Teacher pay equity plan has school officials puzzled
NASHVILLE (AP) — School officials are just starting to understand the implications of Gov. Phil Bredesen’s proposal to equalize teacher pay, and not all of them are happy.
The proposal puts more money into the system, and schools are glad for any help they can get. But, since the plan is designed to redress an inequity, the new money is distributed inequitably.
And there’s the rub.
Take for example two neighboring systems: Metropolitan Nashville, the second largest school district in the state, and Rutherford County.
According to figures provided by the governor’s office, Rutherford County would receive $5.5 million in teacher equity pay and benefits, while Nashville would get $305,000 — or about one-eighteenth as much.
“We’re having a hard time understanding it,” said Nashville schools finance director David Manning. “Hopefully we’ll get a better explanation from them soon and develop some clearer insight into why the numbers are the way they are.”
The equalization plan directs $112 million dollars to the state’s 136 school systems to help equalize teachers’ salaries between poor and rich school districts, as ordered by the state Supreme Court nearly two years ago.
The plan also ensures that no school system gets less money under the new formula than it got under the old arrangement. For some systems that is significant — Davidson County, for instance, is slated for $15 million.
“Of course, that just keeps us where we are,” Manning said.
The equalization formula takes into account a jurisdiction’s ability to pay, so commercially rich areas can expect to get less money than poor counties.
In many cases, the distribution makes obvious sense. Thirty-one counties across the state, most of them rural areas, get more than $1 million in equalization money.
But there are anomalies that have the school systems searching for an explanation.
Many school officials expected the four most populous counties — Shelby (Memphis), Davidson (Nashville), Knox (Knoxville) and Hamilton (Chattanooga) — to be treated about the same.
Davidson County is scheduled to receive $305,063, Knox County $625,878, and Hamilton County $438,860.
But Shelby County is slated for a $2.1 million increase, and Memphis City Schools will receive more than $6 million, the largest amount of equalization money.
“The issue I brought up has to do with how the state calculates fiscal capacity,” said Chris Henson, assistant superintendent for business and facility services at Nashville schools. “I don’t understand how somebody like Rutherford … sees that much when it was a lawsuit for small, rural districts.”
Bredesen said changing a complex formula to correct an inequity “means there are going to be some winners and some losers.”
“If there are problems with it, we’ve told systems to bring them to our attention and we’ll try to get them sorted out,” the governor said. “I think we’ve done the fairest job we know how. If there are some unfairnesses, we’ll try to modify it.”
Some of the loudest grumbling has come from upper East Tennessee.
“There are some unanswered questions,” Sullivan County schools Superintendent John O’Dell said. “It’s not a matter of mistrust; it’s just a matter of not fully understanding things.”
Many surprising disparities in the way the equalization money is being distributed can be explained by enrollment growth. Rutherford County has been one of the fastest growing systems in the state, averaging 4 percent to 5 percent growth every year for the last decade.
Through a quirk in the funding distribution, the equalization money goes in larger chunks to systems with younger, less educated teachers — and they appear more often in fast-growing counties, which hire more entry-level teachers to keep up with enrollment.
“In two of the last five years we’ve actually dropped a year in our average teacher experience,” said Jim Mahanes, spokesman for the Rutherford County Schools. “We’re currently 88th in the state as far as teacher pay goes, on average. Five years ago we were 77th, so we’re going backward. That’s also related to the youth of our teachers. Plus, our top priority has been building schools so we’d have somewhere to put all the new students.”
Two other significant elements of the plan have gotten little notice.
The first is Bredesen’s proposal to split the cost of teacher salaries — 65 percent from the state, 35 percent local. The split has previously been 75-25.
Over time that will shift more responsibility for teacher salaries to the local level. The idea is to mitigate the large local pay supplements that created the disparity in the first place.
The second involves two chunks of money that are outside the formula. The first is called the Cost Differential Factor, intended to recognize the greater cost of living in some areas, which can bump funding by as much as 20 percent.
The other is the so-called “hold harmless” money, which is intended to ensure no system receives less under the new funding arrangement next year than it got this year.
The bulk of that goes to Davidson ($15 million), Hamilton ($5.3 million) and Knox ($7 million) counties, which got little of the new equity money.
“Of course the whole issue is to satisfy the court,” said Davidson County’s Henson. “So without a huge influx of additional dollars we can’t really expect to receive much of that.”