NASHVILLE — House Republicans are turning their thumbs down to a Senate GOP plan that switches the state’s Career Ladder pay supplement plan for teachers over to one-time funding.
Representatives said the move would likely result in an estimated 30,000 teachers getting their annual supplements of $1,000 to $3,000 axed in two years.
“The consensus has formed that Career Ladder is something those teachers earned years ago and to cut that down just wouldn’t be fair,” said House Assistant Republican Leader Gerald McCormick of Chattanooga.
He noted the program has been closed to incoming teachers for years and is “going to go slowly away anyway, and it won’t be an issue for too many years as the teachers retire. I think everybody pretty much decided it wouldn’t be fair to take that money away after they’d been getting it over the years because that would be an actual pay cut.”
The Career Ladder program was passed in the 1980s as a form of merit pay under then-Gov. Lamar Alexander’s Better Schools program. Educators who met qualifications received annual stipends. Lawmakers in the late 1990s closed the program to new entrants but left funding intact with attrition via participants retirements ultimately expected to bring it to an end.