Every summer before school starts, Scott Bradley spends about half a day hanging maps and posters, getting his classroom ready for the arrival of his high school geography students.

In exchange for hanging those maps and posters, Bradley should be in line for an extra $100, the amount agreed upon in the nasty back-and-forth salary talks between the Metro teachers’ union and the Metro school board. But Scott Bradley says the time he spends preparing his classroom isn’t worth $100. He argues that Metro should pay its public school teachers based on the amount of work they do.

He argues that elementary school teachers, who sometimes show up weeks in advance to get their classrooms ready for the school year, should get more than $100, while high school teachers, who spend less time on preparing their classrooms, should get a smaller amount.

Bradley, a teacher at White’s Creek High School, is one of the 20 percent of Metro’s 4,500 public school teachers who do not belong to the local teachers’ union, the Metro Nashville Education Association (MNEA). He says he’s opposed to the union and the way it operates. While Bradley admits that he’s in the minority, he is not alone.

“I’m totally open-minded about a lot of things,” Bradley says. “But I just can’t tolerate the idea that, if you’re a teacher and if you breathe, you deserve a raise.”

An advocate of merit-based pay raises, Bradley, 30, says teachers should be held accountable for the jobs they do. They shouldn’t just be entitled to pay raises as a matter of course.

“The people who should be judging our performance are our principals. They’re the ones who face teachers every day at school and know what we’re doing or not doing. If you’re running any business on this earth, is that not what you do?” Bradley asks.

Bradley knows this is not popular thinking. Talk about merit-based raises, he says, is “so alien to the way of thinking for MNEA members that they don’t think it would even be within the realm of possibility. They think I’m crazy. You should see teachers when we talk about accountability; they just about gasp and die.”

David Rector, 31, one of Bradley’s colleagues at White’s Creek, agrees. He says he’s not opposed to the idea of pay raises; he just doesn’t think they should be across the board.

“I come from the business world,” Rector says. “There, you’re paid based on doing your job. I don’t mind if the school board wants to provide an average 4-percent pay raise for teachers. Let’s collect it all and let the principals decide where it should go. Give no more than a 10 percent raise to any teacher. I think that would be an incentive for these teachers who beat the students to their cars after school.”

Merit-based pay raises are briefly mentioned in the school system’s high-minded and high-budget desegregation proposal, known as “Commitment to the Future.” But the mention is vague, and that’s what makes a merit-raise program hard to implement.

“There needs to be a fair, equitable way to identify those who are performing,” says Bruce Bowers, executive principal at White’s Creek and a 25-year school veteran.

“There’s a lot of criteria there. You may have a teacher that’s a crackerjack, but the data may not reflect large achievement.”

Still, Bowers sympathizes and even agrees, to some extent, with some of his teachers who favor performance-based raises rather than a something-for-everyone approach.

“We have many professional staff—more specifically, teachers—who do a wonderful job. But with any large group you’re going to have some that just don’t fulfill the standards,” Bowers says. “Is it fair for those to receive the same raises as individuals who are performing well? I think, when you’re looking at achievement, those who are just filling positions—who are stagnating—those people need to be removed. I think what we have in place doesn’t really compensate or acknowledge those who are really doing the job.”

Bowers agrees that principals should play some role in deciding teacher pay raises. The principal’s involvement, he says, is “a very important piece in determining if teachers are performing. I think local administrators should have some input in determining if teachers should qualify for more or not.”

Team spirit

Nationwide, anti-union teachers like Rector and Bradley have come together to support an alternative teachers’ association, the Association of American Educators. The AAE serves as a counterbalance to the National Education Association, the nation’s largest and best-known teachers’ organization. The NEA is the parent organization of MNEA.

Gary Beckner, executive director of the California-based AAE, says his organization is “not a union.” Instead, he says, “We’re a professional association, and that is a big difference. The unions try to tell us what our agenda is, but I don’t think they get it sometimes. Our agenda takes a little bit of courage because it goes against the flow of what public education has done in the last 20 years.”

The powerful and well-organized NEA has alliances with the Democratic Party and a reputation for liberal thinking, while the AAE is conservative and right-wing, even though it doesn’t come right out and say so.

