State’s revenue surplus stuffed under mattresses, teachers, schools left behind
As I read through Tennessee’s latest revenue update, I can’t help but think that state leaders are acting like a “broke dad” when all the evidence points to the opposite.
So far this year, Tennessee has taken in $1.2 billion MORE than was estimated.
On the low end, it seems likely that the state will have a $2 billion surplus THIS YEAR when all is said and done.
Let me put it this way: You’re a parent. You have a paid for house, two paid for cars, and enough money in the bank that you can NOT work for a year and still cover basic expenses.
Is that the time when you tell your family that you will all be moving into a car and sleeping in the parking lot of a nearby park?
On a range of issues – from the DCS crisis to third grade retention to teacher compensation, Tennessee policymakers are refusing to invest the revenue provided by taxpayers.
A recent report indicated that only 25% of Tennessee teachers earn $60,000 or more a year.
Here’s an idea: Make the starting pay for Tennessee’s teachers $60,000.
Do it THIS YEAR.
The state can afford it.
In fact, given the teacher shortage, the state really can’t afford not to do it.
Unless, that is, the state is hurtling toward full privatization of public schools and figures public K-12 teacher salaries won’t be the state’s worry soon.
Sure, the UT football team claimed a big win over Alabama in football this year. However, teachers in Alabama still earn more than teachers here in Tennessee.
And yes, that’s even AFTER Gov. Bill Lee’s proposed teacher pay raise announced in last night’s State of the State address.
“Tennessee teachers are the best in the Southeast, and we have the outcomes and data to back that up, but we are not paid as the best and are behind our peers in neighboring states,” said TEA President Tanya Coats. “Teachers, like other Tennesseans, have been affected by inflation and rising costs in the family budget. State revenues are strong, and we’ve seen record budget surpluses for many years. More can be done to improve the economics of being a professional teacher in our state, and TEA will continue to advocate for professional salaries for our dedicate educators.”
Coats noted that the proposed teacher pay increase will bring Tennessee’s minimum teacher salary to $42,000 a year. She then pointed out that Alabama’s minimum teacher pay is $43,358.
Yes, that’s right – even with a 4% raise this year, Tennessee teachers will still lag behind neighboring Alabama in teacher pay.
This despite the state facing a significant teacher shortage AND having a surplus in excess of $2 billion.
The Tennessee State Board of Education is looking at ways to smooth the pathway into teaching, including by eliminating a key hurdle faced by some candidates – a test of teaching aptitude.
Currently, all teachers in Tennessee must pass the education teacher performance assessment, whether they have a degree in another field or they’re in the process of student teaching.
But some are looking to drop the requirement for this assessment.
If adopted, the exemption would only apply to about 800-900 teacher certification applicants a year – those who are already “job-embedded” candidates doing teaching under the supervision of a mentor teacher.
The idea, according to officials at the State Board of Education, is to eliminate a barrier to teacher certification for those with a high level of training.
However, as the story notes, schools of education and even recent teacher applicants say the certification process, including the testing, is a key element of preparation for the classroom.
It was about a decade ago when then-Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman pushed the State Board to increase the rigor of requirements to become a certified teacher.
This was supposed to dramatically improve education quality in Tennessee.
Now, facing both a teacher shortage AND a reluctance by policymakers to significantly improve teacher compensation, the State Board is seeking to lower requirements so more people will be eligible for these positions.
It’s noteworthy that in each case, the reform in question did NOT result in any increase in compensation or improvement in working conditions for teachers.
It’s as if investing in teachers is a bridge too far – instead, so-called education “reformers” will continue to try everything possible EXCEPT dramatically raising pay in order to address the issue at hand.
That’s the impact of inflation on starting teacher pay in Metro Nashville.
Teachers in Nashville have seen significant pay bumps in recent years, but as inflation takes a toll, those increases effectively mean a starting teacher today makes less than a starting teacher did back in 2015.
But when you take into account inflation and run the 2015 and 2022 salaries through the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator, $42,082 has the same buying power as $52,242 now.
Therefore, a new teacher is making $4,121 less now compared to what they would’ve made in 2015.
That’s a number that hits particularly hard in one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities – where housing costs have been steadily on the rise.
As Mintzer notes:
There are more than 120 teacher positions still open as of a couple of weeks ago in Metro Nashville Public Schools, according to a spokesperson for the district.
Despite all the rhetoric from Tennessee policymakers about funds for schools and teacher salaries, Tennessee teachers continue to experience a “wage gap.” That is, teachers in Tennessee earn nearly 24% less than similarly educated peers.
