Will 2020 really be Florida’s Year of the Teacher?
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared 2020 as the “year of the teacher,” championing a $47,500 starting salary and a new bonus program designed to fix chronic problems. But Miami Dade teachers are skeptical.
Florida’s teacher pay debate hits a sore spot for Miami-Dade teachers like Jennifer Desa.
The Miami Southridge Senior High teacher knows why rookie teachers cycle through. She gets it: She did everything she could — teaching through her planning period and sponsoring the yearbook and sophomore class, all while keeping a highly effective rating — to make a little more money so she could afford a home in Homestead.
That’s why a proposal to raise the minimum teacher salary to more than what Desa currently makes after 14 years in the classroom cuts deep.
“I understand the need for teachers in Florida. It’s a huge incentive,” she said. “The problem is that I can quit my job tomorrow, go work in another county as a first-year teacher, and make more than I do now.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently declared 2020 as the “year of the teacher,” championing a $47,500 starting salary and
a new bonus program designed to soothe the controversies of previous bonus structures. His pitches, if enacted, would total nearly $1 billion, create a potential bipartisan win and bring praise for finally addressing the state’s longfestering teacher shortage.
But it’s already become clear that it won’t be that easy.
NOT EVERYONE LOVES THE PLANS
Despite generalized and broad support for the idea of boosting teacher compensation in Florida, go just below the surface and that support splinters.
From school boards to teachers unions, and even Republican lawmakers, no one has agreed to an early vision of how to make that reality.
In the Legislature, Miami Republicans have raised the issue of equity when it comes to places with higher costs of living. Monroe County’s minimum teacher salary is already $47,500, and Miami-Dade’s falls just below when the temporary boost from a property tax referendum is included. Miami-Dade’s starting base pay for a teacher is $41,000, not including any additional money from the referendum.
But that doesn’t mean their teachers don’t deserve raises, or that South Florida taxpayers should bear the costs of boosting salaries in other parts of the state, some argue.
“This is really great for the rest of the state, but it doesn’t mean anything for my constituents in Monroe County, and you can’t live off of $47,500 in Monroe County just like you can barely live off of that in Miami-Dade,” said Sen. Anitere Flores, a Republican whose district includes portions of South Miami-Dade and all of Monroe County, at a recent conference put on by the Miami Herald.
Meanwhile, another key lawmaker, Rep. Chris Latvala, R-Clearwater, who chairs the House PreK-12 Appropriations subcommittee, has said he’s not fully on board with DeSantis’ proposal to scrap the existing bonus program called “Best and Brightest” in favor of putting its $285 million toward new bonuses and raises. The House has historically been Best and Brightest’s most vocal defender against criticism that its eligibility criteria were unfair and that onetime bonuses were not sustainable to teachers needing reliable income.
“[Best and Brightest] was a program I’ve supported, that a lot of people have supported in the House,” Latvala said, but added that still, “everything is on the table.”
In the Senate, a bill to repeal the program has already passed its first committee, as Senate Republicans say it failed to achieve its purpose of rewarding the state’s best teachers.
All this disagreement suggests that both the House and Senate may draft their own teacher pay plans, which will be hashed out during the 2020 session, starting Jan. 14.
“There are some practical issues and those are things that are being culled out,” said Senate President Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton, who added that he has concerns about removing the control of teacher salaries from local school boards.
“When you go through and put it as a one-size-fitsall then you can create … some inequities,” he said. “I’m cautious about us owning that issue at the state level.”
Still, one question will have to be answered before all else.
“It’s going to come down to how much money is available,” said Sen. Manny Diaz, R-Hialeah, as both chambers comb through the budget to determine whether they agree with DeSantis that the state can afford his proposals.
LOST WAGES
Florida’s low national ranking (46th for average pay, 27th for average starting salary) when it comes to teacher pay has been an issue that’s dogged the state for years, much to the annoyance of state leaders who often say they allocate enough funding for districts to make their own decisions about whether to pay teachers better.
But how did Florida find itself so uncompetitive in the market for teachers? A confluence of factors came into play.
The recession that hit the state in 2007 can’t be underplayed.
Teachers, already at the low end of the national pay scale, went six years without raises.
Flexible state funding provided to districts dipped during that time as well, taking eight years to return to 2007 levels. To ease the squeeze, the state and districts looked to the federal government for temporary revenue boosts.
When Gov. Rick Scott took office in the middle of the financial drought, though, he decided that schools needed to be weaned from their dependence on unsustainable money sources. So he worked with lawmakers to cut state education funding by $1 billion in a year, proposing increases only when he thought the state could afford it.
