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Nobody messes with extra pay for cops
By adamg on Tue, 04/21/2009 - 8:15am
Legislature set to restore bonus pay for police officers with college degrees even as it gets ready to cut social services.
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Comments
So much for shared sacrifices
Yes, we want cops who are well educated. Incentive pay for completing degree programs is not much different than private sector programs that cover tuition or other work situations where adding a degree brings with it the fair expectation of higher pay.
Zero budgeting the Quinn Bill funding was not a good idea. However, with the state budget in crisis, a reduction consistent with what other state-funded programs are experiencing would seem to be in line.
If you do not have a great
If you do not have a great programming offering more money for educated cops then you end up losing the cops to other places. I know lawyers who are police officers, and its great for the departments they work in and for the cities and towns in which they serve. They are making less then if they were a lawyer in a private practice working similar hours (and without the gun fire) but they enjoy being cops. Cut that pay and you may start to lose these good cops and will be left with a station full of high school graduates (no problem with that, I am not a snob, but I think its better to have a mix in the same way where it wouldnt be good to have a station full of lawyers either.) This program allows a police officer to meet his educational potential while staying on the force, its a very good thing.
we want staff in general who are well educated...
but there is no quinn bill for civilians, encouraging them to get better educations. if there were, i would be earning over $10K more than i am now. instead, we civil servants who are not protected by powerful police unions are looking at pay cuts, additional costs in health insurance, and a slew of lay-offs.
when the state is in fiscal crisis, we should *all* take the hit. it shouldn't be forced down to the lowest levels.
cutting, or even lowering, the quinn bill makes sense at this time.
Um excuse me? As a civil
Um excuse me? As a civil servant you have the ability to get a college degree, put in years of service and then climb up the ladder based off of your degree and your time spent doing a certain job. Explain to me how you would not be capable of making more money if you got a graduate degree???
I work outside of government and what happens with me is I move up the non profit ladder as I get another degree and get more experience, and you should be the same. I dont want to pay a secretary more money to sit behind a desk because she has a PHD in something, Id much rather she move on up and out.
Your comparing apples and oranges.
i am afraid it's you who is comparing fruits.
the police career incentive pay program (the Quinn bill) isn't about "moving up". it is an incentive program for additional education in the field they work in. and in a perfect world, it's a great idea. i do want an educated force, and i want to keep good officers in massachusetts.
but in tough times, it's hard to rationalize why only the officers are entitled to incentive pay for education, while everybody else struggles with extreme cuts. nobody is paying me more because i have an MS in my field.
this isn't about moving up the ladder, it's about equity.
I think your proving my
I think your proving my point. In the police force its NOT about moving up. So without the extra pay whats the incentive to get a masters degree if you can become Sergent or Captain without it??? Where as in other civil service positions oftentimes there is a requirement for certain degrees. Nothing is stopping the fine civil servants of Massachusetts from getting masters degrees and law degrees and getting better jobs in the state system.
A degree does help move up
Even though it is not a requirement to get promoted it is something that helps with promotion. If two officers vying for a promotion are tie in all other aspects, the one with the degree gets the job (if the promo is on the up-and-up).
But what about commitment to your field?
In state systems such as Early Intervention, Department of Mental Health, Department of Developmental Services, etc., people don't get paid more if they get more degrees and stay in the same position. Sometimes there might be a slightly higher position that does factor in one's education (like doing essentially the same job but being a supervisor), but generally, there's no increase in pay if one wants to keep working directly with children with developmental delays or keep working directly with adults in a residential program. There's little to no financial incentive for getting degrees and licenses. If we want to be paid more, the only real options are to become a bureaucrat who has little contact with the people we serve, or to leave the system and provide private services for the extraordinarily wealthy members of our community.
This isn't remotely equal to the system where police officers get paid more to do their same job once they've gotten a degree, or are given opportunities to do a more prestigious form of their same job. Human services programs don't have a system of ranking officers who get paid substantially more to do the same sort of work but with additional responsibilities. In our programs, we just work it out based on who has the appropriate skills and length of time on the job to do things like chair a committee or be the one who gets assigned to those particularly involved clients. We make it work because we don't want to see people getting less-than-optimal care, but we really ought to be rewarded for it the way the police are.
Not different from the
Not different from the private sector? In the private sector you have to get a degree to get a job. You cant apply to be a doctor and start operating on people, and then expect the taxpayers to pay you to take classes as you gain education to be able to perform your job. For some reason, cops believe that this education is necessary yet do not make it a requirement for being a cop.
