District Glut Drives Teacher Demand (Gwen Moritz Editor’s note)

An extra $10,000 a year is probably not enough to make most readers of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal move to Texas. But for freshly minted school teachers, an extra 10 grand is 40-50 percent more than they can make teaching in Arkansas. No wonder Dallas schools are having such good luck recruiting teachers.

And no wonder Arkansas schools are having a harder time hiring teachers. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported that 600 teaching positions will likely be vacant when school starts next month, and the problem is getting worse. Plus, there are some 2,500 teachers who aren’t certified in the subjects they are being asked to teach. The Arkansas Board of Education has been warned that that the state is in danger of violating the federal “No Child Left Behind Act of 2001,” which requires that all teachers be “highly qualified” by 2005-2006.

There is clearly a disconnect between the demand for teachers and the supply, but the problem is not on the supply side. Even at the below-par salaries being paid by most Arkansas districts, there is a teacher for every 16.2 students in Arkansas (as of the 1999-2000 school year), and the ratio has declined steadily for the past century.

The problem is we have too much demand for teachers because we have too many school districts — all attempting, but few succeeding, to meet the same staffing requirements. Some tiny districts boast a teacher-student ratio of barely six to one, but even they aren’t necessarily providing qualified teachers for each subject or teaching every required subject every year.

The Blue Ribbon Commission on Public Education has endorsed the idea of forced consolidation of schools that can’t meet minimum standards for educational offerings and teacher salaries, which would radically alter the landscape if the General Assembly miraculously had the courage to adopt the recommendation.

Meanwhile, Gov. Mike Huckabee is promoting his competing “Next Step” plan, which calls for higher standards but scrupulously avoids any suggestion of tough consequences should school districts fail to comply. (Consolidation, the governor has said, is just part of the “Little Rock mentality.”) Next Step does have many wonderful features, including a better balance between protecting teachers’ jobs and protecting students from lousy teachers. But if we get rid of the bad teachers — the ones Dallas doesn’t have to hire, even if they are willing to move — we may have a real shortage.

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Editorial opinion on the proposed “Ax the Tax” amendment, which would remove all sales taxes on groceries, has been polarized along ideological lines. The conservative Democrat-Gazette is all for axing the grocery tax; the liberal Arkansas Times is in the unpleasant position of having to oppose an amendment that would provide relief from a burdensome regressive tax because there is no proposed method for replacing $321 million in a state budget that already has been scraped to the bone. (Local governments would lose an additional $114 million.)

I have always considered grocery taxes to be barbaric. There is something fundamentally wrong with taxing baby formula while exempting cattle feed. And Arkansas’ lawmakers have been short-sighted in allowing the state’s revenue to become more and more dependent on sales taxes, which are the most regressive and the least dependable, tied as they are to both real and perceived economic hardships.

If Arkansans ax the tax at the polls in November, there is a very real chance that the Legislature that convenes in January will face a court order in the Lake View case that will require hundreds of millions more every year for education as well as hundreds of millions to replace the grocery tax. Part of me would like to see our elected representatives have to deal — head-on and with no more time-outs — with our state’s two most pressing political problems: inadequate education and illogical taxes. But the other part of me fears they might be no better than their counterparts in Tennessee at rising to the occasion.

Removing the tax from groceries is the right thing to do, but until I am confident that the other right things will also be done, I can’t actively encourage anyone to vote for the amendment.