Editorial: A race to the bottom in Florida teacher pay

Give dunce caps to the Florida Legislature for flunking one of life’s most obvious lessons.

It’s this: Experience really is the best teacher. That goes double for teachers themselves.

There’s no college prep or other shortcut to knowing what works best with each student and with a classroom as a whole. Teachers learn that only from their students. It takes time. Like almost anything else, it gets better with practice.

And yet Florida has just placed next to last — No. 50 out of 51 — in the annual nationwide teacher pay rankings compiled by the National Education Association (NEA), which include all states plus Washington D.C. That’s how poorly Tallahassee values experience.

It’s two places worse than last year, when Florida could boast of being at least better than Mississippi.

Now, only West Virginia stands between Florida and rock bottom.

Sinking fast

Florida’s average teacher pay is $53,048, some $11,000 less than neighboring Georgia and way below the nationwide average of $69,544. Overall, teacher pay in Florida increased by a meager 3% last year compared to 4.1% nationally.

While pumping lots more money into starting salaries, which is good as far as it goes, Florida has taken experienced teachers for granted, allowing their income to fall further behind inflation.

It’s no coincidence that Florida posts the nation’s highest number of teacher vacancies at 5,294. That’s 10 times as many as in California, which has twice as many K-12 students but pays teachers the nation’s highest wages, almost double Florida’s.

We asked a retired teacher with 44 years of classroom experience, mostly in Florida, what she learned from her students.

“You get a better understanding of how to work with people in a particular age group,” she said, “so that all of them can benefit from the knowledge you’re imparting. You learn to be compassionate, because there are things that go on outside the classroom that impact their lives. You learn what works and what doesn’t work academically. You learn to be flexible in your lesson plans, because what sounds great on paper doesn’t always work.”

Serious burnout

A 2022 Gallup survey revealed that K-12 employees have the highest burnout rate — 44% — of all industries nationally.

The reasons belie the insidious myth that teachers have it easy because they keep bankers’ hours and have summers off. In reality, it’s more like an 80-hour week with papers to grade and lessons to plan at home and constant emails and texts from students and their parents.

“I worked seven days a week,” said the retired Florida teacher. “It’s never out of your head if you do the job properly. You can’t go in there and wing it. It’s one of the toughest jobs there are.”

Florida’s Department of Education has responded to the NEA report by calling it “bogus,” saying it fails to account fairly for the starting salary increases or for state-by-state cost-of-living variations. Predictably, the response attacked the NEA over collective bargaining, which the NEA credits for higher wages in states where it prevails.

The Florida Constitution protects the right of public employees to bargain collectively, but Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature have deliberately made it more difficult for teachers, and some other unions, by eliminating payroll deduction for dues and requiring local bargaining units to be recertified.

While doing that, they exempted police, firefighters and correctional workers. Those public safety unions commonly support Republicans while the teachers favor Democrats.

Culture war damage

Florida is deliberately making teaching more difficult.

DeSantis’ culture war legislation has made faculties fearful of teaching honestly about the history and influence of racism.

He has signed a new state law specifically forbidding teacher training courses and continuing education from teaching “identity politics” or anything based on “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities.”

Read strictly, that would bar prospective teachers from learning how the South conceived Jim Crow laws to keep Blacks poor and powerless for a century after the Civil War ended slavery, and how the consequences persist.

The bill DeSantis signed, House Bill 1291, passed the Republican supermajority legislature along partisan lines.

“If you are planning for a year, sow rice,” says a Chinese proverb. “If you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.”

Florida’s Legislature prefers to plant seeds of ignorance.

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