When Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders talks about the Arkansas LEARNS Act, she almost always mentions teacher pay.
“It starts by immediately offering incentives to attract and retain the best brightest teachers to Arkansas,” she said when she first introduced the bill. “Instead of being in 48th in the nation for starting teacher salary, we will now be in the top five.”
Under the law, new teachers will get $50,000 a year, a far higher base salary than even a year ago, when, according to the National Education Association, Arkansas offered on average $37,000 to first-year teachers.
Under LEARNS, educators already making $50,000 or more get an additional $2,000 as a bonus, but the law doesn't promise that money for teachers after the upcoming school year.
For many people, the law is a trade-off because although starting salaries are higher, it eliminates the salary schedule teachers have enjoyed for years.
In the past, teachers received yearly salary hikes, and more money if they got a master's degree. LEARNS shifts that responsibility to districts, meaning teachers wanting a raise may be at the mercy of their employers.
Democratic state Senator and former high school social studies teacher Linda Chesterfield was critical of the bill saying, with these few rules, districts could choose a salary schedule of a “dollar a year.”
“And if you want the camaraderie of the classroom, those first-year teachers who don't know how to set up a classroom, who don't know how to engage in classroom discipline, are not going to enjoy the camaraderie they deserve,” she said, speaking against the bill in the legislature.
Teachers around the state have echoed this, saying the dependability of yearly raises is an incentive to stay in the profession.
Chesterfield says, for her, being a teacher was something she had to practice.
“If I just stayed stagnant,” she said,“ I would not have had classroom discipline. I deliberately paid extra money so I could get extra hours. I took advantage of professional learning opportunities.”
“Teachers are not born great,” Chesterfield explained, saying they get better as they go.
Trevor McGarrah teaches computer science in Searcy. He is working on the effort to repeal LEARNS, and cites teacher pay as one of his biggest problems with the law. Teachers, McGarrah believes, shouldn't make less than $50,000 a year, he just wants the law to account for professional growth.
“Between 50% and 60% of teachers have a master's degree or more,” he said. “And we have all this extra training... not to mention most teachers at some point pursue additional college courses to become better teachers.”
Like many educators, McGarrah says he’s unsure how LEARNS is going to play out.
“For Cabot, an example, the first-year teacher, second-year teacher, third-year, fourth-year, all of them are going to be making the same amount of money regardless of the years of experience.”
When asked at a town hall meeting about more experienced teachers potentially making just as much as new ones, Gov. Sanders said districts should be responsible for keeping teachers in the job.
“This is where the flexibility for teachers really matters,” she said explaining that districts should fight to keep good teachers in the profession.
The law says the money will come out of the “funding matrix” set up by the Senate and House Education Committee this year. Under LEARNS, 80% of money allocated to districts per teacher is required to go to paying those teachers' salaries.
Little Rock School Board members have expressed concern over the new salary plan. At a presentation during a March meeting, board members said the state is funding less than half of teacher raises, meaning the district has to rearrange money to meet the requirements. Superintendent Jermall Wright and board member Leigh Ann Wilson were worried about the salary schedule.
“Districts, based upon some conversations we have had among some superintendents, they are not going to be able to meet the [$50,000],” Wright said.
Wilson responded: “If your starting teacher salary is $35,000 for a bachelor and the state is going to fund less than half, there is no way those districts can get to [$50,000]."
Before LEARNS, Little Rock had one of the highest starting salaries for teachers in the state. Board member Ali Noland is suing the state over the law.
“The practical impact of complying with this new law is going to be that we're going to have to make cuts,” she said. “We don't have another source of millions of dollars coming in.”
At a Senate Education Committee meeting in April, the committee’s chair, Republican Sen. Jane English, said the group will hold future meetings to discuss funding public schools in light of LEARNS.
