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Winn defends Florida's teacher pay scale

By JEFFREY S. SOLOCHEK
Published May 11, 2006

Florida Education Commissioner John Winn has had it with people who say the state ranks poorly on average teacher pay.

It's just not true, Winn says. If other states included such factors as benefits, taxes and cost of living in their calculations, he says, Florida would appear much more generous to teachers.

Yet in the national hunt for teachers - Florida school districts need to hire about 32,000 for the coming academic year - the state bears the burden of national rankings that make it look bad unjustly, Winn says.

"We are inordinately hampered by faulty national data," the commissioner said Wednesday during a telephone conference. "We are hearing from some teachers, "Doesn't Florida pay low?' This is a concern. It's a competition out there."

His answer? A more systematic method of comparing "apples to apples," where every state uses the same criteria and someone follows through to ensure that they did.

"Let's find out where we are," he said.

Winn presented a report on national average salary calculations to the U.S. Education Department this week. Federal officials found the information so compelling that they assigned the National Center for Education Statistics to take up the initiative, bringing education leaders from several states together in June to consider alternatives.

All of which is academically interesting but likely beside the point, said Yvonne Lyons, executive director of the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association.

"I'm not so sure that it does actually ever mean anything," she said of the state teacher salary average.

It's not a common topic on the recruiting trail, said Kim Swartzel, a Pinellas County recruiter, who recently returned from a week seeking teachers in the Midwest.

"When I go out and recruit, I don't talk about the average teacher salary in Florida. At all," Swartzel said.

Neither do her potential hires.

"(But) they will ask you about the cost of living," she said.

If teachers take jobs here, they usually come with their eyes open, said Gwen Gideon, Hernando County's school recruitment and retention coordinator. They know what salary, benefit and related packages they are getting, Gideon said.

The bigger difficulty, she said, arises when teachers choose among several districts in a given area. "Some will say this district pays lower than the surrounding area," she said. "Sometimes we lose people for that reason."

Lyons, who negotiates teacher contracts in Hillsborough, shares that point of view: "The reality is, our competition is Pinellas, Pasco, Manatee and Polk."

And the real problem is that real teacher pay, however the average is calculated, does not keep up with the cost of living, said Jade Moore, executive director of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association. Many teachers can't afford mortgages for average-priced homes, he said, and often can't even make the average rents without roommates.

"It is their attempt to make perfume out of manure," Moore said of Winn's argument.

Winn called the need to revise average pay calculations a no-brainer. Maybe it wouldn't matter if lawmakers didn't rely on such rankings, he said, but the reality is that even the unions use them when lobbying for additional money.

So the time has come, he said, to do it right. And if Florida by some fluke ends up ranking even lower, Winn said teachers can count on him to fight for better compensation.

Jeffrey S. Solochek can be reached at 813 269-5304 or solochek@sptimes.com

[Last modified May 11, 2006, 01:32:14]