Teacher Pay 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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Attrition Report Ignores Serious ‘Brain Drain’ Among K-12 Teachers

WakeEd — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 21:21:16 +0000

The news that fewer North Carolina public school teachers have quit their jobs is a silver lining on a dark cloud of the teacher recruitment and retention pipeline. It is good news that deserves celebrating, but it is hardly an indicator of clear skies ahead.

According to a report about teacher attrition prepared for the State Board of Education this week, the fact only 7.5 percent of teachers have left the public schools to work in another industry or state is seen as an indicator of rising job satisfaction among teachers. It’s reasonable to draw that conclusion, but this is not a significant victory.

There are other factors to consider in the teacher pipeline such as early retirements and a dwindling number of new teachers entering the profession.

For example, not included in attrition rate are teachers who retired. The data shows a sharp spike to about 22 percent in the number of teachers “no longer employed by NC Public Schools” when teachers hit 27 years of service. Teachers reach full retirement age at 30 years, but there’s a disincentive in the state’s pay scale to continue teaching to year 30 or beyond.

The state pay scale for teachers levels off the salary at 15 years of service at $50,000 for teachers with a bachelor’s degree and no National Board certification. That plateau lasts until year 25 when the salary is increased to $52,000. This is the base salary paid by the state. Many districts, like Wake County Public School System, increase pay with local supplements which trend with the state scale.

What’s more, teachers can retire at age 50 with 20 years of service to receive reduced benefits. Teachers who started teaching at age 22 would be at 27 years of service by age 50. These are professionals who have 17 years until they reach the age for full Social Security retirement benefits. In other words, they are leaving the profession while they still have plenty of years of their working lives left.

This is a terrible “brain drain” on our public education system. The people with the most expertise and those who can best mentor the next generation of teachers are leaving at a much earlier age than they might if the pay scale compensated their expertise appropriately. This needs to change, and the responsibility rests with the General Assembly.

The other factor to consider is there are fewer college students entering teacher preparation programs nationwide, but especially in North Carolina. Despite a recent uptick of 6 percent in program enrollment in the UNC system’s colleges of education, the downward trend has led to 4,500 fewer students annually learning to become teachers. It should also be noted that enrollment is an indicator of interest, but graduation and licensure are true measures of the state’s ability to replace its retiring teacher workforce.

Based on numbers in the teacher attrition report, the state isn’t adequately replacing its teacher workforce. In fact, there’s a severe shortage of teachers across the state in large urban and small rural districts alike. The shortages occur for different reasons, but the effect of having a temporary teacher in a classroom is still the same.

The report indicated that in the 2018-19 school year there were 1,562.3 instructional vacancies across the state on the first day of school, and by the 40th day of school, or about the end of the first marking period, that number had only been reduced by only 7.3 teachers. The largest area of need was in elementary school with 603.7 vacancies, followed by exception children (special education) at 158.6 vacancies.

This is unsustainable, and the responsibility to fix this is in the hands of the General Assembly.

The legislature has increased salaries, but when adjusted for inflation teachers are earning less than they did in 2009. Teachers also used to receive a small annual increase in pay known as a “step” increase because they moved up one “step” in the salary schedule for each year of service. Well, at year 15, as mentioned above, those step increases stop for 10 years. They have also lost increases for longevity and master\’s degrees.

The salary schedule is a major hurdle for current and future teachers. It is hastening the exit of the state’s most experienced teachers and it keeps many potential teachers away from the profession. Of all the funding issues facing North Carolina’s public education system, this is the most critical one to resolve.

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It\’s Time for a Productive Conversation About Honoring Educator Professionalism

WakeEd — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 19:47:59 +0000

Regardless of the profession and above all else, employees want to feel respected and valued. How that respect and value is measured differs across the industry spectrum, but some common themes occur in all areas such as meaningful and productive work, adequate compensation and benefits, and a safe working environment with proper tools and technology.

