Governor’s vague teacher pay raise plan cries out for answers

For Florida public school teachers who have been underpaid for far too long, the news after all these years must seem like a mirage.

Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to raise starting teacher pay by nearly $10,000 a year, to $47,500 for a first-year teacher just out of college. His plan would dramatically uplift Florida’s starting teacher salary from a dreadful 46th nationwide, to No. 2, after New Jersey.

DeSantis deserves credit for addressing the low pay that has driven too many good teachers out of the classroom and contributed to Florida’s acute teacher shortage.

But the governor’s bold plan, issued in a bare-bones press release followed by headline-grabbing visits to three schools, is full of holes.

The biggest question: Where’s the money coming from?

DeSantis estimates the pay raise will cost $600 million in its first year, a year when state economists project little new revenue. So unless DeSantis has a plan to raise taxes — he doesn’t — he owes it to his 21 million constituents to say what he would cut to pay teachers more.

Abolishing an unpopular teacher bonus program known as Best and Brightest would free up nearly $300 million. That’s a good start. But getting this done won’t be as easy as DeSantis makes it sound.

Undoing a $500 million corporate tax break quietly given top businesses this year would also send an important signal about investing in Florida’s future, but that will only happen if business leaders walk the walk about the importance of improving education.

Another option is to undo dozens of narrowly-tailored sales tax exemptions given to powerful special interests, but that’s not going to happen, especially in an election year.

Here’s another question: It has taken many veteran teachers years to earn $47,500. It hardly seems equitable for a first-year teacher to earn the same as someone with 15 years of experience.

Lawmakers have a history of creating “salary compression,” when two groups of workers make the same money despite great differences in experience. A year or two ago, legislators belatedly raised the starting pay of public defenders and assistant state attorneys — and destroyed the morale of those who’d been toiling for less money for years, causing many to leave. Let’s learn from history, not repeat it.

Another question: How much of the salary bump would come from state revenues, and how much from a second school property tax imposed by the state, called Required Local Effort? Will lawmakers agree to let the revenue from that second tax rise along with property values? They fought former Gov. Rick Scott’s efforts to increase education spending that way.

Yet another question: Why didn’t the governor first secure the buy-in of the Florida Senate president and House speaker, who wield vast power over how your tax dollars are spent?

House Speaker José Oliva, R-Miami Lakes, greeted the proposal with icy skepticism. He noted that state agencies want more than $2 billion in other new spending for prisons, health, environment and the social safety net. “My initial thought is one of gratitude for those who came before us and saw it fit to bind us and all future legislatures to a balanced budget,” he said.

Oliva’s likely successor, Rep. Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, recently gave a talk in which he criticized the Legislature’s “spending problem” with bigger budgets every year — with the governor in the audience.

Sprowls is wrong. The problem is too little investment in Florida’s future, not too much. Still, his is the prevailing mood that DeSantis faces among House Republicans.

Another question: What about those counties — including Broward, Palm

Beach and Miami-Dade — that passed local referendums last year, raising money to increase teacher pay? Local voters recognized the problem before DeSantis did.

To ensure equity, any new money should be steered to a part of the school funding formula known as the Base Student Allocation, which provides money for day-to-day operations. In this year’s budget, the allocation for a typical student is $4,280 a year.

“It’s easily doable,” DeSantis said of his pay raise proposal during a visit to Bayview Elementary in Fort Lauderdale on Monday. It’s about “setting priorities.”

We agree. Republicans who have controlled the Capitol for two decades have their priorities wrong, treating public school teachers as the enemy simply because their union remains a bulwark of the Democratic Party.

Along the way, they have labeled our public schools as “failure factories,” imposed high-stakes tests on multiple classes and grades, changed curriculum standards as frequently as car oil, paid teachers based on long-ago SAT scores, undermined the union’s ability to collect dues and diverted construction-and-repair dollars to newer for-profit charter schools.

So it’s a welcome shift to see the governor stand up for teachers.

If he’s serious, though, he’ll have to ensure a permanent source of revenue to ensure better salaries not just this year, but every year for the next 20 years.

Statewide, there are about 180,000 public school teachers. DeSantis’ announcement said more than 101,000 would get raises. That arithmetic raises one more question DeSantis needs to answer.