Missouri’s next governor to face education issues

September 27, 2008 05:06 pm

— By Melissa Dunson
mdunson@joplinglobe.com
No one goes into education for the money, but Al Cade, head of Missouri Southern State University’s teacher-education department, doesn’t believe teachers should scrape by.
“Why do folks become teachers? Because they have a love for young people. They want to make a difference,” Cade said. “But you can’t pay the bills off of making a difference.”
The average salary for a beginning teacher in Southwest Missouri is $27,618; even after a lifetime in the classroom, maximum pay for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree averages $33,680, and with a master’s $41,229, the Missouri State Teachers Association says.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education reports that 36 percent of Missouri teachers leave within their first five years because of pay.
Cade said low salaries are just one obstacle facing education that candidates for state office need to address.
Their plans
Kenny Hulshof, the Republican candidate for governor, wants to offer $3,000 incentives to math and science teachers in an effort to attract 1,500 of them and so Missouri can keep the teachers that it trains, said Scott Baker, spokesman for the Hulshof campaign. Hulshof was unavailable for comment.
Hulshof is expected to reveal his plan for K-12 education this week, but Baker said the candidate is committed to fully funding K-12 education and some of the inadequacies in teacher pay can be addressed through that.
Jay Nixon, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, also was unavailable for comment last week, but Oren Shur, a spokesman for the campaign, said Nixon also will offer incentives to bring Missouri teachers’ salaries closer to the national average, but he didn’t offer any details.
“Right now, Missouri ranks 43rd in the nation (for teacher salaries), and that’s inexcusable,” Shur said. “There is no reason our state should rank near the bottom. We need to respect the very challenging job (teachers) do.”
Nixon supports forgiveness of state-funded loans for those entering education as well as incentives for teachers going into struggling school districts.
Higher ed
Bethany Humphrey, a junior psychology major at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin, gets federal grants to help pay for school, but the full-time student from Joplin also has to work 20 hours a week and take out loans to pay for her college education. She wonders why she and other college students must go into debt to get a degree.
“College isn’t even viable for lots of people because it’s still too expensive,” Humphrey said. “What are we doing to ourselves, putting ourselves into debt while we’re just starting out in life? This puts us behind for the rest of our lives.”
Hulshof wants to expand needs-based scholarships, specifically for students going into math and science. Scholarships currently consume $100 million in appropriations from the Missouri budget. He also wants to increase higher education funding at the rate of inflation plus 2 percent each year starting in 2011.
“In most of the last 10 years, that formula would have sent significantly more money to higher education than has been,” Baker said.
Hulshof’s plan also includes a fast track to create groups of ready-to-hire employees for particular sectors and greater access to technical schools and community colleges for students who aren’t looking for a four-year degree. Toward that end, he wants to invest $5 million his first year in office into setting up technical and community college programs.
Nixon is proposing the Missouri Promise program, which builds on the existing A+ Schools Program, currently in about half of Missouri high schools. It pays for two years of community college for students who meet certain academic, community service and financial requirements. Shur said Nixon’s plan expands the existing program to all high schools and then pays for the last two years of a four-year college degree too.
“The plan is to design a plan for middle class families where students can get a four-year degree and graduate from college debt-free,” Shur said.
K-12 funding
Funding is also a challenge for K-12 education, and Cade warns his student teachers to prepare for a continuing battle for space in classes and school buildings. He said these have been the critical issues in education for years, and they don’t appear to be going away. More money would help, he said.
“Don’t ever let someone tell you that money doesn’t make a difference,” Cade said.
Baker wouldn’t give specifics about Hulshof’s plan for K-12 education until next week, but said the candidate’s philosophy is to fulfill the state’s promise to fully fund schools through the existing funding formula.
“We have to have a balanced budget,” Baker said. “Both candidates have promised not to raise taxes, so this will be about how each candidate is going to pay for those things that he wants to do.”
Shur said Nixon has promised to improve early childhood education, provide more support for Parents As Teachers and to change the way high school seniors look at their final year in school. Nixon wants to let seniors earn up to a full semester of college credit during that final year in high school or focus their energies on vocational and technical programs.
Accountability
Acronyms are becoming the tools of accountability for public schools. There’s NCLB (No Child Left Behind), AYP (Annual Yearly Performance) and MAP (Missouri Assessment Program). These programs are designed to offers assessments of how districts are doing to penalize those that don’t measure up.
Just last week, the Joplin R-8 Board of Education added its support to a federal bill that would provide school districts with temporary relief from NCLB penalties and urged Congress to reform education assessment.
“I think a lot of kids are being hurt by NCLB in some way,” said C.J. Huff, R-8 superintendent, during a board meeting last week. “When we lose local control of how dollars are being spent, kids get hurt. We know better how to spend the money than some legislator in Washington. We’re all about accountability, but make it reasonable and attainable.”
Matt Harding, a social studies teacher at Joplin High School, said he and other teachers are forced to teach to the numbers, often times at the expense of students.
“The big thing with the public is they want to see the numbers, the data,” Harding said. “But kids get lost in the numbers.”
Baker said Hulshof believes accountability is important, but said the candidate’s plan for K-12 will include modifications to the state’s current testing practices. He wants measurable data on school test results to be available to parents and anyone else who wants to see it.
“(Hulshof) does believe there is a place for testing,” Baker said.
Shur said Nixon also supports NCLB reform, and thinks local school districts are the best ones to decide how to use funding.
“Jay is all about accountability, but he wants it to be local,” Shur said. “We don’t need Washington wagging its finger at school districts in Missouri and telling teachers what they need to teach.”

‘In this together’
Al Cade, head of Missouri Southern State University’s teacher-education department, said Joplin-area teachers deal daily with students who are effectively homeless and those with other deep-seated social needs. The school system feeds some students several times during the day, helps them with their homework and even takes care of them when they are sick.
“Look at the number of kids growing up in poverty,” Cade said. “There are critical issues that (people) are looking at the schools to solve, but the school is not this entity apart from society. We’re all in this together. It’s all of our responsibility.”

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