Scott also approved a move to require teachers to pay 3% more toward their retirement fund, further reducing their take-home pay. Many educators argued that the government was putting them in a hole.
Compounding all that, Scott signed into law a measure that his predecessor, Charlie Crist, vetoed before leaving office. The “Student Success Act” eliminated long-term contracts for teachers hired after June 2011, placing them on annual contracts instead.
It then required that any teachers on annual contracts rated “highly effective” must receive a larger raise than any other class of teachers. That included veteran teachers who remained on the grandfathered system.
Miami-Dade dealt teachers an extra blow: The school district could’ve kept its grandfathered system in place, but federal grants for high-performing teachers dried up and the district couldn’t keep up with paying out big bucks to thousands of veteran teachers.
District officials and the teacher’s union agreed to change the way it pays teachers and scrapped a pay scale that gave incremental increases until $5,000 and $6,000 pay bumps at 17 and 22 years of service, respectively.
Now, when Florida districts do give raises, the money is spread fairly evenly. Some educators have noted that pay has barely kept pace with inflation, and in some cases has gone backward.
That’s why Miami’s teachers are particularly aggrieved: Miami-Dade’s median salary for about 19,400 teachers is $46,539. The average salary is $51,395, and the average teacher has 13 years of experience.
The salary schedule law wasn’t controversial at the time it passed. It didn’t generate much discussion, and, looking back, one of the sponsors barely remembered it even was part of the plan.
Only years later has it become viewed as a catalyst for the current pay situation.
“It took a while for the impact of that to be felt,” observed Andrea Messina, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association.
The outcome is a system that satisfies few.
‘IT’S NOT FAIR’
DeSantis’ plan doesn’t detail what it’ll do for teachers like Desa at Southridge other than bring up their salaries to the minimum.
It leaves her wondering, “Do they even value my experience?”
“It’s not fair for a teacher like me who has experience to be making the same as a first-year entrance teacher,” she said.
Instead of focusing solely on luring entry-level teachers into the profession, Desa suggests guaranteed raises in base pay would do justice to veteran teachers and retain beginning teachers.
DeSantis’ proposal would give Melissa Reiche, a second-year teacher at Dr. Toni Bilbao Preparatory Academy, an extra $6,500 a year. But even that might not be enough.
Reiche knew what she was getting into. She worked at her high school’s preschool and went on to get her bachelor’s degree in education. She’s currently working toward her master’s degree — not for the measly salary supplement, but to someday teach at the college level on the side.
Because she lives with her police officer boyfriend, money isn’t the issue — it’s the blended kindergarten class she teaches with special education students she wasn’t prepared to teach that’s driving her away.
“This year, specifically because of the group that I got, it really made me think twice about teaching again,” Reiche said. “The salary won’t change things for me, to be honest.”
At 30 years of teaching, Ceresta Smith narrowly dodged losing those big raises. But she’s seen the damage firsthand. She sat on the task force that recommended the district adopt a property tax referendum to pay teachers more.
The language arts teacher believes the state is planning for an exodus of retiring baby boomer teachers. Stupid is what she calls DeSantis’ plan.
“They need to do something more permanent across the board and all those that are beginning and mid-career and in [late] career,” said Smith, who teaches at Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High. “They need to spread the wealth so to speak.”
WHAT’S TO COME?
The statewide debate played out in miniature at the end of the Florida School Boards Association’s annual December meeting in Tampa.
As the conference was ending, the group’s president — Tim Weisheyer of Osceola County — released a statement with the Florida superintendents’ association praising DeSantis’ pay proposal, saying it was a step toward attracting the best talent to Florida.
But it generated a tempest among some board members across the state, who said they were not consulted before their organization issued its comments, and further that they didn’t necessarily agree with the position.
“I would not fully support it,” Pasco County board member Alison Crumbley said. “My answer would be, ‘Is this it?’ ”
Hillsborough County board member Lynn Gray didn’t back her organization’s statement, either, and suggested boards should call for a return to salaries based on years of service, degrees and other credentials.
“Teachers are not unlike many workers. They love what they do, but the financial realities of life are real,” said Gray, a former teacher, contending that type of change would show respect to the profession.
When asked why 2020 is the year when teacher pay will take center stage, Latvala, the House lawmaker, said that it’s partially a combination of the economy roaring and the momentum created by DeSantis’ attention on the issue.
“Why not now?” he said. “We’re going to give it our best shot.”
FLORIDA RANKS 46TH IN THE NATION IN AVERAGE PAY FOR TEACHERS