A survey of Fairfax County Public School teachers obtained by The Washington Examiner’s Lisa Gartner found that 76 percent consider a fatter paycheck as their primary job satisfaction, up from 70 percent last year. While money can be an excellent motivator, there’s no incentive to do better if educators are rewarded with yearly pay raises without a corresponding and independently verified increase in productivity. Especially in this era of fiscal uncertainty, automatic pay raises for public employees are in appropriate, to say nothing of unsustainable. Between 2000 and 2009, FCPS employees received generous annual pay raises ranging between 4.5 and 7.6 percent, which bumped up their retirement benefits. Fairfax taxpayers will be paying for these past pay increases for years to come. After a necessary two-year freeze on wages, teachers got a 1 percent cost-of-living raise last fall, paid for with $21 million in federal stimulus funds. Union officials want another across-the-board pay increase in the school board’s fiscal 2013 budget, which will be presented later this month. But is it justified?
No, according to an analysis by the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance. Between 2000 and 2012, public school spending increased 31 percent — twice as fast as enrollment — and most of that increase went to teacher pay and benefits. What have Fairfax taxpayers received in return for $1.6 billion in fiscal 2012? Overall SAT scores have remained virtually flat since 1975. Only 44 percent of the 3,511 FCPS seniors who took the 2010 ACT college entrance exam were considered “college ready.” According to the Virginia Department of Education, FCPS failed to make annual yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, defined as 85 percent proficiency in mathematics and 86 percent proficiency in reading.
On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 13 percent of FCPS fourth-graders scored “below basic” in reading and 28 percent missed the mark in reading. Even more alarming, 22 percent of eighth-graders scored “below basic” in both reading and math, meaning that almost a quarter of students in one of the nation’s top public school systems are not academically prepared for high school. (Note that a fifth of all FCPS students — those in special ed and with limited English ability — didn’t take the NAEPs.) Superintendent Jack Dale’s previous attempts to jack up FCPS scores on the state-mandated Standards of Learning tests by pushing hundreds of students into “alternate assessments” earned a rare rebuke from the State Board of Education. FCPS teachers may want a pay raise, but they clearly haven’t earned one.
