State Budget Archives - WakeEd

Teacher Pay in North Carolina

WakeEd — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 05:00:00 +0000

President’s Note

Still Waiting on a State Budget — and Still Waiting on Action for Public Schools

North Carolina is still waiting for a comprehensive state budget, and once again our public schools are feeling the impact.

Last week Governor Josh Stein, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger, and House Speaker Destin Hall jointly announced the creation of a Blue Ribbon Commission on the Future of Public Education. Long-term planning for our schools is important. But the challenges facing teachers and students today are not complicated — and they are not new.

As we noted in the last issue of In Context, North Carolina ranks near the bottom nationally in teacher pay, per-pupil funding, and overall funding effort. Those rankings point to a clear underlying issue: North Carolina is simply not investing enough in its public schools.

Governor Stein has also proposed immediate investments to address urgent needs, including teacher pay. Those conversations are critical and cannot wait.

Here in Wake County, our community has stepped up. A strong local economy and leaders who prioritize public education have allowed Wake County to supplement teacher pay and invest in our schools. That commitment helps make Wake County a place where great educators want to work.

But the North Carolina Constitution places the primary responsibility for funding public education with the state — a principle at the center of the long-running Leandro case. When the state underfunds schools, the burden increasingly shifts to local communities and taxpayers.

Local support matters. But it cannot replace state responsibility.

The data in this issue helps explain why.

— Keith Poston
President, WakeEd Partnership

Teacher Pay in North Carolina

What the Data Shows — and Why It Matters for Wake County

Most North Carolina teachers reach the maximum state salary after about 15 years in the classroom — a structure that increasingly leaves local communities like Wake County filling the gap.

North Carolina’s teacher pay system tells a story that should concern every community that depends on strong public schools — including Wake County.

For most teachers with a bachelor’s degree, the state salary schedule starts at $41,000. After 15 years in the classroom, their salary reaches $53,880. And then something unusual happens: the state salary schedule essentially stops.

From year 15 through year 25 and beyond, there are no additional state salary steps for most teachers.

In practical terms, that means many educators reach their maximum state salary in their late 30s, even though they may continue teaching for another 25 or 30 years.

Few professions expect employees to spend the majority of their careers with little opportunity for salary growth.

What the Data Shows

This challenge is not just about one pay schedule. It reflects a broader pattern in how North Carolina funds public education.

According to national comparisons:

North Carolina ranks 43rd in average teacher pay
50th in per-pupil funding
50th in overall funding effort

Meanwhile, neighboring states — including South Carolina — have increased investments in teacher compensation and now rank significantly higher.

These rankings make it harder for North Carolina school districts to compete for talent in a regional and national labor market.

Wake County’s Role

Here in Wake County, local leaders have worked hard to strengthen teacher compensation.

Through county funding, Wake County provides a local salary supplement currently averaging about $9,150 for teachers with a bachelor’s degree — an increase of roughly $2,950 over the past decade.

Those local investments matter. They help make Wake County more competitive in recruiting and retaining teachers.

But they also illustrate an important reality: local communities are increasingly being asked to fill gaps left by state funding.

Wake County’s strong economy, growing tax base, and longstanding commitment to public education have made these investments possible. Many communities across North Carolina do not have that same capacity.

Why This Matters

Competitive teacher pay is not simply about fairness for educators. It directly affects the ability of schools to attract and keep talented teachers in classrooms.

When compensation lags behind other professions — or behind neighboring states — school systems face greater challenges in recruitment and retention.

Wake County has taken meaningful steps locally to support teachers. But the scale of the challenge means local communities cannot solve the issue alone.

Under North Carolina’s constitution, the state bears the primary responsibility for providing every child access to a sound basic education — including ensuring schools can recruit and retain high-quality teachers.

Wake County’s investment in teacher pay reflects a community that values strong public schools. But the data in this issue makes clear that local leadership alone cannot solve a statewide challenge.

That responsibility ultimately rests with the General Assembly.

