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Pass it along.
Texas House Up to No Good on School Bill: Real Pay Raise Voted Down, Sham Pay Raise Passed; Health-Care Money Voted Down, Equity Voted Down; Debate Continues
The Texas House quit working just shy of midnight last night on HB 2, the session's big bill on school finance and education policy. Debate on scores of amendments resumed this morning. You may see headlines in today’s papers suggesting that the House approved a teacher pay raise last evening. The real story is very different. HB 2 shortchanges public education in multiple ways, and teacher compensation is no exception.
The bill's author, Arlington Republican Rep. Kent Grusendorf, has long been a bitter opponent of across-the-board teacher pay raises. No such raises were included in the bill as introduced or as it passed out of Grusendorf's Public Education Committee last week. But as the debate wore on yesterday, vote-counters for House Speaker Tom Craddick, Republican of Midland, evidently began to fear that a real, across-the-board pay raise would be attached as an amendment to their bill. So House leaders orchestrated a vote for a sham version of a $3,000 pay raise.
First, however, the folks in charge of the House had to dispose of a substitute motion by Rep. Jim Dunnam, Democrat of Waco, to pass a real teacher pay raise of $2,400 for next school year and another $2,400 on top of that for school year 2006-2007. The Dunnam substitute was defeated by a margin of 78 to 70. All 63 House Democrats voted for it, and so did seven House Republicans. According to the unofficial vote tally, the seven Republicans who voted for the real pay raise were: Dwayne Bohac of Houston, Charlie Geren of Fort Worth, Pat Haggerty of El Paso, Mike Hamilton from the Beaumont area, Bob Hunter of Abilene, Tommy Merritt of Longview, and Sid Miller of Stephenville.
The sham teacher pay raise then was offered as the only version acceptable to the leadership, and House members went along with it by a vote of 102 to 42. Here's what the pay amendment says. Out of the money already promised to school districts in HB 2–intended to cover the costs of enrollment growth and state allotments such as those for extra services needed by students with disabilities, low English proficiency, and economic disadvantages–districts also would be told to raise teacher pay by "the lesser of" $3,000 per teacher or "the amount that can be provided using 44 percent of the increase in the district's maintenance and operations revenue from the 2004-2005 school year." Further, if your school district raised pay locally this year or last year to make up for the cut in the state health-care stipend, it could subtract that amount from this supposed pay raise.
If this all sounds pretty shifty, that's because it is. This purported pay raise lacks crucial guarantees that were built into the $3,000 pay raise of 1999. On that occasion, the legislature wrote into the law extremely strict provisions to ensure that the $3,000 was a net gain on top of whatever your school district would have paid you in the next school year. And when that bill passed it had a guaranteed funding source. Neither one of these crucial elements is present in the sham pay raise tentatively adopted. While this move may have been slick enough to get the House leadership out of a tight spot in the floor debate today, it is likely to backfire as teachers learn that (a) the money for this raise has yet to be found and (b) even if the money is found there is no guarantee of receiving $3,000 above current pay.
State Representative Marc Veasey of Fort Worth called UEA today to let us know that he and State Representative Lon Burnam of Fort Worth voted against the $3000 pay raise amendment because it was a sham amendment. He said he supports teacher pay raises and will vote on any amendment with a raise that is truly funded.
Besides concocting the illusory pay raise, the House voted by a margin of 77 to 70 against restoring the $1,000 health-care stipend for all school employees. This fight will go on, and Rep. Jose Menendez, Democrat of San Antonio, deserves credit for offering the necessary amendment and pressing the legislature to keep its promise.
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ouse School Plan Narrowly Approved, But It Hinges On Tax Bill Up For a Vote Tomorrow
The Texas House gave preliminary approval to a sweeping change in school finance and education policy today, voting 76 to 71 in favor of HB 2 by Rep. Kent Grusendorf, Republican of Arlington. As previously reported in the hotline, the Grusendorf plan was prettied up yesterday with a proposal for a teacher pay hike, but the bill offers no guarantee of the funding needed to make the proposal meaningful.
All but one of the 63 Democrats in the House and nine Republicans joined forces to vote against HB 2. All major teachers associations, administrators associations, and most other educational related organizations opposed this bill.
Last session, you may recall, the legislature took more than $1 billion out of the pockets of active and retired school employees and then took credit for providing approximately that same amount of money to school districts in new formula aid. Under HB 2 we apparently would see the same short of shell game, and lawmakers once again are casting a covetous eye on your pocketbook.
Among the budget "savings" under consideration this time, the biggest take-away from school employees would be the failure to restore the $1,000 health-care stipend as required by law. That move alone would "save" $650 million at your expense. A proposed increase in the cut from your paycheck for retired school employees' health insurance would take another $58 million off your hands. If you're reminded at this point of the old saying about "robbing Peter to pay Paul," then you're starting to get the picture.
The bottom line under HB 2: New school aid after accounting for enrollment growth and inflation would be next to nil yet would be expected to fund rapidly expanding services for students with special needs (e.g., students with disabilities, low English proficiency, or economic disadvantages)--as well as the purported pay raise for teachers.
