(Missourinet) – Niche.com ranks Missouri 39th in the nation in teacher pay with the average salary being $49,000 a year. It also ranks Missouri 49th for the average starting teacher salary of $31,800.

During Tuesday’s State Board of Education meeting in Jefferson City, Paul Katnik, Assistant Commissioner of Missouri’s Office of Educator Quality, gave a presentation summing up the state’s work to recruit and retain more teachers and boost the quality of educators.

Board member Kim Bailey of Raymore asked if the salary information compares apples to apples.

“I’m not dismissing the reality that we need to increase salaries, but I also recognize that different regions have different costs of living. It’s more expensive to live in New York than it is in Missouri. We might be 49th but we might be 25th in cost of living. Is that calculated at all into this,” asks Bailey.

Katnik points to Niche.com showing all of Missouri’s eight bordering states ranking higher in teacher salaries, except for Arkansas and Oklahoma.

“Not that we advocate that we suddenly pay teachers the same as you pay them in New York or California,” he says. “One of the things I offer for you is all of our neighboring states. What does Kansas pay? What does Iowa pay? What does Illinois pay? What does Arkansas pay? It’s those that we are under. I think that we should pay attention to.”

Katnik says teachers leave the profession for a variety of reasons, including family commitments, low pay, lack of administrative support and challenging working conditions. He says paying teachers more would be felt at school.

“Research shows that high teacher turnover rates in schools negatively impact student achievement, for all the students in the school, not just those in a new teacher’s classroom. These rates are highest in schools serving our low-income students and students of color,” Katnik says.

Missouri has about 70,500 teachers with most of them being white women.

According to Katnik, about 8% of Missouri teachers leave the workforce annually and another 8% change schools. The state’s current hiring rate is 11% and Katnik says a great deal of money is spent filling the vacancies.

Board member Carol Hallquist of Kansas City questioned whether there’s a link between teacher salaries and student achievement. Katnik says merit pay is a debatable practice.

He goes on to cite a Vanderbilt University study saying teacher merit pay for student performance has merit.

“If you take into account two things, that good salaries can create the conditions where teachers will get more performance out of students but you have to pay attention to program design,” he says. “So that means it’s not going to work if it’s not set up well.”

The study says pay-for-performance structures have considerable political and financial support. The federal government has awarded some $2 billion in more than 30 states to design and implement performance pay systems.

According to Melissa Randol with the Missouri School Boards’ Association, Missouri school districts are required by statute to pay teachers on a uniform salary schedule and the state constitution prohibits paying bonuses. State law makes it difficult to have an effective performance pay system.

Katnik says the department is working to retain teachers through preparation and mentoring, providing adequate teaching materials, professional working conditions and teacher leadership. It is also leading an effort to recruit 2-3 students from each Missouri high school. Katnik says the students recruited would ideally match the demographics of the student population in their district with the intent of increasing diversity and the male teacher population.

The goal is to boost Missouri’s teacher pipeline by 1,500 to 1,800 next year.

(Missourinet) – There’s a bill in the legislature that impacts voting in Missouri.

It’s likely to be less controversial than a provision in the Clean Missouri ballot measure approved in the last election that changes the way voting districts are drawn up. Republican Governor Mike Parson has voiced his preference for that measure to be repealed.

The proposal filed to go before lawmakers in the new legislative session would require federal, state and local elections to use the Instant Runoff Voting Method (IRV).

The IRV bill from Republican Representative Dan Stacy of Blue Springs would establish a form of casting ballots in which voters rank candidates in order of preference. In the event that one candidate fails to achieve a 50 percent-plus-one majority, the candidate with the fewest number of first-preference rankings is eliminated and those votes are redistributed. The process is repeated until one candidate achieves the required majority.

The current system of plurality voting simply awards the victory to whoever receives the most votes. Stacy points out that often when more than two candidates are on the ballot, the winner doesn’t receive a 50 percent-plus-one majority.

“This bill allows us to always achieve a mandate candidate, a candidate who would represent the majority of the people,” says Stacy.

One of the biggest elections in the past 50 years where a three-candidate field led to the victor accumulating far less than 50 percent of the vote occurred in the 1992 presidential contest. Democrat Bill Clinton won the election with 43 percent of the vote, while incumbent Republican George H.W. Bush garnered 37 percent and Independent Ross Perot received 19 percent.

IRV began to gain traction in 2000 when Green Party candidate Ralph Nader siphoned off enough votes from Democrat Al Gore in Florida to enable Republican George W. Bush to take that state and the presidency.

There have also been cases in New Mexico where strong Green Party candidates have taken away Democratic votes to assure Republican victories in Democratic strongholds, and in Alaska where numerous conservative candidates have made it difficult for Republicans to win.

Representative Stacy notes primary elections also often advance winning candidates that get less than a majority of the votes. He suggests such an outcome could occur in the upcoming Kansas City mayoral race where seven candidates will face off in a non-partisan primary election. The top two candidates with the most votes will move on the general election in that contest.

Stacy also points to a local Kansas City area election where candidates won with small percentages of ballots cast in their favor.

“For school board in Lee’s Summit last year we had 11 candidates running for three seats,” Stacy says. “One of the candidates was seated with 13 percent of the vote because they won the plurality at that number.”

Maine became the first state in its June 2018 primary to implement IRV after the election and reelection of controversial Republican Governor Paul LePage with less than a majority of the vote.  LePage was elected in 2010 with less than 40 percent of the vote and reelected four years later with less than 50 percent. Among other things, he’s been accused of using his power to delay implementation of the state’s Medicaid expansion, which passed on a ballot measure by a wide majority.

Cities are also gradually adopting the system. San Francisco used the method for the mayor’s race this year, and New York City is considering putting the measure on the ballot for its municipal elections.

Representative Stacy thinks the electorate will embrace a voting system that awards a candidate who receives a majority of votes.

“The voting public then can have greater confidence in their government that the people that they elect are people that they generally support,” says Stacy.

The former college music professor filed the same bill in 2018 but didn’t actively promote it to his legislative colleagues with November’s election on the horizon.

“Election reform was not a topic that was engendered during an election cycle, so I didn’t push it, really,” Stacy says. “I filed it but I didn’t spend a lot of time chasing it.”

IRV isn’t foolproof as the process could still result in a tie vote. Stacy contends such an outcome is a remote possibility, but his proposal still provides for the scenario. The bill calls for a coin toss if an election results in a tie.

The legislative session started Wednesday in Jefferson City.