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Moving to A Weighted Student Formula for Public School Funding Makes Sense

WakeEd — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 14:37:22 +0000

North Carolina is at an important crossroads in how it pays for its K-12 public schools, and dramatic change may be on the horizon.

The 2017-19 state budget that was signed into law last month created a special legislative committee, known as the Joint Legislative Task Force on Education Finance Reform, to study the way the state pays for public education. The committee will meet over the next year to review current laws and policies for public school funding, and it will make recommendations that may be introduced as bills designed to change the way North Carolina pays for public education.

The study committee is the result of a report by the state Program Evaluation Division (digest, full report, presentation) which revealed that North Carolina’s method of financing public education was out of step with other states in ways that were creating gaps and inequities between and among school systems.

Under the current law, the General Assembly develops an education budget that pays for local school operations, district central office administration, and the Department of Public Instruction staff, all of which is largely based on student enrollment. Adjustments are built in for special circumstances such as low-wealth counties, underperforming schools, and small school districts, among others. Many counties, like Wake, supplement state funds with money from local property taxes.

It should be noted that, except in special circumstances, the state does not pay for school construction, renovation, and maintenance. That is mostly funded by local property owners.

This practice of supplementing state funding with local tax dollars has been in place for a long time, but it has recently become a major issue as the state public education spending has become more austere. Reduced, stagnated, or low-growth state funding has pushed more of the financing responsibility onto the Wake County of Board of Commissioners and the property and sales taxes.

That is not a sustainable model. Local taxpayers have shown consistent support for a top-tier public schools system, but there will come a point when local taxpayers will decide they cannot afford and will not support annual tax increases to pay for costs which should be paid by state government through its revenue streams.

A Complicated System

The way North Carolina finances public education can be traced back to the Great Depression when, in 1933, the General Assembly passed the School Machinery Act, which created a sales tax to pay for school operations. This made the state the primary source for education spending, but it kept the county or municipality in control of local education decisions, a practice which continues today.

State funding was updated and modified significantly throughout the second half of the 20^th century to accommodate desegration efforts in the 1970s and 80s and to usher in the age of student accountability in the 1990s. Part of this period included the landmark federal lawsuit known as Leandro v. North Carolina which was decided in 1997. The ruling ordered that all students in the state have a constitutional right to a “sound basic education”.

In the past decade, major changes in public funding have included an increase in the number of charter schools and public financing of private school tuition known as “opportunity scholarships,” but often called vouchers.

Changes in federal regulations for public education over the past 50 years have also contributed to what is now a complicated system of financing public education.

As mentioned, North Carolina decides how much to spend on education based on how many students there are enrolled in traditional public schools and charter schools. This headcount is called the average daily membership (ADM), and that number is used to decide how many teaching positions are needed in a school. Each teaching position is called an allotment, and these can be distributed according to certain guidelines within a school building or school system as the leaders deem necessary.

ADM doesn’t take into account the actual cost to educate a student. ADM is also used to calculate spending in other areas such as textbooks, supplies, and school buses, however, textbooks and supplies have largely gone unfunded in the past decade.

In addition to ADM, there’s a patchwork of other funding formulas used to pay for routine, but unique, costs as well.

In short, as new spending priorities occurred over the 80 years since the School Machinery Act, new legislation was passed to accommodate those priorities. This has created a complicated system of accounting that requires special training to understand, and the school systems with the right knowledge of how these various rules and regulations work can reap the reward while others leave money on the table.

The current funding method also creates special circumstances for low-wealth counties and small districts, but not for high-growth areas like Wake and Mecklenberg counties. With 67 people moving to Wake County per day on average, local officials estimate about 18 of those people are school-age children. That is the equivalent of kindergarten class moving to Wake per day. There’s no funding adjustment for rapid growth, and therefore the local taxpayer picks up more of the cost than in other school districts.

All of this, with specific examples, was covered in the Program Evaluation Division Report, which highlighted inequities created by ADM-based allotment funding.

Resource Allocation Model

There’s actually two major categories of allotments in North Carolina: position allotments and dollar allotments. Position allotments made up about 60% of state funding in the 2014-15 school year, or $4.9 billion. Dollar allotments accounted for the rest, or about $3.5 billion. Among the two categories, there were 37 different types of allotments.

