Election Integrity: News Miner 16
Notes on teacher pay; Griswold, Anderson, Aadland, and Pettersen on election integrity; fear-mongering about transgenderism; an important fossil find; and more.
Colorado Teacher Pay
Complete Colorado published my article, “Behind those misleading headlines on Colorado teacher pay,” about Colorado teachers faring worst in terms of the “pay gap” compared to others.
I explain the main problem with the study in question:
It compares the salaries of teachers to the salaries of relatively high-earning Coloradans often working in fields of science and technology. . . .
As the EPI study measures things, a teacher with exactly the same standard of living is deemed worse off simply by virtue of living around higher earners. That’s ridiculous. If anything, teachers’ lives are better, not worse, by virtue of living around a bunch of relatively wealthier people. By EPI’s absurd accounting, if everyone in Colorado besides teachers suddenly lost half their revenues, Colorado teachers would move higher in the rankings.
If you looked at benefits and (probably) total hours worked, the gap shrinks anyway.
Overall, Colorado teachers make about the median salary for teachers nationally and come in less than the mean.
Then I make a more-radical point:
If we had anything resembling a market in education, schools would, if they needed to, increase how much they pay teachers in order to attract more talent, and pass on the costs via higher tuition (or more fundraising or whatever). I think that, in a real market, teachers probably would make more on average, and salaries would range more widely depending on skill.
Griswold and Anderson on Election Integrity
Complete Colorado published my article on Jena Griswold’s remarks on election integrity. Both she and Pam Anderson, her Republican opponent in the Secretary of State race, graciously weighed in. I start off:
People can exaggerate and still worry about real problems. Take Jena Griswold and her recent remarks about election integrity. She overstated the risks pretty dramatically, but nevertheless various candidates running throughout the country pose a real threat to free and fair elections.
See also a Bolt article about Wyoming’s “election denier” Chuck Gray.
Pettersen Condemns Aadland’s Conspiracy Mongering
Erik Aadland, the Republican candidate for Colorado’s seventh Congressional seat, said last year, “The 2020 election, it was rigged. Absolutely rigged.” I asked both him and his Democratic opponent, Brittany Pettersen, about this. Aadland did not respond to my inquiry. Here’s what Pettersen said:
MAGA Republicans like my opponent who perpetuate Trump’s big lie are a threat to our democracy. We need people in the US House who we can count on to certify future elections and defend our democracy, no matter who wins the election. . . . By falsely claiming elections are “rigged” candidates for office undermine the very democratic institutions they are asking voters to entrust them with. Electing 2020 election deniers puts our democracy at stake.
It so happens that these candidates are running in my area. I disagree with Pettersen about damn near everything. But she's right about this. Until and unless Aadland chooses to clearly and publicly denounce his previous comments about the election, I cannot see those remarks as anything other than disqualifying.
Cole Wist first brought Aadland’s remarks to my attention. Both Wist and Mario Nicolais, former Republicans, have endorsed Pettersen.
Aadland Dithers on 9/11 Conspiracies
One would think that it would be easy for political candidates to toss aside conspiracy mongering about 9/11. But when someone suggested to Aadland at a Republican event that the Israelis participated in the “takedown of the Twin Towers,” all Aadland could do was evade and dither. “There’s a lot of complexity in our geopolitical world. . .” “I don’t have the access to the information. . .” Bullshit. The Colorado Times Recorder has the full remarks.
The Transgender Fear-Mongering of Some Colorado Republicans
Scott Bottoms is a pastor and the Republican candidate for HD15. Here is what he said about transgenderism in schools, as reported by Heidi Beedle:
This is demonic stuff. Another thing that I’m going to try to do when it comes to legislation, this is a big shot in the dark, but this is what I would try to do, is if you’re some kind of teacher, counselor, administrator, somebody in a school district and you encourage a six or seven-year-old girl to go mutilate herself because she was kind of a tomboy at the time, I’m going to put legislation through that says that is pedophilia and you’re going to go to prison. Yeah, this is a big deal.
As Beedle notes, Bottoms’s claims about what’s happening in schools are a total fantasy.
One can worry about how some educators handle transgender issues in schools without resorting to the sort of hateful, dangerous fear-mongering to which Bottoms resorts.
In related news (PBS). . . Montezuma County candidate for sheriff Odis Sikes said drag-queen story time should be outlawed, “suggested sending deputies to school board meetings to ensure teachers are not teaching critical race theory or gender expression” (PBS summarizes), and baselessly accused transgender people of “grooming” children.
In still more news. . . As Kyle Clark reports, Douglas County Commissioner George Teal threatened to try to ban PrideFest from county property (which would be straightforwardly illegal). Thankfully, fellow Republican commissioner Abe Laydon condemned the “thinly-veiled bigotry and anti-gay rhetoric.” Good for him!
Quick Takes
More ‘Free’ Education: “The Care Forward Colorado Program will invest $26 million of federal COVID stimulus funding into the program for two years, guaranteeing free schooling for students interested in becoming certified nursing assistants, emergency medical technicians, pharmacy technicians, phlebotomy technicians, medical assistants or dental assistants.”—Colorado Sun
Housing: “Eagle County School District is pleading with area residents to offer vacant spaces to educators at rates they can afford and will even matchmake teachers and property owners.”—Colorado Sun
Elections: Mario Nicolais is a fan of Alaska’s new system of nonpartisan primaries plus ranked voting. Sounds fine to me. But I’d be just as happy, maybe more happy, with just eliminating primaries altogether, implementing fair ballot-access rules across the board, and using approval voting, wherein people can vote for as many candidates as they want. It’s a much simpler system, and it accomplishes the main goal of avoiding split votes for comparable candidates.
Fossil Find: A team involving Tyler Lyson of the Denver Nature Museum discovered the fossil of a freshwater gar that lived (relatively) soon after the asteroid collision that wiped out the dinosaurs. Lyson said, “The fossil speaks to how quickly life rebounded in freshwater ecosystems after the giant dinosaur-killing asteroid struck Earth, which was the single worst day for multicellular life on Earth. This discovery suggests that freshwater life rebounded very quickly, within thousands of years, and not hundreds of thousands or millions of years as we had previously assumed.” Here’s a photo released by the museum.
More Griswold: After her team kicked Eric Sondermann out of a campaign event, Jena Griswold called him to apologize (part I, II, and III).
More Election Conspiracy Mongering: Great—yet another conspiracy-mongering Republican candidate (Katie Lehr).