Hard-working teachers deserve job security

Editorial by Winston-Salem Journal, October 29, 2013.

North Carolina’s judicial branch will decide if the legislature acted legally when it ended job protections for public school teachers and instituted a system of one-to-four-year contracts.

No matter what the court says, however, it is clear that the legislature’s actions are not good for students or fair to some very hardworking teachers.

The 2013 General Assembly changed what is commonly misidentified as the state’s “teacher tenure” law. That law, which gives veteran teachers protections against arbitrary firing but does not guarantee them lifelong employment, will be phased out beginning next year, The Associated Press reports.

In its place, teachers will work under a system that provides them with contracts of one, two or four years. One-fourth of the state’s teachers will get the longest contracts and, with those contracts, a $5,000 pay raise.

The N.C. Association of Educators plans to sue, saying the new law would violate the contractual rights of teachers who have either earned legal protections under the old system or were working toward that.

We’ll let the courts decide the legal questions. We say, however, that it isn’t fair to hire someone, pay them the pathetically low salaries our public school teachers now get and then strip away one of their biggest benefits -- job security.

Firing procedures were instituted for teachers to protect them from the political whims of both school supervisors and local politicians. These protections, and the security they provide, are what often attract nurturing, but risk-averse, people into teaching.

The new law, which is almost completely lacking in defined standards to guide the awarding of contracts and raises, demonstrates the very arbitrariness against which the expiring law protects teachers.

We fear that as the legislature redesigns teaching into a high-stakes, highly competitive profession akin to careers in the business world that two bad things will happen: Good teachers in the 75 percent denied the longest contracts and pay raises will find other careers and the profession will become less attractive to smart young people.

Neither of those outcomes would be good for North Carolina children.