A position allotment pays for a teacher, but it doesn’t consider the cost of the teacher. For example an allotment might pay for a 25-year teacher with a Master’s degree and National Board Certification as easily as it might pay for a third-year teacher paid on the base pay schedule. Clearly there’s a big discrepancy in the cost to fund that position. One teacher could cost the state close to $60,000 per year while another might cost the state a little more than $36,000 per year, not including the local pay supplement.

Dollar allotments present different problems. Based on ADM, dollar allotments may have a negative effect on districts with high concentrations of students with disabilities or with limited English proficiency, among others.

Once all the allotment scenarios are settled for the school year, the local school systems have had, until recently, the flexibility to transfer allotments to other categories to help cover the gaps in other areas. Until the 2013-14 school year, a common practice to reduce class size was to convert a teaching assistant allotment into a teaching position allotment. The General Assembly eliminated the practice that year. This year the state budget also ended transfers out of special education, limited English proficiency, and others starting with the 2017-18 school year. Now gaps may not be filled. The state did not increase funding in areas where additional teaching positions may be needed, and local tax dollars are not available to make up the difference.

These examples are just on the surface. The Program Evaluation Division report estimates it takes about four years to know how to navigate the state’s allotment system. That’s just to have a basic, or working knowledge, level of understanding. Many school districts actually hire outside consultants to help them manage the allotment system.

North Carolina is one of about seven states which use a “resource allocation” model. Many states have modernized their public school finance methods, and one that is gaining popularity is called Weighted Student Funding because it is designed to pay for the actual cost of educating a child based on the needs of the child.

Weighted Student Formula

The study committee created in this year’s budget, which consists of nine senators and nine representatives, may consider any number of possible changes to the way the state pays for public education, but the Program Evaluation Division’s report indicated a preference for the Weighted Student Formula.

This method of paying for public education allows the money to follow the student rather than the money following the teacher, as it does in the resource allocation model North Carolina currently uses. Using the weighted student method, the actual cost to educate a student is the determining factor in how much money a school system may receive. It would still use enrollment as a driver for funding, but it would also consider the different types of educational services that they would receive.

For example, if the base cost to educate a student is $7,500 per year, then all school systems would receive this base funding amount. Additional state money would then be added based on the cost to educate students. A student in kindergarten may cost more than a student in 7^th grade, and therefore more money would flow toward the kindergarten classroom. A student with a diagnosed disability in the 8^th grade may require more services than a fourth grader who is learning English, and therefore more dollars would flow toward the 8^th grade.

If done right, this could mean that school systems receive adequate funding from the state. It would take the pressure off local taxpayers and county governments to make up the difference between real needs and state support of those needs. It would give school systems a different type of flexibility to staff its school buildings while providing the financial transparency and accountability that many people say are lacking now.

Although there are many blueprints in place in large and small school systems around the country, there is no model that could North Carolin could use as a carbon copy. That means the study committee on education finance reform could design a weighted student formula that considers all the intricacies of financing public education in North Carolina.

The pitfalls, however, are innumerable. The committee would have to establish a base amount to educate a student in North Carolina. This amount needs to cover the wide disparity between education costs across the 115 school districts and all charter schools in the state. The committee would also need to decide the value of each weighting condition to establish a uniform factor to add on to the base weight. For example, they would have to decide that it costs, say, 19 percent more than the base weight to educate a student in grades K-3.

Then, of course, is deciding the process that would take place to update these numbers as needed. Perhaps technology improves service delivery and produces a savings, or the federal government ends a program which sent money to the state for specific groups of students producing a resource gap. If there’s no way to adjust the formulas to accommodate these realistic changes, then North Carolina could quickly find itself back in the complex system it has today.

The committee may also decide to develop its own funding formula which has nothing to do with weighted student funding, or they may decide to only make piecemeal changes to the way the state pays for public education.

