State drops bid to limit bonus to nationally certified teachers
Facing opposition from teacher groups, the Arkansas Department of Education will drop a proposal to end annual payments to teachers with National Board Certification after 10 years, Education Commissioner Johnny Key told lawmakers Monday.
The move came after a conversation with Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Monday morning, Key told reporters.
About $ 13.8 million a year has been allocated for the program, which has been growing quickly. Spending under the program will exceed the amount appropriated by fiscal 2018, according to a projection from the Education Department.
“No commitment on new dollars or anything like that,” Key said. “Without changes … the growth is still going to necessitate a growing allocation of funds, so it’s going to continue to be a growing need if we fully fund it.”
In a joint meeting of the House and Senate education committees, Sen. Uvalde Lindsey, D- Fayetteville, made a motion for a subcommittee to study the program and look into additional funding. His motion was adopted without dissent.
“It’s a good program that apparently needs to be thoroughly vetted,” he said.
The proposed rule change had received opposition from teacher groups, including the Arkansas State Teachers Association, which said the cut was ironic considering the governor’s plan to spend an additional $ 3 million on Teach for America instructors.
“Although we are supportive of the promising work [ Teach For America] can do for Arkansas, educators want to know why Arkansas’s [ national board certified teachers] are not receiving similar support,” the association said in a letter to the state Board of Education.
Under the current program, national board certified teachers receive $ 5,000 per year bonuses. The state also pays an application fee and three paid release days. The proposed change would limit payments to a total of 10 years even if a teacher were to recertify after that point.
From fiscal 2007 through 2015, the program’s cost increased from $ 3.6 million to $ 13.5 million a year, according to figures provided by Kimberly Friedman, Education Department spokesman. Over the same period, the number of teachers who received payments increased from 565 to 2,588.
In fiscal 2018, the existing program is expected to cost $ 17 million.
Despite the expense, Key
said he believes that the certifications are worthwhile.
“It is a very rigorous process — classroom observations, course work and work to demonstrate a higher level of expertise in the field of teaching,” he said. “That’s submitted to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. They judge those submissions. It’s a multiyear process, so it’s very rigorous, and the teachers who have gone through that will tell you it has helped their ability to deliver education in a classroom.”
According to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, Arkansas typically ranks among the top 10 states with the most new national board certified teachers.
Of the surrounding states, only Mississippi and Oklahoma provide state support. Oklahoma used to offer $ 5,000- a- year bonuses to certified teachers, but the program was dropped.
After the meeting, Arkansas Education Association President Brenda Robinson said that dropping the rule change is a win for teachers.
“This is a great step forward with the collaboration of the governor and the commissioner deciding to put the brakes on this rule,” she said. “We know national board is truly, by research, a great investment in student achievement.”
Arkansas House Minority Leader Michael John Gray, D- Augusta, who sent a letter to Key on Feb. 3 outlining reservations about the rule change, said he was excited by the move.
“I’ve really got to praise the governor for taking the lead here and saying, hey, this is an important program [ that] deserves more time and more vetting than simply just running it through a rules change,” he said. “We need to come up with some solutions to maintain this program.”
Earlier in the education committees’ meeting, lawmakers got into a discussion over the role race plays in teaching.
Rep. John Walker, D- Little Rock, said that schools with more disciplinary activity “are more likely to have white teachers in black situations and middle- class teachers in poverty situations, and therefore there is a disconnect. In other words, you bring a middleclass value system into a poverty school, you’re going to have more discipline.”
Sen. Alan Clark, R- Lonsdale, said he didn’t think Walker’s argument was appropriate.
“Did I just hear the insinuation that I as a white, middleclass person … would be less qualified to teach minority, poor students?” he said.
Walker said Clark would likely be less sensitive to their culture.
“Is that not a racist comment?” Clark said. “If I had turned that around and said that a poor, black person was less able to teach, you would have blasted me and I would have been all over newspaper and TV tomorrow. That is just not true, and it’s uncalled for and it’s wrong and it’s racist thinking.”
At that point Sen. Joyce Elliott, D- Little Rock, said it takes cultural understanding — which she said can be learned — to teach students effectively.
“I grew up a very poor black girl. I am not going to be as good of a teacher if I don’t get some cultural understanding in, say, a high school that has kids that are very well- to- do and I’ve not ever bothered to understand what their lives are like,” she said. “I would take my value system into that classroom and try to impose the disciplinary value system that I grew up with on that classroom. There would be trouble.
“That’s what the discussion is — not that you cannot teach someone who is different from you. This is one of the reasons that teaching is not rocket science. It’s harder than rocket science.”
Teachers have a responsibility to learn and appreciate the culture of their students, she said.
Addressing Walker and Elliott by name, Clark said blame shouldn’t be placed on “white, middle- class teachers who are supposedly not as motivated to understand their students as someone else might be, and that’s especially problematic when one of the problems we keep listing is that in the Delta and other poor areas, we’re having a hard time recruiting teachers, many of which are white, middle class that can choose to go anywhere they want to go.”