiana, public school teacher. In fact, I make $14,000 less.

Or do I?

According to NerdWallet’s Cost of Living Calculator, my current annual salary of $60,000, St. Tammany, LA, dollars buys the same lifestyle as would $92,716 in Los Angeles, CA. (In L.A., median 2-bedroom apartment rent is $2,757; in St. Tammany, it is $1,087.)

Let’s go the other way with that L.A. average annual salary of $74,000: How do those dollars translate into St. Tammany, LA, dollars?

According to NerdWallet, that $74,000 L.A. salary would buy as much as $47,888 does in St. Tammany, LA.

I would be hard pressed to live on an annual salary of $47,888 mid-career and would consider it an embarrassment and insult to be asked to do so. And yes, Mr. Hess, I would consider such a salary to be “outrageously low.”

But there is good news for Hess: If he moves to LA, according to NerdWallet, he only needs to earn $214K to maintain the buying power of his $235K DC salary. (Toungue in cheek, my friends. Tongue in cheek.)

Yet salary is only part of the Measure EE story. Class size reduction and addition of needed personnel were also a part. And then there is this:

Moreover, L.A. Unified must address its ongoing structural deficit so that it may continue offering high-quality educational programs to all of its students. A major shortfall and reductions are anticipated in Fiscal Year 2021-2022 and beyond. If not addressed, it will be necessary to implement harmful cuts to L.A. Unified programs, schools, and employees, including possible teacher and employee lay-offs and increased class sizes.

Possible increased class sizes in two years? Class size is already such an issue at LAUSD that it considered “capping middle and high school English and math at 39” as a January 2019 “significant reduction in class sizes” bargaining point.

Still, for Measure EE, multiple millions of L.A. voters did not show up, and of those who did, 165,294 said “no” to the additional funding, and so, the “no” has it.

Meanwhile, questions continue as to whether LAUSD officials “are artificially inflating the deficit” by over-budgeting and then under-spending. If that is what is happening, such a practice could well be putting the squeeze on classroom teacher salaries and untenable class sizes. Superintendent Austin Beutner notes that $42M has already been “saved” by cutting central office staff. What complicates the admin cost is that LAUSD employs more admin per student than California allows, which means LAUSD must pay $35M in penalties to the state. Beutner states that LAUSD has petitioned the state for an exemption to the rule of max 8 admin per 100 teachers. (LAUSD has 9.5 admin per 100 teachers.)

LAUSD’s three-year budget projections do not include adding staff and reducing class sizes.

Regarding his three-year budget projections, Beutner says, “We’d expect to provide a wage increase to those who work in schools.”

Not sure what Beutner’s “expecting” means, but it seems that an average annual salary of $74,000 L.A. dollars is only “reasonable” to those of notably loftier financial realities.

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Schneider is a southern Louisiana native, career teacher, trained researcher, and author of two other books: A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who In the Implosion of American Public Education and Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?. You should buy these books. They’re great. No, really.

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