No matter what, there’s near universal agreement at all levels of government in North Carolina that change is necessary. The state has reached an important crossroads, and the path ahead is going to require creative thinking, open minds, and a willingness to put students first.

All images courtesy of the Program Evaluation Division Presentation Slide Deck, \”K-12 Presentation.pdf\” from Nov. 23, 2016.

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Dump the National Average Salary and Properly Value the Teaching Profession

WakeEd — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 14:15:23 +0000

The traditional school year is over once again without teachers knowing what their salaries will be next year.

It’s not uncommon that the state budget bill, which sets spending priorities for the next two years, isn’t completed before the end of the school year, but until recently it used to be uncommon that public school employees wouldn’t at least have a sense of what their pay increase would look like for the upcoming school year.

The Great Recession, which started in 2008, forced lawmakers from both parties to agree to adopt austerity budgets to address the sharp reduction in sales and income tax revenue. It was acceptable that everyone tighten their belts for the good of the cause. Public school employees accepted flat pay and even forced days off without pay known as furloughs. They did this because they knew the economy would turn around and they would be back to a proper salary schedule again.

That never happened, and North Carolina’s rank for teacher salary fell into the bottom 10 states.

State lawmakers continued to pass budgets with small raises while simultaneously increasing health insurance premiums which resulted in a net loss of salary. Lawmakers added five days of additional work without an increase in pay, but for two years offered five extra vacation days which expired at the end of the school year if they weren’t used. The budget writers also included modest one-time bonuses for all teachers, but those didn’t apply to earnings used to calculate retirement benefits. The biggest changes were the end to increased pay for earning a Master’s degree after 2013 and the end of tenure.

As the years wore on, and it’s been almost 10 years now, the House and Senate have continued to fiddle with the teacher salary scale in ways that don’t seem to follow any known logic – not in the public or private sectors. The only hint is all the talk about getting the “average” teacher salary to the “national average”.

This year is no different. In fact, national average teacher salary has become the mediocre benchmark our lawmakers, the governor, and many public education advocacy groups have embraced as a shared goal.

This is wrong.

The national average is an important bellwether. It’s a guide point, not a goal. It’s time to properly value the teaching profession with a compensation schedule that is based on expertise and experience and not value-add or some arbitrary comparison.

An Unknown Outcome

Let’s take a look at what national average has wrought for North Carolina teachers this year. First of all, just as the budget season was getting underway, the National Education Association released its annual rankings document which placed North Carolina at 35 out of 51 states and Washington D.C. This was a big increase over the previous rank of 42. It shows improvement, but there’s more work to do.

As such, moving up the scale has once again become the focus. It’s not a bad thing to want to move closer to the national average. It just shouldn’t be the only reason for increasing pay. After all, what happens when North Carolina reaches that goal?

Does the state just tread water by increasing salaries enough to stay at or near the national average?

Will it be enough for teachers to support a household?

Will it be enough to attract people to the profession?

Will it be enough to retain the high-quality teachers who are producing results?

Those questions remain unanswered because they are not even being considered. Instead the House and Senate budget writers agreed to a $22.9 billion spending plan for 2017-18 and have been fiddling with numbers within that cap to figure out how much to spend in the various categories. They are not considering the true value of the teaching profession.

The Senate budget has proposed a series of raises for teachers in the middle of their careers. First-year and 25-plus-year veteran teachers remain flat at $35,000 and $51,000, respectively. In the middle are pay increases which vary depending on a teacher’s years of experience.

The House version of the teacher salary scale is different. First, it gives raises to teachers everywhere on the scale, but the House budget raises seem to follow a bizarre pattern where, for example, a teacher with four years of experience would receive a $550 raise while a teacher with five years of experience would earn $1,050, and a teacher with six years of experience would receive $300. The highest raise would be for teachers at 19 years of experience on the scale who would get a $3,050 raise.

There’s no way to know what affect either of these plans will have on the state’s teacher pay rank on the national scale next year because other states will also raise their teacher salaries. Legislators have been aiming to get the “average” teaching salary in North Carolina to $50,000, which includes supplemental pay from local funding sources. So there’s a good chance the rank could drop. What then?

