Teacher equity pay issue under attack in Legislature
NASHVILLE (AP) — The unhappiness of urban school systems with Gov. Phil Bredesen’s proposal to equalize teacher pay across poor and rich school systems continues to bubble just beneath the surface in the Legislature.
The bill to enact Bredesen’s equity pay proposal was deferred Tuesday for a week in the Senate Finance Committee after its sponsor said an amendment was pending to help three of the four major urban centers — Nashville, Chattanooga and Knoxville — who feel they’re being shortchanged in Bredesen’s plan.
Sen. Ward Crutchfield, D-Chattanooga, declined to specify what the amendment would do. He already has submitted a proposed amendment to the governor’s budget that would add $16 million in funding for at-risk students, which would go primarily to urban districts. The administration is cool to that idea.
The equity pay bill is an effort to satisfy the Tennessee Supreme Court, which held for the third time in October 2002 that the state’s funding formula for K-12 education was unconstitutional. The court said there were unacceptable disparities in teacher pay between districts, making it impossible for children to have equal educational opportunity regardless of where they live.
Bredesen’s proposal adds $35 million to equalize pay — on top of $27 million he put into this year’s budget — and significantly alters the way the burden for funding education is split between the state and local school districts.
It includes money to ensure no system receives less under the new formula than it received this year. The three systems looking to change the bill get most of $30 million in so-called “hold-harmless” money — Davidson County receives $15 million, Knox County gets $7 million and Hamilton County gets $5 million.
The governor’s bill passed through the House Finance Committee on Tuesday. Sponsor Les Winningham, D-Huntsville, said he had not been approached by anyone about possible changes, and that it could be before the full House as early as next week.
The story is different in the Senate. Sen. Douglas Henry, D-Nashville and chairman of the Finance Committee, said a proposed amendment is being worked on by members of the Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga school boards.
Nashville school board member Lisa Hunt is leading that effort.
“We really understand and appreciate the governor’s leadership in responding to the Supreme Court’s order, and we support taking a comprehensive look at the (K-12 funding) formula,” she said. “But we think this current bill does not effectively hold urban systems harmless, and that we stand to lose the growth potential we’ve enjoyed and need to keep our schools functioning.”
The big school systems’ major complaint is that Bredesen’s proposal does not recognize the additional burdens and costs of having larger percentages of poor children, or students who use English as a second language.
The task force Bredesen appointed to study pay equity over the summer made 10 recommendations. Accounting for the cost of teaching at-risk and non-English-speaking students was one of only two of the task force’s recommendations that Bredesen did not include in his proposal.
Administration officials have said that those aspects of educational funding will be reviewed over the summer, and that they expect some changes in those areas to be proposed next year.
Hunt said her coalition believes the funding formula shortchanges schools in urban centers.
“We’re in conversations with other urban systems to see if we can’t craft an amendment that will take our concerns into consideration,” she said. “We’re trying to lay the groundwork for future collaboration with the governor.”
That may mean the urban systems will get out of the way of this year’s bill in exchange for a promise — perhaps included in the bill itself — for the administration to account in next year’s budget for the higher costs of teaching at-risk and ELL (English Language Learners).
“We recognize that the whole issue of education financing in the state is a huge issue and really needs a deep look, much deeper than we’ll be able to accomplish this year,” Hunt said. “But we don’t want to leave it so open-ended that it’s just a promise to look at it in the future. We need something with a little more teeth.”
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Read HB3510/SB3397 at:
Tennessee General Assembly: http://www.legislature.state.tn.us/