“We didn’t even think about politics when we started [AAE],” Beckner says. “It is not unusual, though, for people with a more conservative point of view to be interested in us. Many saw us as an alternative to the politics and Democratic leaning of the NEA. And we offer the liability and professional services without paying the high dues of the union.”

MNEA has pulled off a remarkable public relations coup over the last several weeks. Dominating the headlines and the airwaves, the teachers’ union has argued on its own behalf and has garnered some public sympathy without necessarily laying out all the facts. Money is not the issue, MNEA members say, but they won’t stop until they get more.

One fact that’s gone unreported is that teachers, whose contracts cover just 10 months out of the year, make more money than many other Metro employees who work year round and who, in many cases, risk their lives on the job. While Metro’s most qualified and highest-paid firefighters top out at $35,438 a year, the most qualified Metro teachers—those with doctorates—top out at $49,678. Even those teachers who meet Metro’s minimum educational qualifications have the chance to make a salary of $38,214—almost $3,000 more than the top firefighters’ salary.

Metro police officers also have lower salary caps than teachers. Depending on their status, officers top out at either $31,993 or $35,438. Either way, the salaries are less than those available to Metro teachers. What’s more, teachers have consistently received pay raises, even when other Metro employees have had to wait. During the years when Bill Boner was mayor, from 1987 through part of 1991, Metro teachers received raises every year. Other Metro employees went the entire four-year period without pay hikes.

Despite those realities, MNEA has persistently battled with the Metro School Board and schools director Richard Benjamin. Months ago, MNEA began pressing for a 9-percent raise for its membership; at this point, a 4-percent raise seems more likely. In addition, teachers will get the $100 school-year preparation bonus and a paid holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The cost to the city of the percentage pay raise alone is an estimated $6.4 million.

MNEA officials say the negotiations grew contentious only because the teachers’ concerns have been ignored in recent years. According to MNEA president Juanita Lockert, the union first became disgruntled over the school board’s handling of MLK Day. “It was agreed upon that [MLK Day] would be a paid day,” Lockert says. “When it came time to be paid, [the school board] could not pay for it. All those kinds of things led to the line in the sand.”

Since negotiations began months ago, all indications have been that Benjamin is convinced that school funding—this year’s budget is $350 million—could be better spent on uses other than teacher pay raises. Behind the scenes, he and schools spokesman Craig Owensby have said that the $6.4 million needed to pay for the pay raise may require a cut in the special-education budget.

“[Benjamin is] very supportive of teachers,” says school board member Nikki Meyer. “But I believe he thought that the money that was available had other legitimate uses.” According to Meyer, Benjamin’s opposition to the pay raise was based in “what he perceived to be economic realities.”

Economics 101

But over and over, Lockert and other teachers say money is not the issue. If money isn’t the issue, however, school board members are convinced they know what’s really at stake. The deeper problems, they suggest, may have to do with frustration, poor communication, and a lack of recognition.

“There’s a lot more involved in this than money,” says Meyer. “I really think the administration didn’t perceive the teachers as playing a vital role. The board chose to take a position that they were going to let the negotiating team handle everything. I think [board members] were not getting the direction they needed.”

Another school board member, Murray Philip, agrees, saying teachers are frustrated because they don’t know what goals they need to be meeting. He places much of the blame with Benjamin.

“Teacher morale is incredibly low because of the misdirection of the director of schools,” says Philip, a new board member and one of Benjamin’s most outspoken critics. “The money became the measure, but the real issue is how can we make teachers happier.”

Philip cites the Metro Schools mission statement, which calls for creating “lifelong learners, productive workers, and caring global citizens that extend democratic principles.” He calls the mission statement “wacko crapola” and “impossible to measure.”

Still, if money is not the issue, the teachers’ union is only confusing matters by arguing over school-preparation bonuses and across-the-board raises. If they want more respect, they would be well advised to draft their own mission statement, propose a better means of compensation, and work to improve communications between themselves and the school board and Benjamin. They will have a hard time getting respect for their argument if they continue to talk about money, while arguing that what they are really concerned about is a separate issue.

Unless, of course, money was the real issue all along.