That’s why aligning North Carolina’s pay schedule with the national average doesn’t work. It’s a great bellwether to make sure we are competitive, but it’s a terrible benchmark. A benchmark should be something standard that doesn’t vary from year to year as the national average does.

When it comes to national average, the question should be: “Are we competitive?” If that answer is “No”, then then the next question should be: “Are we properly valuing the expertise and experience of teachers?”

A Valuable Comparison

The way North Carolina decides teacher salaries is very simple. The current salary schedule is used as a floor and pay increases are added on top of that at different percentages. This assumes that the scale is already a proper valuation of the teaching profession and that it has kept pace with market indicators and increasing responsibility.

It hasn’t.

The teacher pay scale is based on a time gone by. The teaching profession, like many others, has modernized. It has evolved into a multi-faceted profession which still requires content knowledge and skill, but now includes the ability to read and interpret data, identify specific strengths and weaknesses of every student, individualize special lessons for small groups of struggling or advanced students, utilize technological devices which themselves require a completely independent knowledge set, and collaborate with colleagues across disciplines to link curriculum content.

Teaching has always been an art and a science, but it is surely leaning heavily on science these days.

In many ways, teaching is a lot like nursing. Nurses at the BSN level and teachers complete a four-year college degree which includes a pre-service practicum. Both must pass a certification test to obtain a license. Both must earn continuing education credits to qualify for periodic license renewal. Both professions have evolved in the past 40 years to require more expertise and added responsibility.

There was a time when nurses were trained to administer the orders of a doctor, care for a patient’s basic needs, and report important information to the physician who made patient care decisions. Nowadays, nurses have responsibilities just short of a physician’s. They are required to know a great deal about specific medicines, medical treatments, post-event care, triage, and too many others to list. Nurses are important decision-makers in the medical profession.

As nursing evolved, so did the salary schedule. The lowest salary listed on Glassdoor.com for a WakeMed Hospital Registered Nurse is $28.12 per hour. That works out to about $58,500 per year. Of course, that’s for 12 months of work. At that rate, a 10-month employee like a teacher would make almost $49,000 per year. Since $28.12 is the lowest salary on Glassdoor, it can be considered entry level.

A first-year teacher in Wake County Public School System is paid $35,000 per year from the state and $6,037.50 per year from Wake County government for a total entry level salary of a little more than $41,000. That’s about $8,000 per year less than a nurse at WakeMed.

It’s important to note that salaries on Glassdoor are reported by employees. This means they could have increased since their most recent report. They, too, are merely a bellwether.

For comparison’s sake, a Radiologic Technologist at WakeMed earns $25.76 per hour according to Glassdoor. That equals about $53,500 per year, and when adjusted for a 10-month salary, it equals about $44,500. That’s still more than a first-year teacher in Wake County with the local teacher salary supplement. A Radiologic Tech must complete an Associate’s Degree with a pre-service practicum and pass a certification test to qualify for a license.

Comparisons like these are valuable to understanding what positions with similar minimum requirements for pay at entry level and for years of experience. First-year teachers are increasingly required to be conversant in complex technologies and data analysis that wasn’t previously part of the profession, yet their salaries don’t value that expertise.

Properly Valuing the Teaching Profession

One thing all sides of teacher compensation debate agree on is that North Carolina teachers are underpaid. Their salaries, like other public employees, stagnated during the Great Recession. Teacher salaries have only just started to recover, but to levels that were too low to begin with. Again, that’s because salaries have been decided by the previous pay scale and not by a true valuation of the teaching profession.

The way forward is to conduct a study of the demands, responsibilities, and experience required of today’s classroom teacher. Take this information and benchmark it against other professions with similar characteristics. Draw comparisons with multiple professions as well. Use the current teacher evaluation tool and quantify how those goals and objectives factor into salary. Do this instead of benchmarking against an arbitrary chosen national average that is a composite of many other factors which have no bearing on the qualities of a high-performing teacher.

