State: Low pay drives teachers out of state

Every school day before dawn, teacher Linda Ward leaves her home in the small North Florida town of Monticello and heads north to teach at Central Middle School in Thomasville, Ga.

She drives along U.S. 19, passing open fields, old plantation homes, and the "Welcome to Georgia" sign at the state line. It's a 20-minute commute, made easier by the bigger salary Georgia offers.

She makes $17,000 more than she would in Monticello.

Every year, Florida loses teachers to Georgia and Alabama -- valuable teachers like Ward, an 18-year veteran with a talent for math and science. That loss of good teachers is evidence of Florida's lack of progress on teacher salaries.

Solving the problem is a major issue in Florida's gubernatorial race. Democrat Bill McBride has vowed to increase teacher pay and accuses Gov. Jeb Bush of ignoring the issue. Bush has begun talking more about it, but has not offered a specific plan.

How big is the problem of teacher pay?

Florida's average teacher pay ranked 30th in the nation last year, continuing a slow slide dating back to the early 1990s. The state lost ground under Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles, and that didn't change under Bush.

But the state fares even worse in comparison with the neighboring states with which it competes.

Between 1995 and 2001, Georgia and Alabama aggressively increased teacher pay. The governors in both states set ambitious goals to reach the national average. Both are short of that goal, but still vaulted ahead 10 places in national rankings.

Neither Bush nor McBride appear ready to embark on the quests that Georgia and Alabama did. Florida's decentralized system gives the governor and lawmakers little direct control over teacher salaries. Besides, it's expensive.

McBride says he would immediately raise the state's average teacher salary by $2,500, which he says will cut in half the gap with the national average. Eventually he hopes to meet the national average.

"When we lose teachers to Georgia and Alabama, the market is telling us that we're not investing in education like we should," said McBride spokesman Alan Stonecipher.

As Georgia would attest, reaching the national average is easier said than done. That average keeps creeping up as other states improve their salaries.

Bush says he would continue providing more money that school districts could use to increase teacher pay. In an unguarded moment, the governor said he was interested in establishing a statewide minimum salary like the ones that exist in Alabama and Georgia. But Bush said he would not propose such a plan before the election because it would contradict his policy of supporting local control.

"Over the last four years, Gov. Bush has increased education funding and school districts have been able to put that money into teacher salaries," said Bush campaign spokeswoman Jill Bratina.

The additional $1.1-billion in school funding this year has enabled several districts to give raises of 5 percent or more. Those increases followed dismal raises or no raises last year, when Florida and other states struggled with budgets. "Every year I'm amazed that Georgia keeps coming up with that kind of money while Florida stands still," said Alfreddie Hightower, a veteran high school teacher in Jefferson County on the Georgia border, and president of the Jefferson County Education Association.

In those unguarded remarks about teacher pay, caught on tape by a reporter, Bush said he wants to stop talking about average pay.

There's a reason for that: Average pay provides an incomplete picture, especially in Florida where teacher salaries vary widely. Florida's average includes Miami-Dade, where an experienced teacher with a doctorate made $64,775 last year, and Desoto County, where the top salary is $40,534.

Some of the state's lowest teacher salaries are in North Florida counties that compete with neighboring states.

A beginning teacher in Jefferson County might spurn a $25,000 salary to take a job in Georgia for at least $29,259. Orange County, in the middle of the state, could offer $30,405.

Georgia and Alabama addressed their own pay disparity problems by setting statewide pay scales. They act as a sort of minimum wage for teachers. Local school districts can pay more, and cities like Atlanta and Birmingham do. "If not for that statewide floor, we would have some really low salaries in some of our small, rural areas," said Jim Williams, executive director of the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama. "They couldn't compete otherwise."

Florida has no such statewide scale. Unlike Georgia and Alabama, salaries are left to collective bargaining agreements between local school districts and local teacher unions. Few government or union leaders are ready to challenge that time-honored and constitutionally protected bargaining process.

But some are talking about it.

"A chunk of the teacher's salary will be taken out of the hands of the unions and school districts to negotiate," Bush said in those unguarded remarks. "As a state, we would say, "We're going to have this minimum pay scale.' "

Bush said then that he would not raise the issue until after the election -- he didn't want to be criticized for a proposal inconsistent with previous policies -- and has not made such a proposal.

Education Secretary Jim Horne recently laid out a list of possibilities for boosting teacher pay in Florida, including the concept of "setting a floor" for salaries. Horne, too, acknowledged the difficulty of challenging collective bargaining, but held out hope that some compromise might work.

The president of Florida's teachers union, Maureen Dinnen, said "I don't want to close my mind to anything." But she said she is "real protective of that collective bargaining law" and would be concerned that Bush might want to cut teachers out of the decisionmaking.

Some teachers would welcome such a change.

"To have a statewide minimum could really help a small county like ours," said Joyce Bosscher, the immediate past president of the Madison County teachers union.

"It wouldn't make any difference to Dade and the bigger counties. But right now we can't compete with Georgia or Leon (County, which includes Tallahassee, where pay is higher than in neighboring counties). We need to do something because we're losing people."

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Lucy Morgan

From the Times state desk