DTU and DCPS reach a tentative contract agreement

Most people don’t know but Jacksonville’s public-school teachers have been working without a contract since the last one expired in July of last year. A huge sticking point had been the amount of raises for teachers and this is going to get a little wonky for a moment.

Seven years ago, after the passage of Senate Bill 736, districts were forced to change how they evaluate and pay teachers. Now student test scores would factor heavily how school districts would do both. During the last contract Duval teachers United and the district negotiated in 2014, two pay scales were created. One for teachers who were hired after 2010 when another bill stripped teachers of work protections, which were commonly and inaccurately referred to as tenure, which put new teachers on one-year contracts where they could be let go for any or no reason at the end of the school year and the other pay scale was for veteran teachers who still had their work protections. They were put on what was called the grandfather pay scale. 

Teachers without work protections could expect a thousand dollar raise for an effective evaluation and two thousand dollars for a highly effective one, while teachers on the grandfather pay scale received more modest wage increases, though they could give up their job protections and join the new pay scale should they choose. I and most veteran teachers I know chose to remain on the grandfather scale.

That brings us to the current negotiation where the sticking point was the 1000 and 2000 dollar raises. The district feeling the pinch from the previous superintendent’s financial mismanagement, started this year 12 million dollars in the hole. Couple this with the state continuously in my opinion criminally underfund education and the district was caught between a rock and a hard place.

So, teachers started the year without a contract and without the raises, either 1000, 2000, or the more modest raises that were negotiated. Likewise, stipends for hard to fill positions or for teachers that worked at special schools were held back and as you can imagine as the year dragged on this has caused a lot of frustration with a lot of teachers.

That frustration however may be coming to an end as the district and union have reached a tentative agreement the week of January 8^th where the 1000, and 2000-dollar raises were kept intact. So that should be the end of the story, after all the pitch was about how teachers were working without contracts and soon they will have them ending an ongoing problem.

Except it’s not, not even close because as long as we have a government in Tallahassee and education leaders here at home that continue to underfund and kneecap public education then we will continue to have problems.

Florida is chronically near the bottom when it comes to education funding and when you factor in inflation our schools get less than they did in 2007 the year before the great recession. Furthermore, now thanks to last year’s House Bill 7069 the district is required to share what meager funds it has with charter schools many of which are for profit.  

Locally board member Scott Shine supported the measure because he said he expected Tallahassee to dramatically increase education funding, which it did not, he also supported the bill because he said he believed union teachers would lose their job but that would be a whole different post.  

Last fall at a board meeting when discussing suing the state over House Bill 7069, Mister Shine went onto say that the republican members of the Duval delegation voted for the bill because they didn’t know what was in it and because the bill was speaker of the house Richard Corcoran’s priority, and those members were afraid to cross the speaker.

Then there is local businessman Gary Chartrand whose name you have probably heard a lot. He is responsible for bringing Teach for America, which takes non-education members puts then through a six-week access course and then into our neediest schools where they are supposed to serve a two-year commitment ensuring our most vulnerable students have a revolving door of teachers, or the exact opposite of what they need.

He also brought the KIPP charter school to town and if you didn’t know it, the Jacksonville Children’s Commission, after Chartrand made large donations to Mayor Lenny Curry, changed their rules so that they now fund part of the KIPP school day, before this they had only funded after school programs.  Now the mayor, Chartrand and the Jacksonville Children’s Commission, might argue that correlation is not causation, but the relationship is clear.

Chartrand also banded together with a group of philanthropists and pledged nearly fifty million dollars over three years to Duval County public schools, with the only caveats being that the district must spend the money on what they told the district to and the district had to continue funding the programs when the money ran out. Last summer when the district balked, Chartrand threatened to withhold the money that the QEA promised the district but had not yet delivered.

Perhaps worst of all however is Chartrand is currently finishing his second term on the state board of education despite the fact he has no education experience, he was never a teacher and he sent his children to expensive private schools. While on the board he advocated for teachers to lose work protections, but he has never advocated for Tallahassee to adequately fund education.

Duval County is at the epicenter for what ails education in Florida. A school board member who roots for schools to fail so union teachers can be fired and for-profit charter schools can make even more money. A mayor who has rules changed to fund his donors pet project.  A delegation that is ignorant about what they are voting on and only did so to satiate a powerful legislator, and an influential businessman out of his depth who wields money like a club and gives campaign donations to get what he wants and threatens when he doesn’t.

Despite my spending much of the last decade criticizing DCPS I believe we have such promise, but it is promise we will never meet as long as the city reflexively votes for and supports people like Shine, Chartrand and the republican members of the Duval delegation who seek to harm our schools.

So, Duval Teachers United and Duval Public Schools have finally negotiated a new contract and I sincerely believe they have both done the best they can. Unfortunately, it is a contract where most teachers don’t have work protections, and which pays teachers far below the national average and what professionals with the same level of education receive, because sadly, that is all the state of Florida allows.