This year’s voter information guide has seventy seven pages for eight propositions. Damn! That’s a lot to read, especially for today’s busy voter. For each prop there’s summary information, analysis by the legislative analyst, arguments for and against (and rebuttals, which are my favorite part), and the text of the propositions themselves. Unless you’ve got like an entire evening and a twelver of some good beer, you just can’t make it through all of that.

The summary is pretty good — it’s useful to know, for instance, the name of the proposition. The arguments for and against, as we saw for Prop 73, aren’t always the most well-reasoned texts in the world, so if you’re in a hurry you might as well give those a miss. If you’re really brave you could read the actually text of the propositions, but there are too many sections and subsections and bullet points and what have you for my taste.

The real gold for the time-pressed voter is the legislative analyst’s section. More specifically, the “Fiscal Effects” section, which really gets to the meat of the whole thing. If you’re truly short on time you could just read this one short section and get a pretty good idea of what the prop is all about. Let’s try it with Proposition 74, Public School Teachers. Waiting Period for Permanent Status. Dismissal. Initiative Statute.

Fiscal Effects

The proposition would affect costs relating to teacher compensation, performance evaluations, and other activities.

Ok, wow, this is going pretty quickly. I guess this is about teachers or something.

Effect on Teacher Compensation Costs

The proposition would affect school district teacher costs in a variety of ways. The net impact would depend on future district actions, and these effects would vary significantly by district. For example, districts would experience reduced teacher costs in the following cases:

Apparently this initiative doesn’t set any hard rules in terms of spending or anything like that, which makes it somewhat murky. Let’s see how it might reduce teacher costs.

• Given the longer probationary period, districts could dismiss more teachers during their first five years. This could result in salary savings by replacing higher salaried teachers toward the end of their probationary period with lower salaried teachers just beginning their probationary period.

Passing this initiative could let us save money by swapping out higher-salaried teachers for lower-salaried teachers. Fair enough.

• Similarly, due to the proposition’s modifications to the dismissal process, school districts might experience greater turnover among permanent teachers. This too would result in teacher-related savings from replacing higher salaried veteran teachers with lower salaried, less experienced teachers.

Wow, same thing. If we pass 74, we would have all different sorts of opportunities to get rid of those pesky, well-paid veteran teachers and replace them with lower-salaried rookies.

In contrast, districts would experience increased teacher costs in the following instances:

For your reading enjoyment: the other shoe!

• The supply of teachers could be reduced because the longer probationary period and modified dismissal process might be perceived as increasing job insecurity. This would have the effect of putting upward pressure on teacher compensation costs.

Apparently there’s a chance that Prop 74 would make it harder to hire teachers, thus driving up the price of employing them. That doesn’t sound too cool.

• The longer probationary period could lead districts to retain some struggling new teachers beyond the current two-year period to give them additional chances to succeed. By retaining these teachers — instead of replacing them with lower-cost entry level teachers — this would have the effect of increasing teacher salary costs above what they otherwise would have been.

If we pass 74, we could possibly pay more for struggling teachers.

As noted above, the net impact on a school district could vary significantly, depending on such factors as the local labor market, the perceived desirability of working in the district, and district actions in response to the measure.

Which tells me that we don’t know which or any of the above scenarios we might get from school district to school district.

So, in summary, in a state with Prop 74, we would have in uncertain quantities some subset of the following:

• cheaper teachers on account of firing them just before their probation is up
• cheaper, less experienced teachers
• a seller’s market for teachers, leading them to be more expensive
• more expensive struggling teachers

This reads to me like we’ll either be chintzing on teachers and losing the experienced veterans or paying more for rookies. Such a deal! All of this just from the analysis of the fiscal effects of the proposition. I’m pretty sure that I don’t need to read the other five pages on Prop 74.

Now, I don’t recommend this particular method of decision making (although it works for me). You can find the text of the proposition and arguments both Pro and Con at the League of Women Voters page for Proposition 74. Read it yourself and make up your own mind.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 3rd, 2005 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Election '05. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.