Chrisitan Schneider Takes Apart the Deceitful Citizen's United ad for Shrek

Anti-Scott Walker forces take to the air By Christian Schneider on March 21, 2012 With the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election tentatively set for June 5 of this year, anti-Governor Scott Walker forces have already taken to the air to support the preferred union candidate, former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk. In January of this year, Falk publicly promised the public sector unions that she would veto any budget that didn't fully restore their ability to collectively bargain. That promise has begun to bear fruit, as a pro-Falk ad called "Believer" has begun to run, paid for a group called "Wisconsin for Falk." Here's the ad: Of course, it's difficult to tell that this isn't actually an ad run by Falk herself. (Ten bucks if you find anyone who complains about the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision that also condemns this ad.) Despite it being illegal for Falk's campaign to coordinate with a third party group, the ad ends with a professional slow-motion shot of Falk turning towards the camera. How did "Falk for Wisconsin" get such good footage of their preferred candidate? Does Kathleen Falk stand in the middle of the Capitol Rotunda, slowly moving her head back and forth like a Disney World animatronic, and they happened to catch a brief clip of it without her knowing? Regardless, the ad makes several claims that deserve some scrutiny. Let's take a look, claim by claim: Claim One: "Scott Walker, you can't improve our schools when you cut $800 million from education." I feel like Charlie Sheen at a Playmate convention... Where to even start with this? In the budget signed by Walker, state aid to school districts was reduced by $432.1 million in FY 2012 and $361.2 million in FY 2013, for a total of $793.3 million for the biennium. (Not how much less scary the number is when you realize it's over two years.) But in order to make up for this cut, Walker increased the health care and pension contributions from teachers, which the ad doesn't mention. This is the truly ironic twist: Tens of thousands of teachers marched on the Wisconsin State Capitol last year to protest having to pay more for their health and pension benefits. But now, when criticizing Scott Walker for "cutting" state government, they have to pretend that those higher contributions never happened. They want to have it both ways - they argue Walker should be recalled for forcing them to kick in more for their benefits, but they can't let the public know that all that benefit money will now go to help kids in the classroom. "Protests? I don't remember any protests." The final budget also reduced by 5.5% the amount per pupil that school districts can levy in 2012, to make sure property taxpayers aren't stuck with local tax increases. The revenue caps then increase by $50 per pupil in 2013, allowing districts to spend about $42.5 million more. But even with the levy cap reduced, school districts all over the state are coming out ahead by doing things like renegotiating their health care contracts. The Appleton School District saved over $3 million per year simply by opening their health care contract up to competitive bidding - which wasn't possible under the previous state law. (I go into a lot more of these benefits in my piece in the last City Journal.) Of course, none of these savings are mentioned by the pro-Falk ad. The first claim in the ad also asks viewers to buy into the myth that somehow more spending necessarily means better schools. This fallacy has been debunked time and time again - in fact, Walker's budget continues to demonstrate that millions of dollars is being sucked out of the public schools and deposited into the bank accounts of groups like "Falk for Wisconsin" in order to purchase favorable legislation. Beyond that, study after study shows very little connection between spending and results. One only needs to look at the Washington, D.C. public school system, which spends $16,408 per student (over $5,000 more per pupil than Wisconsin), yet remains a national embarrassment. Wisconsin's two-decades old private school choice program spends half the amount per pupil than public schools and turns out students that are as good, if not better, than government-run schools. In fact, many of the changes made by Walker's new collective bargaining law will benefit students without costing anything. School districts will now be able to dismiss teachers based on quality, not solely on seniority, as most teacher contracts mandated. Schools will be able to restructure teacher pay to allow for more incentives, rewarding teachers that are most effective. All of these initiatives will improve schools without spending more. Claim Two: "Walker increased class sizes and cut 3,000 educators from our public schools." Both these claims emanate from a press release issued by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) in November