The Economic Policy Institute has once again published its analysis of teacher pay relative to the pay of similar professionals and found that at a national level, the wage gap is 23.5%. In Tennessee, that gap is 23.8%. As EPI notes, in 28 states, the gap is greater than 20%. Yes, even when you add the benefits package (typically more generous than in other jobs), the penalty is still well above 10%.
What does this mean, though?
Well, all those stories about a teacher shortage start to make sense. Whether there are more actual vacancies this year than in years past (as seems to be the case in some districts), the issue is being talked about more seriously this year.
The numbers from EPI indicate that the value proposition for teachers just isn’t that great. Combine that with heated political rhetoric about “groomer teachers” and book banning, and you may begin to understand why there aren’t as many qualified educators available and eager to fill all the vacancies.
Here’s more from EPI on how they conducted the study:
First, we use Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Groups (CPS-ORG) data for the wage analyses. We focus on weekly wages, which avoids comparisons of weekly hours worked or length of the work year (i.e., the “summers off” issue for teachers) between teachers and other college graduates.3 The sample is restricted to full-time workers (working at least 35 hours per week), 18 to 64 years old, with at least a bachelor’s degree. The education restriction is made because teachers today need at least a bachelor’s degree to teach. The sample is further limited to those who reported their wage information directly (i.e., nonresponders whose wage data was imputed by BLS are excluded).
Trends Over Time
In 1979, teachers earned $1,052 per week (in 2021 dollars), which is 22.9% less than the $1,364 earned by other college graduates. The difference in wages between teachers and other college graduates decreased slightly into the mid-1990s, falling to 15.7% in 1996, but then increased considerably during the tight labor markets of the late 1990s into the early 2000s. The wages of nonteacher college graduates jumped by 13.5% from 1996 to 2002 during an unusual time of exceptional wage growth among low-, middle-, and high-wage earners. But inflation-adjusted wages of teachers did not grow strongly during this period, in part because teacher pay is often set by long-term contracts, and public-sector wages are not as volatile (they do not rise and fall as much) as private-sector wages. Teacher weekly wages remained flat in inflation-adjusted terms from 1996 to 2002, increasing just 0.3%, leaving the real average weekly wage of teachers 25.5% less than their college graduate counterparts.
This difference remained fairly consistent, with some ups and downs, throughout the 2000s. But, a significant widening of the wage gap has occurred since 2010 as teacher wages remained relatively flat while wages of other college graduates took off. The difference increased by 7.6 percentage points between 2010 and 2021—leaving the average weekly wages of teachers 32.9% behind that of other college graduates by 2021, the largest difference recorded in our series.
Now, though, we’re still looking at wage gaps of around 24% – in part due to a tight labor market in other professions increasing overall salaries. Of course, available federal stimulus funds and states with budget surpluses have meant some increases in teacher compensation – still, it is not enough to achieve anything like parity with other professions.
As EPI notes:
Generally, the teacher wage penalty has been on a worsening trajectory since the mid-1990s. A slight shrinking of the gap in 2019 was short lived. It widened again in 2020, to 21.6%, and in 2021, the penalty reached a record 23.5%. That means that, on average, teachers earned just 76.5 cents on the dollar compared with what similar college graduates earned working in other professions—and much less than the relative 93.9 cents on the dollar that teachers earned in 1996.
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A teacher shortage crisis is hitting districts in Tennessee, and districts are struggling to hire teachers with only weeks before school starts.
One example is Wilson County, where WKRN reports there are still 75 teaching vacancies just two weeks before students are slated to return.
Although the shortage is in all departments, the biggest discrepancy is in the teaching department where they are 75 teachers short across all 24 Wilson County schools.
“Some schools are experiencing a shortage, maybe more than another school, but across the board when you have a 75 teacher shortage going into the school year as of today, yeah, it raises a lot of concern,” said Barker.
In a state that continues to lag behind the rest of the nation in teacher pay and school funding, it’s no wonder there’s a shortage of teachers.
In fact, this result has been predicted for more than a decade now:
But the report points to a more pressing problem: A teacher shortage. Specifically, the report states:
Since 2009, Tennessee has identified shortages in the overall numbers of K-12 teachers needed for public schools as well as teachers for specific subjects. There is a critical need in the state for STEM teachers, as well as shortages in high school English, social studies, world languages, Pre-K through high school special education, and English as a second language.
So, we face a teacher shortage in key areas at the same time we are 40th in both average teacher pay and in improvement in salaries over time.
Besides the issue of pay, there’s the issue of respect. Rather, there’s the lack of respect teachers get from policymakers, including Gov. Bill Lee who sat idly by while a key education advisor disparaged teachers.
