$43.65

by Tom Campbell, Executive Producer and Moderator, NC SPIN, October 30, 2015.

Sometimes the teacher gets taken to school, as we learned recently when speaking to The Kenan Fellows. This great program by The Kenan Institute selects 50 K-12 teachers for a yearlong enrichment experience that focuses on leadership development and curriculum. After our NC SPIN panel discussed issues facing our state we opened the floor for questions and got an earful.

Questions covered the gamut of public education issues including policies, testing, curriculum changes, classroom dynamics and discipline, support they receive (or fail to receive) from parents, administrators and elected officials. And no discussion can be held without talking about funding.

But the Q&A stopped dead in its tracks when a young, male, Pitt County teacher told us he was relatively new to the classroom, adding that he loved teaching and felt he was making a difference. He lived modestly, pointing out he didn’t even have cable TV, but after paying his bills he was left with $43.65 at the end of the month. How, he asked, would anyone expect him to continue teaching?

Kudos to Governor McCrory and our legislature for wisely increasing starting teacher pay to $35,000 per year. That will help this young teacher. But what about other teachers?

Teacher pay is just one topic in the education political football game in which the players, elected officials and administrators, seem more interested in playing to the crowds on the sidelines than fixing problems. Nobody believes we adequately compensate our teachers but side issues, like performance pay, distract us. Performance pay discussions come across sounding like someone standing in front of the stove saying, “Give me heat and then I’ll feed you wood.” We’ve been singing that performance pay tune for years and still haven’t resolved it. We just keep tossing incomplete passes while teachers leave the profession and another generation of children pay the price for our failure to address the biggest task of state government.

While we argue over the proper amount of funding and pay for teachers, the latest curriculum du jour, technology, initiatives and trends, the inescapable truth is that the single most important element in public education (aside from the parent) is the classroom teacher. And if that teacher spends too many hours figuring out how to make ends meet or has to take a part-time job just to pay monthly bills he or she cannot be totally focused on providing our children the best possible education.

Let’s take the teacher pay issue off the table of education discussions and move on to more important problems. Pay our teachers attractive living wages so they will stay in the classroom and perhaps encourage a new wave to enroll in our schools of education and head off the teacher shortage looming ahead. To those who believe we have too many mediocre or poor teachers we would respond that is a management problem to be addressed by administrators, but it is no reason to punish the rest of our teachers.

These Kenan Fellows were not just whining or complaining but were truly dedicated professionals who wanted to stay in the classroom. They questioned whether we (the collective we) want them to succeed as much as they wanted to teach. When there’s only $43.65 left at the end of the month it doesn’t feel like i