Grading Texas

Considering how grossly underpaid Texas teachers are, it is absurd to even be talking about “merit” pay for a handful of them. Some merit advocates, perhaps, simply can’t see the forest for the trees. Others are deliberately promoting a viewpoint that public education should be operated like a business.

They want to reward the teachers who are deemed to have the most success, even if that success is dubiously based on STAAR test scores, which don’t indicate much of anything except an ability to take a test.

Public education isn’t a business. It is a public service to Texas’ 5.4 million school children and their families, and it is a public responsibility of state government. We reward success with a high school diploma, and educators strive to make that diploma as meaningful as possible, a symbol that a student has been successfully prepared for continued success in the real word after graduation.

We know that it doesn’t work out that way for many children, in large part because they come to school with many issues – poverty, lack of proper nutrition, inadequate health care, homelessness – that public schools aren’t equipped to address, especially public schools that have been as under-funded as Texas schools have been in recent years. Yet, the “merit” pay advocates want to address that problem by singling out a small number of Texas’ 350,000 public school teachers for raises if they can improve their students’ STAAR scores or successfully jump through some other data-driven hoops.

Every student deserves an effective, properly certified teacher in an adequately furnished classroom, but thousands of effective, properly certified teachers are leaving Texas classrooms every year because they simply can no longer afford to make the personal and family financial sacrifices the classroom requires. On average, their pay is more than $7,000 less than the national average, and they continue to lose ground. Among those teachers who stick it out, almost 40 percent are forced to take extra jobs during the school year to make ends meet, based on TSTA’s most-recent moonlighting survey.

Let’s look at some hard numbers on teacher attrition, gleaned by Bryan Weatherford, TSTA’s teaching and learning specialist, from Texas Education Agency data.

More than 176,000 Texas teachers left their jobs in the five years between 2012-13 and 2016-17. Only about one-fourth of those were retiring from the profession. The yearly attrition figure ranged from 34,424 in 2012-13 to 36,300 in 2016-17, a loss of about 10 percent of the total teacher workforce each year. Thirty percent of the teachers who began their classroom careers in 2012-13 were gone five years later.

If one-fourth of the 36,300 teachers who left the profession in 2016-17 were retirees, that means 27,000 or so left for other reasons. Some may have left the state or transferred to other districts. But if you don’t think that large numbers of these former teachers left because of poor pay, either directly or indirectly, you are kidding yourself.

Other conditions, such as too much paperwork or having to spend too much time on STAAR prep, may have been factors. But the higher your pay the easier paperwork is to take.

Only three states – Florida, Indiana and Arizona – ranked below Texas on a recent “teaching attractiveness rating” issued by the Learning Policy Institute, and – guess what? – those states pay their teachers even less than Texas.

In Austin earlier this week, National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen Garcia noted that some people are concerned that we have a “teacher shortage.” But we don’t have a teacher shortage, she pointed out.

Texas has thousands of certified, highly qualified teachers. But many of them are selling real estate, managing offices, experimenting with the dot.com world, anything that offers better compensation than the low classroom salaries they could no longer afford.

Merit pay? Absurd.

Although the Senate Finance Committee approved Senate Bill 3 to give all Texas classroom teachers an overdue, $5,000 across-the-board pay raise, not everyone is on board. One prominent Austin group thinks such a pay raise would be “wasteful.”

That would be the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which would rather turn public schools over to corporate-style charters or waste money on private school vouchers than adequately pay educators. Here is how Kara Belew, TPPF’s senior education policy adviser, was quoted in The Dallas Morning News this week: “Across-the-board pay raises (for teachers) are wasteful.”

Kara Belew needs to sit down and have a talk with TSTA member Virginia Caldwell, who told the Senate committee on Monday how she makes more money in one day as an Uber driver on the weekend than she makes in one day as an ESL teacher in Hutto ISD, despite having eight years of teaching experience and a master’s degree. Caldwell won’t be wasting a pay raise.

Neither will the thousands of other teachers who also have to take extra jobs during the school year to meet their families’ needs. This is about 40 percent of Texas teachers, according to TSTA’s most-recent moonlighting survey.

Other teachers are scrimping on their medical treatments and prescription drugs because they aren’t paid enough to afford them. They won’t be wasting a pay raise either.

