In Washington, D.C., where schools are among the worst in the industrialized world, Superintendent Arlene Ackerman wanted to give new teachers an 11 percent boost in pay. That would have made the entry salary $30,000--not bad in a city where similarly educated twenty-somethings head to Capitol Hill to work in jobs in the low $20,000s. But the Washington Teachers' Union killed the proposal on the grounds that the raise was unfair to existing teachers, who started for less.
A similar front-end boost in pay was nixed in Richmond, Virginia, where a plan would have given new teachers a $5,000 signing bonus. No good, said union boss Robert Gray, who complained to The Richmond Times Dispatch that such a policy "sends a signal that inexperienced teachers are more valuable than [experienced] teachers."
And then there's San Francisco, where the Edison Charter Academy started paying its teachers $2,800 to $3,600 a year more than their public school counterparts. The United Educators of San Francisco, the union representing most of the city's teachers, filed a grievance with the school district, which oversees the charter school. Beyond the raw dollar amounts, the union was disturbed by another disparity: Edison's teachers put in eight hours a day and work a 190-day school year. That compares to a seven-hour day and 181-day year for San Francisco's other public school teachers.
More pay for more work. Where might that sort of precedent lead?
D.C. United
By Brian Doherty
Lord Acton didn't know from term limits, but he articulated an enduring truth about government with his oft-quoted maxim that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." A new study from the Cato Institute suggests that this tendency is a function of time.Since the GOP sells itself as the party of smaller government, author Aaron Steelman reviewed only the voting records of Republicans. He compared newer members of Congress--those who would still be eligible for office if the Contract with America's term limit provisions (three terms in the House, two terms in the Senate) had become law--to their longer-serving elders.
On 27 of the 31 tax, spending, and regulatory votes examined, the junior statesmen were more likely to opt for government restraint. For example, 61 percent of the junior GOP senators voted against hiking the minimum wage, while only 22 percent of senior solons did so. On a House vote to reduce funding for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a welfare handout for big corporations doing business abroad, 61 percent of the younger representatives saw fit to cut; only 40 percent of their elders followed suit.
Since writing term limits into the 1994 Contract with America and engineering a lackluster losing vote on the matter shortly after gaining a congressional majority, the Republicans have largely kept mum on the issue. Perhaps that's because, as the party in power, they now see term limits as a nuisance rather than a necessity. Steelman's analysis gives further evidence that for lawmakers, being in Washington eventually means being for Washington.
Where's Pa?
By Charles Paul Freund
Politics in the shadow of the Clinton presidency is turning a good trick: With the sex-war "meltdown" of Washington, political discourse has become as scabrous as it was in the 19th century. Then, mostly false tales of the private lives of public men spewed even from the nation's pulpits, and many newspapers were filled with salacious rumors and outright lies.The case of Bill Clinton's purported "love child" is entirely typical; you could fill an orphanage with all the rumored presidential illegitimacies. Indeed, many presidents have themselves been rumored to have been the offspring of disreputable couplings. Even that's said of Clinton: Conspiracists claim that he's a son of Winthrop Rockefeller, thus the nephew of David, and thus an heir to the New World Order.
The Clinton love-child story surfaced in the tabloids in 1992, when a Little Rock prostitute claimed to be the mother of the governor's 7-year-old son. This rumor was kept alive in the anti-Clinton underground, where it was believed that mother and son had been hustled off to Australia. But a tabloid's recent effort to prove the story by using published Clinton DNA data was the story's undoing. Even as would-be mom Bobby Ann Williams was giving TV interviews, the results came back negative.
It's rare that such rumors are ever fully squelched. In 1927--the pre-DNA era--Nan Britton proclaimed herself to be the mother of Warren Harding's illegitimate child, and it is still unclear if her claim was true. The President's Daughter, Brit-ton's self-published account of a claimed six-year affair with Harding (including trysts in an Oval Office closet), became a best-seller even though leading bookstores wouldn't handle it. It was made into the 1928 film Children of No Importance.
Grover Cleveland publicly acknowledged an out-of-wedlock son by Maria Crofts Halpin in response to lurid charges in the appalling 1880 campaign. But neither Cleveland nor Halpin really knew who the boy's father was; Cleveland, who was unmarried when the child was born, may have acted out of honor, protecting the reputation of a late friend and sparing the delicate Victorian feelings of that friend's widow.
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