GIVE TEACHER RAISES TO TEACHERS

An effort to define in law who a Tennessee teacher is has been revived by state Sen. Todd Gardenhire, R-Chattanooga, and state Rep. Mike Carter, R-Ooltewah.

The legislators offered the same bill a year ago, but it got short-circuited when the global coronavirus pandemic hit in mid-March and lawmakers quickly wrapped up their business.

The planned bill is necessary, according to Gardenhire, because when legislators seek to give teachers raises, they want them to go to teachers.

That’s not to say other school staff shouldn’t receive increases, he said, but salary bumps meant for teachers should cover only teachers.

Gov. Bill Lee already has proposed a 2% raise for teachers in the next fiscal year, though that won’t become official until he presents his budget for the 2021-2022 fiscal year next month. He also has proposed a 2% raise for teachers from January to June of this year.

The 4% total pay bump was what the governor originally suggested last year but had to revise after the pandemic shutdowns sank the economy.

Gardenhire’s bill, if passed and signed into law, would take effect with the start of the new fiscal year on July 1. It would define teachers as professionals who spend 50% or more of their time in front of students.

If teachers alone are getting the increases, he said, it might stop the flow of the best classroom teachers into administration, where they would expect to make more money. Maybe, he said, it would even “start the flow back” of administrators into the classroom.

“It would elevate them,” he said.

Gardenhire pointed to an online news source list of Hamilton County Board of Education employees whose salaries exceed $70,000 for 2020. Of the more than 300 names on the list, very few were teachers, he said.

In fact, of 329 names on the list, 28 were listed as “teacher,” only 3.5% of the total.

“I’ve got nothing against administrators,” he told the Hamilton County Republican Women’s Club in 2020. “I’ve got nothing against a superintendent. But let’s take care of the teachers who are in front of the children taking care of the children all day long and make it a reward to stay in there.”

The issue of who exactly gets “teacher raises” drew attention in the spring of 2019 when the district sought to add $34 million to its next fiscal budget for those raises and other school improvements.

Gardenhire at the time wondered who all were defined as teachers.

“There’s nowhere in the [state] code that defines a teacher,” he said that year. “And we’re going to try to define that so that when the governor or anybody gives ‘teachers’ a pay raise, there’s actually money going to classroom teachers and not to everybody else. Not that everybody else is not important, but if we’re going to emphasize teachers, let’s reward teachers.”

A joint meeting of the Hamilton County Commission and the Hamilton County Board of Education wrestled with the question in December 2019, but Gardenhire — who attended the meeting — said Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Dr. Bryan Johnson effectively tabled the conversation until the start of the 2020 legislative session when he said, “The TEA (Tennessee Education Association) decides what a teacher is.”

The unelected TEA is, in effect, the teachers’ union. But the legislature, with the input of teachers and the TEA, should determine where the money they allocate goes, not the other way around.

Gardenhire isn’t the only legislator concerned about where state money for teachers goes.

House Education Committee Chairman Mark White told Chalkbeat — a nonprofit news organization that reports on education — last week that while he supports a 4% raise, the way the state funds schools doesn’t guarantee every teacher will benefit.

Under the state’s funding formula, school systems that meet certain average salary thresholds can put state instructional money toward benefits or hiring additional teachers or staff instead of raises.

Tennessee has steadily invested in teacher pay under Republican Lee and his Republican predecessor, Bill Haslam, including about $370 million since 2016, but — depending on the source — is still in the middle of salaries nationally, is in the bottom half or is in the bottom 10.

And, again depending on the list, Volunteer State teacher salaries fall below those of Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia.

We believe Gardenhire’s proposal makes sense and that the pandemic has highlighted anew not only the value of classroom teachers but also their versatility. Administrators and other school employees will not go without raises, but when the legislature approves raises for teachers they should be the ones getting them.