While the Dickson County School Board has submitted a proposed budget featuring $1500 raises for teachers, at least one County Commissioner has floated the idea of $5000 raises – at an additional cost of $3.5 million in a $70 million budget.
Dickson County teachers are already getting a $1,500 raise in the proposed school district budget, which was presented by Schools Director Dr. Danny Weeks in budget committee meetings this month.
During the review, County Commissioner Jeff Eby suggested moving the teacher raises to $5000.
Eby then suggested $5,000 raises for all teachers, which he estimated to cost about $3.5 million.
It was pointed out the County Commission cannot make line-item adjustments to the school system’s budget. They can, however, send the budget back to the School Board with suggested revisions.
Mayor Bob Rial said the budget increase for a $5,000 raise would equate to a 25-cent property tax increase in Dickson County.
The move in Dickson County comes during budget season and at a time when other middle Tennessee districts are raising teacher pay.
Memphis-Shelby County Schools has a new budget proposal that offers teachers a 2% raise plus a $1500 retention bonus.
While this sounds nice – it IS more money, it really begs the question: Is that all?
Chalkbeat has more on the details of the nearly $2 billion budget proposal:
Memphis-Shelby County Schools teachers would receive a 2% pay raise and $1,500 retention bonuses as part of the $1.93 billion proposed budget approved by school board members Tuesday.
Fulfilling Superintendent Joris Ray’s promises earlier this year to invest in educators, the 2022-23 budget would also funnel nearly $12 million into educators’ tiered pay scale and add a new step on the scale for principals.
The budget, passed on a 5-0 vote, also directs $3.5 million to bump up the district’s contribution to employee health insurance premiums to 70% from 66%, and $3 million to raises for substitute teachers.
While a 2% raise and a $1500 salary increase are nice moves, that’s simply not enough.
It’s unfortunate that Bill Lee’s TISA plan and current funding scheme aren’t dedicating more to public schools We currently have a surplus in excess of $3 billion at the state level and yet still struggle to fund public schools.
It’s a matter of priorities.
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The Wilson County School Board approved a proposed budget that includes a move away from teacher pay based on test scores. According to the plan, all teachers will receive at least a $500 raise in the upcoming school year.
“We took the plans we’re competing with, laid them down and came out with something we can have in our budget,” he (Director of Schools Jeff Luttrell) said, noting that the district has budgeted $3.4 million in employee raises, with the majority going to classroom teachers.
He said, “one of the things I’ve heard and believe is that pay does not need to be tied to one day of testing. This takes us off that plan.”
The current Wilson County pay scale is based on teacher “level of effectiveness” (LOE) as determined by evaluations and state test scores.
It’s interesting that the projected pay increase is relatively small ($500) and that the overall funding for salary improvement is just over $3 million.
By contrast, neighboring Sumner County seems likely to commit $18 million this year to a pay increase that will mean a $4000+ raise for all teachers.
It’s also noteworthy that Gov. Bill Lee’s school funding plan (TISA) is unlikely to actually provide significant new state funds to boost teacher pay across the board.
It is definitely positive that Wilson County is moving away from a pay for test score model – that is a step in the right direction.
It’s likely frustrating to educators (and the one School Board member who opposed the move – a former educator) that the plan is not a more significant move in the direction of raising pay.
The Hamblen County School Board heard a proposal from that district’s Director of Schools that would provide teachers with a 2% raise next year. If approved, the budget with the raises would mean a deficit of nearly $1 million – leaving the County Commission to find revenue to make up the difference.
The Morristown Citizen-Tribune has the full story:
The Hamblen County Board of Education unveiled a first draft Tuesday of a budget that has a nearly $1 million shortfall and a 2% raise for staff amidst inflation that is hovering around 8%.
The budget comes after a year that saw a commitment by the governor’s office to put an extra billion dollars into education across the state and record tax revenue generated in Hamblen County.
Perry said he hopes future years might be easier to manage as a new statewide funding formula is implemented to replace the current BEP formula that is considered overly-complicated by many education administrators across the state.
“But we don’t build budgets from hope,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure we’re responsible this year- it does look like we might be able to take care of folks a little bit better that following year.”
Unfortunately, the reality of TISA is that it does little to address the state’s funding shortfall when it comes to teacher compensation.
After hearing the budget presentation, members of the school board indicated a desire to see a 4% raise. The discussion led to conversations about future budget meetings/workshops in order to explore options for raising teacher pay beyond the recommended 2%.
It’s not clear whether there is an appetite on the County Commission to provide the $1 million+ needed to fund the proposed raises.
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