Why not just make having a BA a requirement if its so beneficial? And the 'education' has been widely panned as a joke, 'criminal justice' degrees the cops take remotely from their union hq. It would be much more useful if they took foreign language classes.
Great Idea
Now when they're standing around drinking coffee and watching holes in the ground, they can recite Plato to passing motorists.
I used to think the Quinn Bill...
...was a total scam. And it's still got some problems, not the least of which is that over the years, some pretty weak degree programs have been approved for credit.
But a bit of education -- yup, including Plato -- can't hurt. Being a good cop must be one of the hardest jobs in the world. (Like many jobs, it's probably not too hard to be a crappy one.) The cops who take seriously this opportunity to earn a degree or two are likely to be more thoughtful at their jobs because of it.
weak degree programs...
luckily some of the poorer programs (WNEC, Anna Maria) have been shut down but there are still some easy ones out there that I don't think make the grade (Curry).
One of the problems I had with it is that a Masters degree from Harvard in Sociology or Urban studies doesn't count, but Criminal justice administration from UMass Lowell does (and from the older schools as well).
Its the undergrad education that was the big problem with Quinn Bill funding though. Many adults that could never had gone through a real college "clepped" dozens of college credits and got undergraduate degrees without really deserving it.
I think they've squeezed a lot of the bad programs out though and have made it somewhat tougher to get the money (Curry aside)
good to hear
I'm glad to hear there's been some sorting of wheat from chaff. I recall several years back a few newspaper articles about the less-than-great graduate programs that were on the approved list.
I'm fine with approving distance and flexible learning options so long as they are legit and require real academic work. But it sounded like some programs were just a mess.
Distance learning doesn't work
...in fields where a good portion of the work has to do with the finer points of interacting with people, managing multiple tasks at once, making judgment calls on the fly, etc.
In most of the human services fields other than police and correctional work, there are national and state boards that give strict guidelines as to what kind of training is sufficient, and all of these require extensive internships where one's work is being closely monitored and critiqued. There's no way in hell that anyone's going to start licensing nurses or teachers or therapists or social workers who've only done the book-larnin' part of their education. Why should a books-only criminal justice degree be worth anything? It's the same kind of work, and it requires the same kind of training to be done well.
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
Actually...when it comes to distance learning...
...there are indeed graduate-level professional programs offered in fields that require licensing, so long as certain residency requirements are met. This might include required internships and/or field work in fields such as psychology, teaching, criminal justice, etc. Because cops are already in the field, academic work and online discussion groups can form the basis of the credit earning experience in a field such as criminal justice or public administration.
Like bad residential programs, bad distance learning offerings can be a sham. But with good distance learning programs, you can't hide in the back of a classroom. The only way to earn the credit is to do the work and to participate. (I speak from experience, having earned degrees the old fashioned way and via distance learning.)
Not entirely distance though
You can't get licensed as a therapist without having done the extensive hands-on work. The boards require it, and the code of ethics requires that you're doing group supervision and a bunch of other things that have to be done face-to-face while in the process of your internship. You can take some of your memorizing-stuff classes online, like theoretical models and psychodiagnosis, but you absolutely have to do the applied stuff, well, in an applied sort of way.
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
They're getting bonuses while we're getting cuts
Yeah, and in the social services, where additional degrees require things like doing research projects and doing clinical training internships (you know, stuff that actually greatly adds to someone's expertise and skills) we don't get bonuses for getting additional degrees. While the police force is getting their bonuses for online degrees that seem to be mostly a review of things they already know and have been doing, we're having to cut staff positions and cut the numbers of community members who are eligible for services.
quinn bill
One of the points of this whole situation is that if the Quinn Bill is funded 0% by the state, many towns have agreements with police Unions to fund the quinn bill up to 100% from the towns budget. That forces local taxpayers and local governments to make other cuts.
There are lots of problems with the current quinn bill system, but cutting it 100% at the state level is not the best answer I don't think.
Why can't the state budge bill void those agreements?
If each city and town is a creature of the state, the state should be able to abolish those agreements at the same time as it cuts the Quinn Bill to 0%.
collective bargining I assume.
A contract is a contract and courts have ruled as such I believe.
yeah, and if the unions lose money...
then who is going to pay to light that darn Zakim bridge?!?
yeah, yeah. i know. different union. but still ;)