Estimating conference right to reject salary estimate, LFT says

How can anyone figure that the average teacher salary in Louisiana has gone up by $2,000 over the past year? Yet that is what the Education Estimating Conference was told on Tuesday, according to this article by Advocate reporter Will Sentell.

The committee decided not to accept the estimate, part of a much broader report on the state of public education's finances. That was the right decision, according to the Louisiana Federation of Teachers:

The state’s Education Estimating Conference was right to reject the portion of the report guessing that Louisiana’s average teacher salary has climbed to more than $51,000 per year, Louisiana Federation of Teachers President Steve Monaghan said today.

“In too many of our school systems, it is not possible for a teacher who has advanced degrees and is at the top of the salary schedule to ever earn that much money,” Monaghan said. “I believe it is fair to characterize this report as chatter, as noise that distracts us from inequities in the way we compensate educators.”

The LFT was responding to a report that consultant Mark Brantley presented to the estimating conference on Tuesday, in which he estimated that teachers this year earn an average of $51,560, an increase of nearly $2,000 over last year’s estimate, which Brantley pegged at $49,614.

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