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Performance Ruler Would Help Teachers Step Up

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By TOM JACKSON

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 19, 2008

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the images published from Tuesday's finalizing of the Pasco public school budget speak encyclopedically. They depict an unruly rabble, brandishing signs that suggest the demonstrators are utterly disconnected from modern realities.

Now, whether these impressions accurately reflect the freeze-frames that inspire them is a matter for debate. Eye of the beholder and all that.

Indeed, some folks, gazing upon school employee Robert Moore and his no-easy-button placard, would shout, "You go, Bob!" seeing a righteous warrior and not just another guy who skipped his Introduction to Education course the day they explained teachers' salaries.

Still, it's not like the 200 or so Pasco school employees who lined U.S. 41 before the meeting, then filled the board room to overflowing, didn't have a sympathetic audience. But nothing any of them said into the microphone or hooted from the gallery was going to change the fact that the board had a statutory mandate to approve a budget Tuesday, and that Tuesday was too late to perform the task of reallocation.

At issue are so-called step increases, automatic raises for school district employees having nothing to do with performance but, instead, tied to years of service. Last year, step increases came to about $800 per contractual employee, or slightly more than $4 a day, based on a 196-day employment calendar. Lunch money. Chump change.

That is, until you multiply it by 7,500, then it becomes a figure - $6 million - that focuses the attention of district accountants attempting to balance a whopper of a budget ($1.2 billion) that nonetheless needed to shrink by about 5.5 percent from last year.

Sounds Familiar

Teachers, bless 'em, expressed familiar complaints. They take work home. They arrive early. They stay late. They purchase supplies. They pursue post-graduate degrees. And they're all on the cusp of bankruptcy.

Listen, This Space gets all that. I grew up in a household in which one of the breadwinners was a public school teacher. Sometimes, given the vagaries of over-the-road sales work performed by the other breadwinner, the teacher's modest, but reliable check comprised the household's primary income.

If the national standard of remuneration had been a value to society, Dee Jackson, master of grammar, Shakespearean expert and unsurpassed example of Southern grace and dignity to several thousand high school students spanning five decades, would have been underpaid at 10 times her well-earned wages.

Moreover, everything today's teachers say about their workloads played out in the concrete block house where I grew up. Never once did I hear her complain about her compensation; she chose her profession, or maybe it chose her, and she accepted the arrangement with equanimity, finding her rewards elsewhere.

Conventional Wisdom

Teachers never have been better paid than now, although it may be fairly said that they still are not well-paid. Like Mom, today's teachers must count on other considerations to achieve job satisfaction.

On the other hand, Pasco teachers rejected the state's pool of bonus money, and they remain philosophically opposed to a framework for identifying and rewarding excellence, and encouraging competition.

Such a system also would help dispel a conventional wisdom - anyone can teach - that trumps every argument about teachers' value to society. We admire excellence, certainly, but it's exceptionalness that we reward, even when the global reality is harsh.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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