Burnt Orange Report

Perry Issues Executive Order on Teacher Pay

By Phillip Martin

Governor Perry issued another executive order on education today, this one on teacher incentive pay. According to his release, the plan is that 100 economically disadvantaged schools that show improvement in performance will each be eligible for a $100,000 grant, 75% of which must go to teachers. That's only $10 million. Perry's order calls for $35 million, asking the Legislative Budget Board to direct another $25 million for his incentive pay plan to be spread out across an additional 250 campuses.

So, in total, 350 campuses could see money from this executive order, but that's assuming the LBB has $25 million to redirect to 25 other campuses. The grant that Perry proposed would only go out to 100 campuses across the state.

Well, there's almost 8,000 school campuses in Texas, meaning the grant Perry has proposed would not give a pay raise to at least 278,000 of the 288,000 teachers in Texas. Compare that to the $2,000-$3,000 across-the-board teacher pay raises that Republicans and Democrats proposed during the Regular and Special Sessions.

From the Texas State Teacher's Association:

"If the Governor really cared about the hard working teachers of Texas, he would get behind an across-the-board teacher pay raise proposal that would move all teacher salaries to at least the national average rather than proposing a 5% solution that rewards only a handful of teachers and leaves 95% of our teachers behind."

Chris Bell had the following to say about Perry's latest order:

“All teachers need an incentive to stay in classrooms, whether they are in poor, rich or middle-class neighborhoods. Rick Perry has been ignoring a legitimate crisis in teacher retention for five years, and this gimmick would do little to address that...We can’t treat teachers like glorified test monitors and pay them accordingly if we want to have any hope of keeping teachers in classrooms. We need to bring all teachers up to the national average, put them in charge of their own classrooms, and then we might see some different results.”

Well said. This executive order, like others before it, amounts to little more than an overblown and out of touch press release that proposes a failing solution that a majority in the Texas Legislature have already decided is simply not enough for our teachers. As Chris Bell said, we can't keep ignoring the fact that teachers are leaving public schools because they aren't getting paid what they deserve.