Next, build a pay scale using the standards discovered in the study mentioned above. If that scale is too high to reach in one year, develop a plan to reach that pay scale in a specified number of years, as tax revenue permits.

Once that new scale is reached, future salary increases should be based on revenue availability as well as market valuations of specific characteristics of the teaching profession, and not just a percentage of the previous scale.

This is a big idea. It’s unlikely that any US school district or state public education agency has done this kind of evaluation before. North Carolina would be leading the way on teacher pay without having to be on top of some annual ranking sheet. Teachers would know their expertise is valued, even if they still don’t earn as much as they might in the private sector. Taxpayers will probably have a higher tax bill, but the best teachers would be more likely to stay longer. Plus local taxing authorities probably won’t have to pay as much in supplemental salaries as they do today which would leave more money for other local initiatives.

Properly valuing the teaching profession is a necessary next step for the North Carolina General Assembly. It’s the only way to move North Carolina into a new era of education funding – an era that honors the complexities of a job that has evolved into more of a science than an art.

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Reduced class size adds $13 million to $56.6 million WCPSS budget increase request

WakeEd — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 00:47:22 +0000

Wake County Public School System is one of the lucky ones when it comes to absorbing the impact of the General Assembly’s action on reduced class size in grades K-3, but it is going to cost the taxpayers more.

Superintendent Jim Merrill told the Wake County School Board that his budget request includes an additional $13 million in spending to cover the cost of hiring more than 460 new K-3 teachers and providing classroom spaces. That’s half of the $26 million impact the 2016 law that set class sizes at 18 students in kindergarten, 16 in first grade, and 17 each in second and third grades.

The difference between the amount budgeted and the cost to hire new teachers is an open gamble on Merrill’s part. He’s planning for the impact, but he’s hopeful the General Assembly will come through and fix the class size law to reduce class sizes before the school year starts for traditional school in August.

A bill known as HB13 would allow an increase to the class sizes to six more students per grade, which would offer some relief for this increased spending. The bill was passed by the House, and it is now sitting in the Senate Rules Committee awaiting action. Senators have expressed concern that the money they have provided in previous budgets to reduce class sizes has not been spent on that initiative.

Normally, a budget document is as much a policy statement as much as it is a spending plan. Despite the impact of class size reduction, Merrill laid out several spending priorities in his letter to the school board which offers some detail into his request for a total of $56.6 million in new spending next year. He also highlighted the system’s goal of graduating 95 percent of students by 2020, and he reminded the school board members that WCPSS leads the nation in National Board Certified teachers, has increased the participation of African American student by 50 percent in Advanced Placement classes.

In addition to the increased spending on smaller class sizes, the budget increases also include other expenses that the school system cannot control such as increased enrollment, opening new schools, and paying for other cost increases caused by changes from the General Assembly in addition to class size. Those factors amount to $36 million in new spending.

The schools are also asking for $5.1 million in new spending to continue programs such as the successful Elementary Support Model schools, the nationally recognized magnet school programs, and increasing the extra-duty pay for teachers which hasn’t been significantly increased in decades. Offsetting those increases is $5.6 million in program reductions.

The final portion of the budget increase is $20.1 million to pay for new or expanding programs which covers initiatives such as increasing the number school counselors and social workers, expanding the work of the Equity Affairs office to improve cultural understanding across the district, to make bus driver pay more competitive, and for an alternative middle school program, among others.

No votes were made at the meeting. The budget will now be discussed in committee by the school board before being they vote to send it to the Wake County Board of Commissioners for consideration in May.

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Governor Cooper’s Budget Puts Focus on Salaries

WakeEd — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 20:58:10 +0000

The budget proposal released by Gov. Roy Cooper today makes education spending a top priority, but it’s not likely to have much influence in the General Assembly.

Cooper calls for raises for teachers, principals, and assistant principals. He wants to increase textbook spending, add a $150 stipend for teachers to use for school supplies, hire more instructional assistants, and increase funding for pre-kindergarten services.

