N.C. Teachers: Third prize is you're fired

by Travis Fain, Greensboro News and Record, August 19, 2013.

I took a shot this morning at explaining the ins and outs of K-12 education funding, with a focus on teacher salaries. Bottom line: They're not so good. We've frozen the salary steps so long that they're pretty much broken, because new teachers make about as much as those who've been in the business six years, and in some counties that's about $31,000. And those steps don't make a ton of sense even when they're working, unless you accept the idea that longevity is the best indicator of ability, and so the highest salaries should go to teachers with 30 years experience and up.

Let me hit some high points.

Teachers' kids shouldn't qualify for Medicaid

Argue that the public assistance thresholds are too high if you like, but does anyone think it makes sense to hire government employees and say, "Don't worry about the low salary, it's going to qualify you for completely separate taxpayer-funded programs to feed your kids and pay for their medical care." It's not like we're Wal-Mart. Then again ....

Teachers have good benefits

Not everyone thinks they can afford to buy into these benefits, but the compare favorably to, say, mine. Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger recently estimated the average teachers "package of salary and benefits" at $55,264 a year, for 10 months of work. According to the state's online benefits calculator, he's underselling it. If you figure the average teacher makes $45,933 in salary - and that's the figure the National Education Association used when it slotted North Carolina at 46th in the nation in teacher pay - the calculator puts total compensation at roughly $67,400 - and more depending on the teacher's years of experience.

Republicans did a poor job selling their budget

When state Rep. Tim Moffitt and state Sen. Thom Goolsby are arguably your leading spokesmen for the post-session p.r. push back, you need a better post-session p.r. push back. That's not a shot at them, they're just not sympathetic figures, even by N.C. GOP standards. Worse: until last week, even I didn't know the $500 annual bonuses contemplated in Berger's merit pay plan would be cumulative and permanent. It's not a $500 bonus - which isn't near enough to sell an incomplete merit pay plan. It's $500+$1,000+$1,500+$2,000 over the course of a four-year contract. And then that's part of the teacher's salary going forward. I  wrote about this thing repeatedly, and until last week, no one said, "Hey Travis, that whole bonus thing is exponentially better than you're telling people." Also, if you're going to argue off of initially appropriated figures, so you can say you're actually increasing education funding this year, instead of working from actual spending or the continuance budget, consider putting that figure into your budget documents so you're not arguing a $360 million increase when your own documents (page 9) say it's a $117 million cut. Also, telling teachers they really got a 1 percent salary increase because of tax reform? That dog didn't hunt.

And one other good point the GOP focused on too late ...

According to DPI's figures, North Carolina is ranked 11th in the country, and second in the southeast, when ranked by percentage of K-12 funding coming from the state, versus local and federal sources. I don't know how far you'll get arguing property taxes should increase so teachers can make more money, but it seems like a reasonable blame shift.

Per-pupil funding: Not simple

This was too complex to hash out in the main article, which is saying something. You ever look at how the N.C. Department of Public Instruction comes up with ADM (Average Daily Membership) figures, upon which budget requests are based? The projected ADM this year is 1,505,652 students. But the allotted is 1,509,985. The department requested funding for 4,333 students that it projects will not exist. Granted, that's a difference of .3 percent, but why? Because here's the process: You go school system by school system and look at the first two months of enrollment data for the previous year. You take the higher of those. You factor in birth rates, migration data, etc., to project the coming year's enrollment. If the projection is higher for a given county, you use that figure. If the actual is higher, that's the one you stick with. The idea is not to hit systems with a big budget cut in any given year based on an expected enrollment decrease. You give them at least a year to prepare this way. But what, you may ask, was the 2012-13 school year's actual ADM statewide? 1,489,623. Doing it county by county inflates the figure, and when the legislature doesn't fully fund allotment, it looks worse than it is to anyone who doesn't understand the process, which is roughly everyone.

Democrats, quit with the hyperbole

Or don't. I mean, your game plan already seems to be working pretty well in North Carolina, and I can't really keep writing the same column.

What's next? Watch the steps.

I don't know what's next, but I'll wager big money there's a pay increase for teachers in next year's state budget. Will it be enough to cool teachers' and parents' ire heading into the elections? I don't know. Consider this from gut-punched-teacher-poster-woman Lindsay Furst: "A sobering fact: even a 20% raise would fall short of bringing me up to the 2007 pay scale for my current step, and that is in 2007 dollars." I also don't know that upset teachers matter much, politically. Walter Dalton promised big salary increases in the 2012 gubernatorial election, and Pat McCrory cleaned his clock. But the GOP is pot-committed on merit pay, and it needs money to fund it. Those cumulative $500 bonuses I mentioned? Not budgeted yet beyond the first year. Top leadership knows it needs to increase starting salaries to keep North Carolina competitive. Where's the money? Some of it's tied up giving the state's longest serving teachers the highest salaries. There is a lot of agreement that this payscale is broken. But you can't very well cut salaries for the state's longest serving teachers to give more money to the young ones. Plus you've already got big money flowing out of the state budget in coming years for tax reform, and it's tough to be an optimist when it comes to cutting Medicaid costs. So where do you find the money to redo that pay scale and fully implement merit pay?

The bottom line for now: Glengarry Phil Berger

Add together everything the GOP majority has done in K-12 education over the last few years and the drumbeat from Raleigh is that educators aren't getting it done. That's got to be getting old for teachers, especially since we just posted an all-time high graduation rate. The GOP has given more freedom and funding to charter schools. It implemented a new school grading system that's going to give a lot of schools a big fat "F." There's a new voucher program for private schools. Class sizes are up. They ended the popular teaching fellows program, which gave college scholarships to top students willing to teach. They're phasing out new pay bumps tied to master's degrees - even if you're halfway to that masters. Pay has been frozen for six years, except for a 1.2 percent increase last year. Sure, three of those years Democrats ran the show, but that was mostly during the recession, and it was an easier sell back then. Tenure is ending, because either you or your colleagues weren't easy enough to fire. Instead you get a quasi-funded merit pay plan whose rules haven't really been written, but we do know some teachers are going to get four year contracts and a bonus, some three, two or one year contracts without the bonus. The one-year teachers will know they're on the hot seat, though I don't know who we're going to replace them with if mass firings ensue. All together, it feels like that Alec Baldwin scene in Glengarry Glen Ross. You remember that one? First prize is a Cadillac. Second prize? Set of steak knives. Third prize is your fired. And, remember, coffee is for closers.