There are only a few professions, however, where those issues are publicly discussed, debated, and decided, and public education is arguably chief among them. Many educators will argue how they are underpaid and undervalued, and some policymakers and public leaders will argue how teachers earn more than they’re worth and still ask for too much.

While both sides can make cases in support of their perspective, this argument doesn’t lead to a productive conversation about what it will take to recruit and retain the top talented and innovative educators to the public schools in North Carolina.

A productive conversation would focus on a few key questions.

What methods should be used to recruit today’s students and potential career-changers to the teaching profession?
Once those individuals are hired, what should the early-career induction phase consist of and how long should it last?
What support and professional development is most important to cultivating talent and retaining the best innovators?
How should compensation relate to an educator’s career ladder?
What assurances are necessary to encourage educators to stay the course through their career span until retirement?

WCPSS teachers at Biogen Community Lab during SummerSTEM.

The answers to these questions are too complex to be hashed out here, but with some focused collaboration the answers could yield positive results.

Demand for highly qualified educators is rising sharply, and the number of eligible applicants isn’t keeping pace. There are committees to encourage recruitment, improve the pathway to licensure, and to retain the best teachers. Just this week, Gov. Roy Cooper called for an expansion of the revised NC Teaching Fellows program, which would pay the college tuition for students who became teachers for a minimum of four years after graduation. The state Department of Public Instruction and state Board of Education are reviewing their standards for initial licensure, qualifying examinations, inter-state reciprocity, and transitioning from one career into becoming a certified educator.

Getting enough highly qualified teachers in the door is only the first step. Keeping them on the job and ensuring they continue to aspire to innovation is another effort entirely. Pay is often the most-discussed component of retention, but there are other factors as well. Education is a relatively flat profession from an organizational standpoint. Most educators have a choice of being a teacher or administrator. There’s a growing sense among educators that education systems would benefit from having some tiers in between where teachers could hold leadership roles without becoming a principal or district-wide administrator. Additionally, the pathway to leadership should be clear, and the professional learning and certification necessary to become qualified should be available and affordable to every educator.

WCPSS teachers and Balfour Beatty staff at SummerSTEM.

Finally, as educators plan for retirement, it’s important to provide assurances on what retirement savings and benefits will be available to educators at the end of their public service.

While finding lasting and durable solutions to these issues will take months of study with input from various stakeholder groups, there are options available in the short term which will help improve the sense among educators that they are respected and valued.

Increase teacher pay to the most-current national average but make this the floor and not the ceiling. Restore supplemental pay for teachers holding Master’s degrees.
Revise the principal pay formula by permanently eliminating any salary reductions caused by the transition to the new program. Increase incentives for dynamic and effective school leaders to take positions at underperforming and challenging schools.
Expand the NC Teaching Fellows program to include more educator preparation programs and invest in other recruitment initiatives such as the Wake Future Teachers and the Wake Teaching Fellows – University Cohort.
Continue to improve the pathway to licensure by allowing interstate reciprocity and streamlining lateral entry for career-changers while maintaining a commitment to only approving highly qualified educators.
Further expand and fund the pilot program for Advanced Teaching Rolesto give more school districts the ability to stratify their teaching corps into roles for grade-level, content, and pedagogical leadership.
Invest in professional development for educators that has an emphasis on integrating workforce development into instruction and establishing public-private partnerships that support instruction and school improvement.

Investing in educators with proper compensation and professional development from their college years through their retirement years is a signal that they are respected and valued. It is one way to ensure that the most innovative and effective educators will remain in public education throughout their entire career and will continuously produce great results for our state’s schoolchildren.

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Law of Averages: There Are Better Ways to Measure Teacher Salaries Than State or National Averages

WakeEd — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 18:54:28 +0000

With the election season on the doorstep, it is reasonable to think that public school funding will be among the top issues raised at candidate forums, and specifically teacher pay will be one issue that is likely to receive the lion’s share of attention.