of 2011. The head of DPI, the state Superintendent of Public Instruction, more or less serves as the press secretary for the teachers' unions. DPI works independently of the executive branch, and the superintendent is chosen in low-turnout spring elections that are dominated by teachers' union members. (The department was rendered essentially toothless by former Governor Tommy Thompson during his tenure.) According to the release, Wisconsin has seen1,655 fewer teachers, 172 fewer administrators, 765 fewer aides, and 776 fewer support staff working in schools in districts responding to a survey conducted by the Wisconsin Association of School Districts. But undoubtedly, much of these teacher losses were due to older teachers voluntarily retiring. According to the actual report by the WASDA (p.3) , 3,318 of the teacher losses were due to retirements, while only 680 were due to layoffs. School districts were able to hire 3,805 new teachers to fill these retirement slots. Last August on The Corner, I wrote about 69-year old German teacher Ginny Fleck, who decided she didn't like Walker's new law and subsequently retired. According to the state Department of Public Instruction, Fleck's total compensation package was $88,292 last year ($58,750 in salary, the rest in benefits.) And it is because of those generous benefits (for which she paid nothing), she was able to retire comfortably. 5,000 other teachers emulated Fleck and decided they were comfortable enough to retire - twice the number as the year before. So it's not as if teachers were being "cut" en masse - clearly, many districts thought they could do just as well with fewer teachers. In many cases, some of these same retiring teachers were hired back in part-time capacities, so they could be paid less by the district, and still begin to collect their pension benefits (a practice known as "double-dipping.") Furthermore, those numbers belie many of the stories seen in individual school districts, where administrators credited Walker's reforms for allowing them to retain staff. For instance, the Wauwatosa School District, facing a $6.5 million shortfall, anticipated needing to cut 100 teacher jobs -- yet they were able to spare those teachers through Walker's increased pension and health contribution mandate. "When students come to school in the fall, they're going to see the same things, have the same teachers, and they're going to see new things as well," said Wauwatosa School District board member Phil Kroner upon passage of next year's district budget. More facts, from my City Journal piece: At the outset of the public-union standoff, educators had made dire predictions that Walker's reforms would force schools to fire teachers. In February, to take one example, Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad predicted that 289 teachers in his district would be laid off. Walker insisted that his reforms were actually a job-retention program: by accepting small concessions in health and pension benefits, he argued, school districts would be able to spare hundreds of teachers' jobs. The argument proved sound. So far, Nerad's district has laid off no teachers at all, a pattern that has held in many of the state's other large school districts. No teachers were laid off in Beloit and LaCrosse; Eau Claire saw a reduction of two teachers, while Racine and Wausau each laid off one. Claim three: "Kathleen Falk won't put corporate tax breaks over education." According to a Falk press release, "Gov. Walker signed $2.3 billion in tax breaks over the next decade for the few." Of course, Falk has to stretch it out to a decade to make Walker's tax breaks scarier - why not say the "next century" and knock Walker for $23 billion in tax breaks for the rich? Let's make it a couple centuries, when humans will still curse Scott Walker's name while we're busy fighting the machines. (Angry robots, incidentally, which will be developed due to Walker's pro-corporate tax breaks.) At the beginning of the 2011 session, Walker ushered through a number of bills that would make changes intended to create and retain jobs in Wisconsin. The most notable of these bills allowed businesses a tax break when they relocated their business to Wisconsin from another state. The more jobs a business created, the more the bill would "cost" taxpayers - so, as I argued at the time, Wisconsin should have been rooting for that bill to be as expensive as possible. When Walker took office, the Wisconsin unemployment rate was 7.7% - by January of 2012, it had dropped to 6.9%. In January alone, Wisconsin created 15,700 private sector jobs, all for a few million in job-creating tax breaks. Oh, and the amount Walker's budget spends on public education for the next two years? $8.6 billion. This is just the first ad in what is soon to be an ad war costing the unions tens of millions of dollars. Unfortunately for them, convincing Wisconsin voters to go back to the old days may be a lot tougher than simply purchasing Kathleen Falk.