Womenstake, NWLC's Blog

A number of state Senators and Representatives in Tennessee have identified a serious problem – Tennessean children aren’t doing that well in school. And they’re right. Tennessee earned a C+ this year on Education Week’s State Report Card and Tennessee’s average ACT score ranks 48th out of 51.

Unfortunately, their solution is simply absurd. There is a bill [PDF] that has cleared committee in both the Tennessee House and Senate that would “fix” the perennial underperformance of students by linking a student’s academic performance to his/her family’s government supports. Specifically it would cut a family’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits by 30 percent if their children “are not making satisfactory progress in school.”

WHAT?! (Let’s keep in mind that in TN, TANF benefits max out at $185/month, we aren’t talking about anyone living large off of a government program.)

I couldn’t neatly package all of my rage into nicely organized paragraphs, so here are the top three reasons why this idea makes me think my head is going to explode…

1. The bill claims the cut to benefits wouldn’t apply if the student has a learning disability. Newsflash – not every child that has a learning disability has been properly screened and diagnosed. When I was a teacher in a low-income school, I taught students that had “highly likely to be dyslexic” results on their preliminary screenings. But in order to be officially classified as dyslexic they had to take a specific exam administered by a diagnostician.  Those exams cost thousands of dollars so none of my students could be properly diagnosed, therefore they couldn’t receive any special services, and they didn’t make adequate progress over the year. The families of those kiddos, if they lived in TN under this law, would have lost vital TANF dollars that helped them barely scrape by.

There’s a lot to report on the minimum wage today, but I’ll start with the biggest news: the New York legislature has approved the state’s 2013-2014 budget, which includes a minimum wage increase. Specifically, the minimum wage will rise from $7.25 to $8.00 per hour on December 31, 2013, to $8.75 one year later, and $9.00 on December 31, 2015.

This is good news for minimum wage workers in New York, nearly two-thirds of whom are women. But the phased-in minimum wage increase in the budget is weaker than the increase that the state Assembly passed just a few weeks ago, which would have raised New York’s minimum wage to $9.00 per hour in one step in January 2014, then indexed the wage annually to keep up with inflation. The budget also drops a provision in the Assembly-passed bill that would have raised the minimum cash wage for tipped food service workers from $5.00 to $6.21 per hour, but it does provide a path to an increase for these workers by authorizing the labor commissioner to have a wage board examine the adequacy of New York’s tipped minimum wage, then issue an order to raise the wage.

Equal Pay Day is fast approaching, and this year NWLC is excited to gather people in a virtual space to talk about equal pay issues. If you’re on Twitter, we hope you’ll join us!

On Tuesday, April 9, 2013 NWLC will be hosting a tweetchat from 1:00 – 2:00 pm ET to talk about equal pay and the wage gap. Our official chat hashtag is #TalkPay.