Teacher pay is a complex issue in North Carolina that cannot be easily explained. The state pays a base salary from sales and income taxes. Most counties provide funding for their local school district to pay a supplemental income to teachers from real estate and local sales taxes. A teacher’s annual base salary is based on the number of years served, with additional compensation for certification from the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards and advanced degrees (if the degrees were conferred or started before 2013). Finally, salary is adjusted for the number of months worked. Most teachers work 10 months, but some work 11 or 12.

How all that shakes out for individuals is an increasingly complicated exercise that has not become any easier in recent years. When headlines announce that teachers will receive a large percentage raise from the state, teachers often scratch their heads in wonder when they read their pay stubs months later because their raise, if they received one at all, was not as high as the announced percentage.

The same goes for average salaries. When education and legislative leaders celebrated the state’s average teacher annual salary moving past the $50,000 benchmark in April, many teachers spoke up to say they were not close to $50,000. That’s the trouble with averages because half the teachers on the scale are below that number and half are above.

With two sides to any story, it’s hard to know who is telling the truth. In this case both sides are, but each side is telling the part of the truth that supports its goals. Let’s examine these truths.

Teacher Pay Increases

As shown in Fig. 1 below, 10 years ago the 2008-09 average statewide salary was $48,454 compared to $51,214 in 2017-18, or a 5.7 percent increase, but when 2013-14 is compared to 2017-18, there’s a 13.8 percent increase. That’s because average teacher salary actually declined 7.1 percent between 2008-9 and 2013-14. (NC Department of Public Instruction: “Highlights of the North Carolina State Budget” February 2018, Page 17).
More than half of the 13.8 percent increase since 2013-14 was recovering the gains lost between 2008-9 and 2013-14.
Raises have not always been applied equally throughout the pay scale; sometimes the raise is weighted towards beginning and mid-career teachers.
As a result, as in 2018, some teachers might receive more than a 10 percent increase over last year’s pay, while others receive no raise at all. This year many early-career and late-career teachers received little to no raises.

Average Salary Math

The statewide average teaching salary has risen thanks to successive annual salary increases by the General Assembly and local boards of county commissioners.
How much that average has increased depends on how far back one looks and whether the salaries are adjusted for inflation.
The statewide average annual salary for teachers crossed $50,000 this year, following several years of steady increases in an effort to get North Carolina closer to the national average teacher salary.
The average moved up because of increased pay, but also because the difference between starting pay and the highest annual salary got smaller. The scale was also reduced from 31 years to 25 so teachers would reach the highest annual salary 6 years earlier.
The average annual salary includes all sources of compensation for teachers such as supplements for National Board of Professional Teaching Standards certification, and local salary supplements paid by county governments from real estate tax revenue.
Since local supplements are often calculated as a percentage of a teacher’s state salary, as the state spending on salaries increases, so does the county spending.

The National Average Benchmark

In April, North Carolina ranked 39th in the nation for average teacher pay according to the National Education Association’s Annual Rankings and Estimates report (Page 26), which is widely accepted as a credible ranking. The state’s rank was an improvement over the previous year’s rank of 41.
Calculating average statewide salaries varies by state and is affected by each state’s average cost of living, whether the state allows collective bargaining through unions, among others. North Carolina does not have a teachers union.
Using the national average is acceptable to measure how North Carolina compares to the rest of the nation but eclipsing the national average is not a good compensation policy because the average doesn’t consider the true knowledge and expertise teachers bring to the profession.

The key takeaway from this is that while overall spending on teacher salaries continues to climb each year, the amount teachers actually receive in their pay checks may not.

Further, a healthy portion of the overall salary spending increase goes to pay for new teaching positions each year. North Carolina continues to be an attractive place to raise a family, and people from all over the country are relocating here. Although not every district is growing, the overall increase in the number of public school students means there’s a need to hire more teachers as well.

