Somebody Has to Say It: Landry Insults Our Intelligence with His So-called Permanent Teacher Pay Raise

The Amendment 3 Proposal that would permanently raise teacher pay in Louisiana is more or less a shell game that pits education priorities against each other. And Somebody Has to Say It.

On Monday (Mar. 9), Gov. Jeff Landry opened the legislative session by pushing Amendment 3, a May ballot item that, if approved by voters, would create a permanent teacher pay raise. Before anyone gets too excited, let’s not pretend this is bold leadership on education.

What Governor Landry is proposing isn’t a real investment in teachers or schools — it’s a shell game. And Louisiana educators have seen this trick before.

The governor wants teachers to celebrate a “permanent” $2,250 pay raise — about $112.50 per paycheck once it’s spread across the school year. But let’s look a little closer at how that raise is supposed to be funded.

The money is NOT coming from a new commitment to education.

It is NOT coming from a serious effort to increase state investment in the classroom.

Instead, it’s coming from moving money around inside the same education bucket — draining trust funds, shifting dollars tied to early childhood programs, classroom initiatives, and other education priorities in order to free up pension savings that can be redirected toward salaries.

In other words, the state isn’t adding money to education. It’s forcing different parts of education to fight over the same limited pot.

And that’s right there is some first-rate bullcrap.

You cannot claim to be strengthening education while simultaneously cannibalizing the programs that support it. Early childhood programs matter. Classroom innovation funds matter. Investments that help struggling students matter. Teachers’ retirement security matters. These things are not optional extras — they are part of the ecosystem that makes schools work.

So when state leaders propose funding teacher raises by dipping into money that supports those programs, what they are really doing is pitting teachers against their own students and colleagues. It’s like telling a family: You can afford groceries or you can afford the light bill — but not both.

That is not a real solution. That is budgeting by musical chairs. Someone’s butt is going to hit ground.

This isn’t the first time teacher pay has been tied to a complicated constitutional maneuver instead of a straightforward budget commitment. We’ve seen attempts before to wrap pay raises inside larger structural changes, hoping the promise of a raise will make everyone ignore the fine print.

But teachers aren’t fools. Neither are voters.

We know that $2,250 a year — roughly the cost of a few utility bills and groceries in today’s economy — is not some transformative windfall. And we also know that if the money funding the raise comes at the expense of programs that help our students succeed, then the state isn’t actually investing in education at all. It’s just shifting the burden from one pocket to another.

If Louisiana truly wants to stop ranking near the bottom nationally in teacher pay and educational outcomes, then the answer is not financial gymnastics. The answer is political courage.

It means acknowledging that education costs money.

It means deciding that competitive teacher salaries are worth paying for.

With about 53,000 public school teachers in Louisiana and another 50,000 support staff, it would take about $176 million a year to fund a permanent $2250 bump is annual pay for teachers and a permanent raise of $1125 for support staff. Yes, $176 million is real money. But it’s not big money in a state with a $12.2 billion general fund. That is about 1.44 percent of the state budget.

And yes, it may mean asking the public to support that commitment through a stable, honest funding source — even if that requires a few more dollars in taxes. Because the truth is simple: you cannot build a world-class education system with spare change and accounting tricks.

Or maybe, Louisiana’s leaders should just check their priorities. For example, let’s take the $44 million in new spending that the governor is proposing for LA GATOR, a program that already diverts funding from public education by providing vouchers for private school tuition. And since Louisiana already offers all sorts of incentives — $1.1 billion worth to be exact through industrial tax exemptions, Enterprise Zones, film credits and more — to lure corporations to the state, we say skip the $75 million in new spending that is being proposed to fund a so-called a new permanent incentive program called the High Impact Jobs Program and use that money to fund teacher pay raises instead.

There, without even breaking a sweat, we just found $119 million that could fund teacher and support staff raises.

But Somehow There is
Plenty of Money for Prisons

Speaking of priorities and to make matters worse, the Governor insists on playing this game with education and teacher pay raises even as he simultaneously proposes to increase funding the state’s prison system by more than $82 million. Guess where the money for that proposed increase would come from?

Surplus cash! Stronger than expected tax revenue!

Yep, as far as Jeff is concerned there is plenty of extra cash in Louisiana to fund for incarceration, but not instruction. Ol’ Jeff will put a kid behind bars, but he is hard pressed to give give him a book — unless its a stone tablet with the Ten Commandments etched on it.

Never mind, we digress.

The fact is that after locking up 2,000 more people under his 2024 “tough on crime” crackdown, Landry expects taxpayers to fork over $82 million more to expand an already hefty prison/corrections budget. He has effectively ended pathways out of prison, packed the system with 2,000 more people and then uses that fact to justify a proposed budget of $800 million for the prison system. Jeff Landry is happy to fund cages, but refuses to fund children.

So forgive us if we aren’t jumping up and down to celebrate his plans now to rob Peter . . . to pay teachers. Make it make sense. Louisiana’s teachers, students, families and taxpayers deserve better than another budget shuffle dressed up as progress.

And somebody has to say it.