Re “Paspalis’s Candidness Questioned”
Both medicinal and political patients traditionally are advised to pursue a second opinion in the hope that the Second Wise Man will produce a more appealing diagnosis.
And so this afternoon, with my aging lab coat flapping in the wind, while wearing my stethoscope backward to amuse non-distractible patients, here is, shall we say, an adjusted view of my colleague George Laase’s take this morning on a weeks-ago pronouncement by School Board president Kathy Paspalis.
Does the outlier gadget known as Step-and-Column – automatic annual increases tied to years of service, unrelated to performance – qualify as a pay raise, as the concept traditionally is understood?
According to Mr. Laase, yes.
He said Ms. Paspalis was errant when she said – just before a School Board vote – that Culver City teachers have not received a pay raise in five years.
Brushing aside philosophical weeds growing in an otherwise becalmed conversational lawn, the debatable issue is terminology rather than rectitude.
Tantalizingly, we are delicately walking barefoot through a rhetorical minefield.
Teacher pay steadily has grown over the half-decade, not, however, via the traditional route of raises in pay.
Raises are widely understood as performance-linked increases formally authorized by the employer – not raw longevity, outlasting others. Typically, pay raises are achieved in negotiation with the employee(s) or his/their delegate.
None of those factors was present in the Step-and-Column model.
I would judge in favor of Ms. Paspalis’s approach, that teachers have not received a raise during the debated period even though their paychecks have grown.
