The Michigan Education Association’s newest strategy is to portray their teachers as underpaid while hoping no one is paying attention to the figures they are using to make their case, says one education policy expert.

“Clearly, their facts are not straight,” said Michael Van Beek, education policy director at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

It started when Steve Cook, the MEA’s president, said in a Detroit News op-ed that one teacher who contacted him was in his second year of teaching with a master’s degree and made $31,000 a year.

Michigan Capitol Confidential looked at the contracts of the lowest-paying school districts in the state and couldn’t find a contract that paid a second-year teacher with a master’s degree $31,000 a year.  

However, in an interview with another newspaper, Doug Pratt, the MEA's spokesman, took what Cook described as the salary of one teacher and turned that $31,000 into the “average salary” of a second-year teacher with a master’s degree.

It’s hard to imagine any second-year teacher with a master’s degree earning $31,000 a year in Michigan, much less it being the statewide average. Consider that Eau Claire has the lowest average teacher’s salary in the state. The Eau Claire teachers’ contract states a second-year teacher with a master’s degree made $34,385 a year in 2010-11. And districts like the Troy School District pay a second-year teacher with a master’s degree $49,132 in 2011-12.

Neither Pratt nor Cook responded to an email seeking comment.

Pratt told the Livingston Daily News that “the average second-year Michigan teacher with a master's degree currently takes home $500 every two weeks after taxes and employee health care and pension deductions, and if he or she opts for a deduction toward child care.”

In the article, Pratt is attributed with saying that current school employees pay 3.9 percent of their salary toward retirement benefits. James Hohman, a fiscal policy analyst at the Mackinac Center, said teachers contribute on a sliding scale; up to 6.4 percent of their salary to the state pension plan and are paying another 3 percent of their salary for retiree health care. They also can pay up to 20 percent for health care costs under the new state law, but many districts negotiated contracts with lower cost-sharing. For example, that Eau Claire teacher would pay 10 percent of health care costs, or about $1,769 a year for the MESSA family plan.

Van Beek questioned Pratt’s logic of including child care costs and pension contributions when talking about how much after tax money a teacher has in discretionary income.

“It (child care costs) is like adding your grocery bill,” Van Beek said. “It’s a cost that you incur if you have children and decide to work outside the home. It’s a cost everyone incurs one way or another. If you have kids you have to take on costs to take care of them. Just like you have to eat to live, you have to buy food.”

Van Beek said that pension contribution will generate a yearly pension of about $30,000 to $40,000 during retirement and shouldn’t be considered a cost, but a savings.

“They can retire when they are 55 and have subsidized post-retirement health care benefits and have a defined-benefit pension that grows by 3 percent every year,” Van Beek said.

Current Republican caucuses in the Michigan Legislature are generally more fiscally conservative than in previous years, but the incentives for individual members to serve the political system ahead of the people are no less strong.

Prison spending provides a useful case study.

Despite having fewer prisoners, overall prison spending is 26 percent higher than in 2000, although it has fallen a very small amount since hitting a peak in 2008. This has frustrated some lawmakers. Sen. John Proos, R-St. Joseph, chairs the Senate’s appropriations subcommittee for corrections, and Mirs News reported last week he thinks such high spending “doesn’t make sense” given that “the prison system losing 14 facilities and being 8,000 prisoners lighter” than seven years ago (Mirs’ characterization of his words).

As Michigan Capitol Confidential reported Saturday, Proos and his colleagues are trying to change that, and in the process are exposing just how bloated and wasteful the system really is.

“We found that some prisons have up to four library staff members,” Proos told CapCon. In addition to $5.6 million in savings from “right-sizing” prison library staff, his committee removed funding for 300 assistant resident unit supervisors, saving another $32.1 million.

These scissors-cuts are laudable, but represent a very small portion of the $2 billion prison budget. More important, they do nothing to change an underlying incentive structure that encourages more spending instead of greater efficiency. Unless they change that dynamic, legislators risk finding themselves in a “whack-a-mole” match, with the politically-adroit prison bureaucracy and unions steadily replacing old bloat with new.

Which leads to another development recently reported by CapCon, the prison guard union’s success so far at stopping an effort to change those incentives, a very modest prison privatization bill in the House, where Republicans hold a 66-44 majority. It’s sponsored by Rep. Jon Bumstead, R-Newaygo, who told CapCon, “(W)hat we're seeing so far is the corrections unions and the UAW being very active on this.”

In plain-English, that means right now at least eight House Republicans are actively helping the union bosses halt real reform. If this holds, it will be just the latest in a long string of prison union wins.

For example, in 2002, gubernatorial candidate Jennifer Granholm publically promised the SEIU-affiliated prison guards union she would shut down Michigan’s first and only experiment in privatized prisons, a so-called “punk prison” located in Baldwin. The union later crowed in its newsletter, “Last year Governor Granholm’s budget eliminated funding for the Michigan Youth Correctional Facility . . . fulfilling a promise Candidate Granholm had made to MCO.”

Government employee unions fear privatization because they understand it changes the dynamics that generate ever-higher spending. More than one study has shown how having even a small percentage of prisoners in privatized prisons generates savings throughout the system, because managers and unions in the unprivatized prisons are forced to “sharpen their pencils” in an effort to avoid the same fate.

Applying the outcomes reported by one such study to Michigan’s prison system suggests that even a small amount of privatization here could save more than $150 million.

Revealing his frustration with system-serving colleagues, Rep. Bumstead told CapCon, “In the last election we ran on the issue of protecting taxpayer dollars and controlling costs. This legislation is something we can do now that would be keeping that promise.”

At least candidate Granholm’s promise to the union bosses was open and public. Some current House Republicans may have given similar promises, but secretly, and while leading voters to expect something different.

On the other side of the aisle, liberals who help artificially increase the cost of core government functions by making themselves handmaidens to rich and powerful government employee unions undermine their claims of wanting to dedicate more resources to helping those left behind in our society.