And thousands of very effective teachers are quitting the profession each year because they simply can’t afford the low pay. That is what is really wasteful – for taxpayers and school children.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation wants to limit pay raises to a very limited number of teachers and make them jump through hoops – such as STAAR test scores – to “earn” what they and their colleagues already have earned – many times over.

TSTA will continue to fight for a significant pay raise for all teachers – to bring us as close as possible to closing the $7,300 gap by which average teacher pay in Texas trails the national average. We also will fight for state funding to increase pay for the other school professionals and support staff whose work also is critical to student success and safety. We also will seek better benefits for retired educators.

And we will fight against “merit” or incentive-based pay, which would unfairly – and wastefully — exclude the vast majority of hard-working, effective Texas educators.

Fifteen billion dollars. Most of us will never see anything close to that much money in our lifetimes, but it happens to be the record balance that the state comptroller has forecast for the state of Texas’ savings account, more commonly called the Rainy Day Fund.

It’s a nice big nest egg of taxpayer money that the Legislature reserves for emergencies and state leaders are reluctant to spend. But you don’t have to look far to find an emergency in Texas, and the House Democratic Caucus has correctly concluded that there is an emergency – many emergencies, actually — in funding for public education.

The caucus has proposed taking $180 million from the savings account to give every school teacher a $500 check for classroom supplies, so they don’t have to keep digging so deeply into their own pockets to subsidize their budget-strapped school districts. Most teachers, who are under-paid and dealing with rising health care costs, will tell you that is an emergency.

The Democratic lawmakers also have proposed taking a larger amount — $1.57 billion – of Rainy Day money to stabilize the Teacher Retirement System pension fund so that retired educators may be able to get a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA), which most retirees haven’t seen in 15 years. Most retirees will tell you that is an emergency, a personal financial emergency for individuals who don’t get Social Security, whose health care costs also are rising and whose average monthly pension payment is only $2,060.

The caucus also wants to use “extra money” in the Rainy Day Fund to create a special account that can be invested in the Teacher Retirement System. That would still leave billions of dollars in the state’s piggy bank.

True, Texas has a lot of other emergencies, some the result of natural disasters, such as hurricanes, and others the result of political disasters, such as years of legislative neglect of education, health care, transportation and other important public services.

Teachers and retired educators have a valid claim to make for emergency assistance from the Rainy Day Fund or from the state’s general revenue stream. The state has an obligation to provide financial assistance from one source or the other, and a fifteen-billion-dollar mountain of money is a good place to spark a discussion.

I don’t think most taxpayers want to see that much money just sitting there. It may not make us feel rich, but it’s our money. So let’s use some of it to help out people who really need it.

State Education Commissioner Mike Morath has been eagerly encouraging school districts to turn campuses over to outside partners – notably charters – and he has found a no more-avid partner in this effort than San Antonio ISD and its superintendent, Pedro Martinez.

Last year, Morath approved SAISD’s decision to turn over Stewart Elementary School to Democracy Prep, a New York-based charter chain, despite opposition from TSTA and the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel, who believe the deal violated several provisions of state law, including a requirement that Stewart teachers and parents be given meaningful input into the decision. They weren’t.

Stewart teachers lost their district contracts and are now employed by Democracy Prep without the due process safeguards provided public school teachers under state law. But the district got some extra funding under another state law, SB1882, which encourages these partnerships for struggling schools, and it got two more years to bring Stewart up to state accountability standards. It remains to be seen if Democracy Prep will be able to do that, since charters have mixed, at best, records on overall student achievement. But turnover fever has taken hold in San Antonio ISD, where, according to the San Antonio Express-News, principals of as many as 10 other campuses are considering partnerships with outside organizations – charters, non-profits, higher education institutions or government agencies.

These schools aren’t necessarily struggling campuses, and teachers’ jobs and contractual rights may not be on the line, the newspaper reported. But what about the principals’ jobs?

The new partner organizations will be accountable to SAISD academically and financially, but the partner organizations will control staffing, curriculum and other decisions made at the campus level. The district, according to the newspaper, will require the outside partners to allow principals “equal say” in hiring decisions, but what else will the principals be doing?

Will the principals still have enough to do to justify the district keeping them on its payroll at their current salaries? Or would that be administrative overload? How many will go to work for the charter or other outside partner?