The General Assembly, however, has taken a more measured approach to education spending in recent years, which has attempted to balance spending growth with increasing teacher salaries and per-pupil spending. These modest spending increases haven’t kept pace with enrollment growth and program expansion needs in the public schools. Both the House and Senate will release their own plans for state spending in the coming weeks with final adoption expected to come in June.

The governor is calling for a 5 percent salary increase each year for two years, which will bring North Carolina’s average teacher salary to the highest in the Southeast in three years, according to Cooper’s budget. If that pace continues, Cooper claims North Carolina’s teacher salary would reach the national average in five years.

While WakeEd fully supports increasing teacher pay, there’s two items of caution. First is the fact that it can be assumed most other states will also increase their teachers’ salaries over the next five years. We would hope the governor has considered this because reaching the national average would require the state to raise its teacher salaries faster than the rest of the states at or below the national average.

Second, is that the national average is not a very good indicator for properly valuing the teaching profession. Paying at least at the national average will make North Carolina look competitive on paper, but being competitive nationally and paying an adequate wage which honors the education and expertise of certified teachers are two different things.

WakeEd is advocating for a teacher salary schedule that is derived from principles similar to those that are used by the private sector when assessing what to pay employees based on experience and responsibility. Businesses don’t look at the national average for a mid-level accountant as the sole indicator for determining salary.

The same approach should be taken as the state is trying to figure out how to increase principal and assistant principal pay. Cooper is proposing a much-needed and very generous 6.5 percent salary increase for principals and assistant principals. In this case, using national average as a bellwether instead of a benchmark, North Carolina school-based administrators have a complex salary schedule that places their pay rate at 50th in the nation. This will help them move out of the basement.

This raise would certainly be welcome since school-based administrators received a 1.5 percent pay increase this school year, which was their first in several years. However, a select committee of representatives and senators studied this issue in the fall of 2016 without any clear resolution to date. Absent any action from the select committee, Cooper’s proposal would be a healthy increase until a comprehensive plan to simplify and increase the administrators’ salary schedule is enacted.

Despite those concerns, the governor’s budget proposal is very good for public education. It sets a high bar for legislators to meet, should they want to, as they prepare their version of the budget.

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Legislative Session Ends with Bang and Fizzle

WakeEd — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 13:07:09 +0000

Members of the General Assembly called this year’s legislative session “short,” but it was anything other than short when considering the number of education reforms addressed.

Some passed, some failed. Either way, there’s harbingers for what’s ahead in next year’s long session.

The budget, which is awaiting final signature by Gov. Pat McCrory, had perhaps the most significant impact on education policy. It was stuffed with over a dozen K-12 related measures aimed at modifying teacher compensation, addressing the teacher pipeline, and paying and evaluating principals and assistant principals.

There are some significant items that have not received a great deal of attention elsewhere, or they do not affect WCPSS yet but they may in the future.

Elementary class sizes were capped in grades K-3 at some impressively small numbers. Kindergarten will have a max of 18 students per teacher. First grade will have 16 students per teacher. Second and third grade will have no more than 17 students per teacher. These changes won\’t take effect until the 2017-18 school year.

School performance grades are a controversial topic, and so far they have not been well received as a means to measure school performance. The formula for calculating a school’s position on the A-F scale uses two metrics: achievement and growth. The current formula weights achievement (the number of students passing EOG and EOC tests) at 80 percent while growth (the grade-level readiness of students) is weighted at 20 percent. Wake Ed advocated that this weighting be changed, and it was changed to a 50-50 balance in the version of the budget that the House passed. That didn’t make it into the final budget, however.

What did make it into the final budget was a still significant change to keep the 15-point scale for the A-F grades. The original law adopted last year called for a move to a 10-point scale this year. Wake Ed advocated for and the budget kept the 15-point scale, so a school that scores 85 percent and above gets an A grade.

In other parts of the state, the budget created pilot programs to address high school drop-outs and instructional assistants becoming certified teachers. The former would raise the minimum drop-out age to 18 in certain counties and study the affect that had on graduation rates in those districts. The latter creates a pathway for teacher assistants to obtain licensure through a program which helps the assistants meet the minimum requirements for certification.

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