An especially compelling statement against the bill came from Republican Rep. Bob Griggs of Fort Worth. Griggs, a former superintendent, said this bill is the equivalent of "junk food" instead of reliable school funding. He said the bill offers a "sugar rush" of initial funding, but "funding falls apart after a very short period of time." Griggs recounted the success stories of two of his former students, one with severe disabilities and one who came to public school as an eighth-grader from Mexico with no English-language skills. Both are now highly successful, he said, thanks to the intensive interventions that public schools marshaled to help them. Their stories show that "dollars do make a difference," Griggs said, but HB 2 would leave districts with minimal discretionary funding for services to high-need students.
One particularly bad part of HB 2 was almost removed today. This section would designate many more schools as low-performing in order to set them up as targets for state-mandated takeover by private school managers. This part of HB 2 would disregard a school's achievement of an "academically acceptable" rating under the state accountability system. Failure to meet federal mandates of "adequate yearly progress" for two years in a row would make schools ripe targets for privatization. An amendment by Rep. Garnet Coleman, Democrat of Houston, to strip this privatization mandate from the bill initially prevailed by a two-vote margin, 72 to 70. After a pause, however, four of Republican House Speaker Tom Craddick's lieutenants, who had apparently missed the vote, claimed that their voting machines all had mysteriously malfunctioned at once, failing to record their votes to table the Coleman amendment. Counting their four votes, the Coleman amendment was defeated.
Voting against the bill: All but one democrat (Al Edwards of Houston who voted present, but not voting. Of the 87 Republicans: 76 voted yes; Rep. Brian McCall of Plano was present but did not vote; Rep. William Callegari of Katy was absent. Nine Republicans voted no. There were Rep. Fred Brown of College Station, Rep. Charlie Geren of Fort Worth, Rep. Toby Goodman of Arlington, Rep Bob Griggs of North Richland Hills*, Rep. Todd Smith of Euless, Rep. Pat Haggerty of El Paso, Rep. Delwin Jones of Lubbock, Rep. Edmund of Seguin, and Rep. Thomas Merritt of Longview. (Rep. Bob Griggs was former Superintendent of Birdville.) Tax Bill in Trouble: The speaker's resourcefulness probably faces a more severe test today, when the tax bill needed to cover HB 2's one-third cut in property taxes comes up for a vote. The tax measure, HB 3, has enemies everywhere you look.
Many business interests dislike the new payroll tax in the bill. Advocates for low- and middle-income Texans point out that the bill would give Texas the highest sales tax in the nation. An official state budget analysis backs up the claim that HB 3 would provide net tax cuts only for Texans who make more than $100,000 a year. The rest of us actually would pay higher taxes overall, because new taxes would more than offset the benefit of the one-third cut in property taxes.
The education community has no use for HB 3, either. It would provide a lot of pain for the vast majority of taxpayers but zero gain for Texas schoolchildren. HB 3 raises only enough money to offset property-tax reductions and "not one red cent more," to quote Rep. Grusendorf.
Today's victory for the Grusendorf HB 2 plan thus could prove to be quite temporary. HB 2 and HB 3 are a package deal. If HB 3 with all its new taxes goes down to defeat, then the new school-funding formulas and education measures in HB 2 are automatically rendered null and void. This scenario, if it comes to pass, describes what could be the best possible outcome for public education this week at your state capitol.
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My letter written in haste to my rep.
The Honorable Jim Pitts
Texas House of Representatives
CAP 1N.9
P.O. Box 2910
Austin, TX 78768
Dear Honorable Rep. Pitts:
It is with great concern that I write you. Over the past several weeks, legislators of the House have been debating school finance. While I appreciate the legislators’ desire to repair a failing system, the proposed legislation to rectify the problem generates more doubts. In fact, HB 2 shortchanges districts and especially teachers as there are no true guarantees to a salary increase; something that teachers have needed for quite some time. We teachers are still ranked in the bottom half for pay nationwide yet we face some of the most daunting situations in our Texas schools with which we are expected to not only deal but also overcome and show progress. This is not a small task. Yet, we continue to feel underappreciated because of rising costs of living which includes health insurance, but no equal rise in salary.
With HB 2 this salary increase is not by any means guaranteed. It is to come from monies already allotted to school districts in helping with special population students such as English language learners and students with disabilities. Other stipulations include allowing school districts to subtract from the $3,000 any raises already given to the teachers from local funds. Even economically disadvantaged districts are being allowed to pull monies from the maintenance and operation funds. In short, this raise is not real and not with guaranteed monies. I strongly supported Rep. Jim Dunnam’s true salary increase amendment. However, this was struck from HB 2 and I have to wonder why.
Further, the House voted against restoring the health care stipend for teachers. My health care costs have risen $500.00 a month over the past four years. That is an incredible amount with no subsequent pay raises to off-set this. Now, my state legislators are continuing to deny me help in this area. Again, I ask why.
Finally, I am against HB 2 because its funding is relying on budget cuts in areas of need. Teacher health care help is cut as I have already stated. There is a proposal to increase the Teacher Retirement System’s monthly multiplier effectively leaving teachers with less per month. There are cuts in higher education services plus health and human services for the state. Even more troubling is the idea to raise the state sales tax which would put even more of a burden on those who are struggling economically. In short HB 2 has poor funding resources and I urge you to rethink and fight for quality funding for Texas schools and a true pay raise for teachers.
Sincerely,
Maestro
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