Teacher equity pay bill begins trek through Legislature
NASHVILLE (AP) — Gov. Phil Bredesen’s proposal to equalize teacher pay among poor and rich school districts began its trek through the Legislature Wednesday when it passed the education committee of both houses.
The Senate Education Committee voted 8-0 and the House Education Committee voted 13-0 for the equity pay plan, which includes the first fundamental change to the state’s funding formula for K-12 education since it was adopted more than a decade ago.
The state Supreme Court has ruled on three occasions, most recently in the fall of 2002, that the state’s method of funding education is unconstitutional because it shortchanges poor, generally rural school districts that don’t have the capacity to pay teachers the same as more affluent neighbors.
The Legislature has wrestled with this problem for years but none of its responses ever satisfied the court.
The current gap between the state’s highest paid teachers and its lowest is more than 50 percent of the lower salary.
The Bredesen plan would raise the average teacher salary in Tennessee from $39,799 to $43,127, better than the average across the Southeast. It injects $35 million in new spending into teacher pay and redistributes previous equity payments to lower the gap between the highest and lowest paid teachers to about 37 percent.
It also changes the state/local match in funding teacher pay from 75 percent for the state and 25 percent for the locals to 65 percent state, 35 percent local. That redefines as matching funds more than $360 million local systems already are adding to teacher salaries as voluntary supplements.
“That’s taking money that’s already on the table and rearranging it to meet the court decision,” Patrick Smith, the governor’s legislative liaison, explained to the Senate Education Committee. “We think this reduces the pressure on local systems to add voluntary supplements, and we think that will reduce the tendency toward salary disparity over time.”
The governor’s proposal was acceptable to the group of small schools that filed the lawsuit leading to the Supreme Court decision, although director Wayne Qualls said the key is the annual review of the funding required by Bredesen’s plan.
“The review committee is where you’ll have to keep check on the disparity,” he said. “This doesn’t take the politics or the urban-rural conflict out of it, but it should reduce the intensity.”
Several participants said the proposal is a better solution than two other possible means of eliminating disparity between teacher pay. Those would have been to make all teachers state employees, thus eliminating local supplements altogether; or capping those local supplements.
“Of all the alternatives we believe this was the best approach to satisfy the courts,” said Doug Goddard, director of the Tennessee County Commissioners Association.
The bill will go straight to the full Senate for its consideration. It was directed through the Finance Committee in the House.
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See HB3510/SB3397 at Tennessee General Assembly: http://www.legislature.state.tn.us/