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by Joe Sullivan

UT’s College of Education graduates about 350 K-12 teachers each year, the vast majority of them with a master’s degree and a year of internship.

Knox County hires between 250 and 300 new teachers each year to fill vacancies in its teaching ranks that total 3,500 positions. But while it would like to attract more of these UT graduates, it only gets about 150 of them.

One of the reasons why so many of them, especially top students, go elsewhere is that the starting pay for teachers with master’s degrees in Knox County only ranks 52 among school systems in the state. This past year, the Knox County pay scale for these teachers was $31,272. That’s more than $2,000 a year below the top 10 school systems in the state and more than $1,000 below the top 25 that includes all of the other metropolitan core systems, as well as Alcoa, Maryville, Oak Ridge, Blount County, Anderson County and Roane County in the Knoxville area.

But these differentials pale by comparison with those offered by school systems throughout the Atlanta metropolitan area. According to Lynn Cagle, UT’s associate dean in charge of licensure, these systems recruit heavily at UT, with starting salaries for teachers with master’s degrees on the order of $40,000 or higher.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg also does a lot of recruiting at UT. While its starting pay for teachers with a master’s isn’t much higher than Knox County, it offers them much greater opportunities for advancement. For example, Charlotte-Mecklenburg and other North Carolina school systems reimburse teachers the $2,300 out-of-pocket cost of applying to become nationally board-certified. Those who get certified, following a rigorous certification process, receive an immediate 12 percent raise. Georgia and South Carolina offer comparable raises on a statewide basis.

In Tennessee, by contrast, only a handful of school systems offer any inducement for teachers to become nationally board-certified, and Knox County isn’t one of them. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Knox County has only one teacher who has attained that status, as compared to 664 in Charlotte-Mecklenburg alone,

UT education professor Ted Hipple is a great believer in the extent to which going through the process of applying for national board certification strengthens teaching skills. Only about half of those who apply obtain it, but according to Hipple, “Even teachers who fail to earn the certification almost always speak highly of the process, saying it has made them better teachers.”

School board member Dan Murphy is in the forefront of pressing to make starting teacher pay in Knox County more competitive. “ We talk a lot about losing our top teachers, but an even bigger problem is recruiting them,” Murphy says.

Yet when the school board resumes budget deliberations next week, coming up with any pay raises for teachers means flying in the face of a $10 million cut that county Mayor Mike Ragsdale imposed on the board’s $316.4 million recommended budget. (A recently announced $3 million windfall increase in state funding has reduced the shortfall to $7 million).

In its original budget, the school board provided $4 million for an across-the-board average $500 pay raise for all teachers. But Murphy is determined to target any of that money that survives the cut to teachers in pay categories where Knox County ranks lowest, of which starting salaries are the worst-case example. Of course, preserving any money for teacher raises will mean cutting substantial sums from other areas that could include course offerings not required by the state, such as third- and fourth-year foreign languages and advanced placement courses. So the board is caught between a rock and a hard place.

In the past, teacher raises have been championed by the Knox County Education Association to the point that they appeared to many to be pay grabs by the teachers’ union. But now the cause of making Knox County schools more competitive for top teachers is being embraced ever moreso by the business community.

In the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership’s June newsletter, its president Mike Edwards writes that, “In the next five years Knox County Schools will have 965 teachers (or 23 percent of its current faculty) eligible for retirement...

“Additionally, our school system is among the lowest paying systems in the region. As it stands now, we are looking at replacing a tremendous amount of our most experienced teachers with salaries that are simply not competitive. The bottom line is that if we are going to achieve great results, we must recruit and retain the very best teachers... Working together, we can all then begin to raise our community’s profile for having a first rate, increasingly competitive workforce...

“Our community must stop viewing public education as just an important government service that we show as a tax expense and start prioritizing it as a primary investment with a very high expectation of return.”

That’s a message that needs to reach Ragsdale as well as the community at large. While the county mayor has proposed some worthy education initiatives, his mantra of making every school a great school is going to have a hollow ring until funding is provided to make teacher pay more competitive.

July 1, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 27 © 2004 Metro Pulse