Keep in mind, too, that the General Assembly has also added several pay bonuses based on student performance. These are treated as rewards rather than incentives, and they are certainly welcomed and appreciated by the teachers who earn them. These bonuses are also used to calculate both the aggregate amount spent on salaries, and the average pay teachers will receive. There’s nothing wrong with that, but these are windfall amounts rather than steady salary increases.

As future legislatures consider how best to pay teachers, it would be worthwhile to compare the teacher salary schedule to other professions which have similar minimum entry requirements such as earning a bachelor’s degree with a preservice practicum, passing a high-stakes qualifying exam, obtaining licensure, and completing a multi-year, on-the-job monitored induction phase. In addition to that, teachers must also earn continuing education credits to periodically renew their licenses.

Aligning pay rates with similar professions makes sense because many college students are choosing non-teaching majors and current teachers are leaving the profession for higher-paying private sector careers.

When compared to professions with similar minimum standards the evidences will show what all teachers already know – that teachers are considerably underpaid, even when their salaries are corrected for 10 months of employment. If the salary scale were based on private sector benchmarks there would be no urgency to match or surpass any other average pay metric.

This election season, encourage candidates to consider new ways to calculate teacher pay by using comparisons to metrics which value professional credentials and expertise.

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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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NC House Budget Addresses School Report Cards, But Not Teacher Pay

WakeEd — Thu, 25 May 2017 20:51:57 +0000

The NC House of Representatives released its version of the state budget today with several important initiatives that were not found in the Senate version of the budget, but there’s no language in the bill about pay for teachers, principals and assistant principals.

Perhaps the most important language in the budget is the way school performance grades are calculated. The changes are being caused the rules in the federal Every Student Achieves Act (ESSA). Advocacy groups including WakeEd urged changes to a more comprehensive report card that measured growth and achievement separately. The House has done just that. If their version of the budget in this area is adopted, school performance reports will show both a letter grade and a point average separately for growth and achievement.

There’s no new spending for elementary school “program enhancement” teachers in the arts, physical education and world languages. This became an issue when last year’s budget limited K-3 class sizes to 16-18 students based on the grade level. The cost of adding enough teachers to meet those standards may have led to the reduction of program enhancement teachers, according to local school officials.

The fact that the budget doesn’t include any additional funding this year for program enhancement teachers is not a surprise. The House and Senate had both agreed to a spending limit of $22.9 billion, and money for education can only come from the education budget. Adding funds in this category would mean a cut in another category.

Wake Rep. Rosa Gill, a former WCPSS school board member, did propose an amendment which ultimately failed in the House Education Appropriations Committee today that would’ve shifted money from the private school voucher program known as Opportunity Scholarships to help pay for class size reduction. The amendment did reveal that the voucher program is overfunded, however.

The House budget is silent on compensation for teachers, principals and assistant principals. Representatives promise those details by Tuesday when the whole budget reached the House floor for a series of final votes. The Senate’s budget focused raises on mid-career teachers while leaving first-year teachers flat at $35,000 and teachers with 25-plus years at $51,000, excluding any local supplements. The Senate budget also proposed a completely new way to pay principals based on school enrollment and school growth performance, while assistant principals would earn 13% above the teacher scale.

For education stakeholders in Wake County, it’s very important to watch the flow of all budgets in the next few weeks.

President Donald Trump’s proposed budget would drastically reduce federal funding for public education and for Medicare, which pays for a great deal of educational programs for children with disabilities. Any president’s budget is merely a policy statement. Congress actually drafts the bill. It could all or nothing of the president’s proposal.
The state budget has implications on how money is spent by school districts in many ways that can cause some upheaval in teaching and central office staff positions. Which parts from the House and Senate versions of the budget make it into the final bill are important to watch.
The Wake County budget is suggesting an increase of $16 million in new spending when WCPSS had requested $45.2 million in additional funds.

Taken together there looks like a lot less money for public education for next school year and beyond. While politicians are wise to hold the line on tax spending – and even offer tax reductions to some – it is important to understand the cumulative effect of all these spending changes.

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