Low pay, lack of respect causing teachers to rethink their chosen profession
Published December 10, 2015
by Lindsay Wagner, NC Policy Watch, December 9, 2015.
By any measure, Asheville Middle School’s Chris Gable was a teaching star.
Gable outperformed all of his colleagues as measured by his students’ test scores, and he had a gift for engaging his students. He coached young writers and was always finding innovative ways to make language arts interesting.
But a salary low enough to qualify him and his family for Medicaid and food assistance, combined with a lack of other professional support, forced him to leave his beloved town and state in search of a living wage.
“I feel guilty,” said Gable, who left two years ago for a teaching position in Columbus, Ohio. There, Gable said, he would earn nearly $30,000 a year more than the $38,000 he was making in North Carolina with 10 years’ experience and a master’s degree.
“I wanted to continue to serve this community, but the state legislature has made it impossible,” he said.
Gable is one of many. According to surveys conducted by the N.C. Department of Public Instruction, teacher turnover rates have risen significantly over the past five years.
What’s up for debate is why teachers are leaving. Some say the figure does not represent a mass exodus because teachers are fed up, but rather that teachers are simply retiring early or moving to other school districts within the state.
But what is clear is that the teaching profession in North Carolina has taken a lot of hits over the past several years and that many teachers are exhausted, frustrated and ready to get out.
Teacher pay hits bottom
In the 1990s, then-Gov. Jim Hunt persuaded legislators to lift teacher pay to the national average to make North Carolina an attractive destination for highly qualified teachers. But the commitment didn’t last. Between 2008 and 2014, teachers saw their salaries frozen, save for a small increase offset by a rise in health insurance premiums. By 2014, the state had fallen in national rankings on teacher pay to 47th.
National Superintendent of the Year and former State Board of Education adviser Mark Edwards has a daughter who recently completed a teaching degree. She didn’t even try to teach here, Edwards told the State Board, instead taking a teaching job in Tennessee, where she will make about $11,000 a year more than a starting teacher in North Carolina.
In 2013, the starting salary for beginning teachers was just $30,800. Lawmakers have worked since then to bring the starting pay back up to $35,000 (where it was in 2008, adjusted for inflation). But compare that with Texas’ average starting salary of $47,000.
“On starting teacher pay and average teacher salaries, we are below Virginia, we’re below Tennessee, we’re below Kentucky, we’re below South Carolina, we’re below Georgia,” said Keith Poston, executive director of the Public School Forum of North Carolina. “How can we expect to get the kinds of high quality teachers that we need when we can’t even keep our own teachers in North Carolina?”
While lawmakers raised beginning teachers’ salaries in 2014 and 2015, veteran teachers were for the most part left behind, with minuscule pay bumps over the past several years, base salaries capped at $50,000 and salary supplements eliminated for teachers who earn master’s degrees.
“Of all industries, education should reward lifelong learning,” said June Atkinson, the state’s top school official. “And there is plenty of evidence to show that a master’s degree in a teacher’s area of study really makes a difference in student achievement.”
CJ Flay, a teacher at North Iredell Middle School in Olin, expressed his disappointment in a letter to N.C. Policy Watch about the ending of salary supplement for advanced degree holders. “I would never have gone on to pursue my degree if that decision had been made prior to August 2006,” said Flay in his letter. He said his wife, also a teacher, decided not to pursue a master’s degree because she could not expect a raise that would help her repay the cost of obtaining that degree.
Lawmakers do away with Teaching Fellows
As teachers expressed frustrations with the changes inflicted on their profession by the legislature — not just low pay, but also cuts to classroom supplies and teacher assistants and the loss of tenure — the UNC system has experienced a 27 percent decline in undergraduate and graduate teaching programs from 2010 to 2014.
One incentive was eliminated in 2011 when state lawmakers began phasing out the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program, which awards scholarships to North Carolina high school students to pursue teaching degrees in the state. Graduates of the highly selective program were then required to teach for four years in North Carolina. More than 75 percent of Teaching Fellows stay in the state beyond five years.
The legislators took money earmarked for the program and put it toward expanding the presence of Teach for America (TFA), a national program designed to provide college graduates without degrees in education minimal training and place them in jobs in low-performing schools.
Teach for America’s retention rates are poor, however. On a national level, only 28 percent of TFA teachers remain in public schools beyond five years, compared with 50 percent of non-TFA teachers.
While the Teaching Fellows program was relatively small, doing away with it was a symbolic gesture, according to one of the program’s last graduates, Tacey Miller.
“Teaching Fellows was created in North Carolina and used as a national model for other programs looking to do something similar,” said Miller, who questioned why there is a will to eliminate a program that has worked so well to prepare future teachers and lure those thinking about teaching into the profession.
Due process rights eliminated
Another serious blow to the profession is the elimination of tenure, formally known as “career status.”
Tenure isn’t a guarantee of a job, but rather an assurance of due process before a teacher can be fired or demoted. It was an important benefit for teachers who often found themselves at the mercy of politicized school boards if they spoke out against harmful policies.
Legislation passed in 2013 would have eliminated tenure for all teachers by 2018, but the courts rolled back part of that that law last year, saying it violated the state constitution. The courts also rejected lawmakers’ proposal to offer some tenured teachers fatter pay raises and four-year contracts in exchange for giving up their tenure before 2018.
The result is that currently tenured teachers retain that benefit for the remainder of their careers, but teachers hired since August 1, 2013, can no longer rely on any kind of due process if they are fired or demoted. Instead, they get temporary year-to-year contracts — unless pending litigation overturns the law.
The list of hits to the teaching profession is taking its toll.
Melissa Noel, an AP English teacher in Johnston County with 19 years in the classroom, came to North Carolina five years ago to support her aging in-laws.
“It feels like we’re being encouraged to leave the profession,” said Noel. “Sending money to private schools in the form of school vouchers, reducing public school budgets, telling us our advanced degrees are not appreciated, and now our governor says experience is not appreciated? I know a lot of my colleagues will leave.”
December 10, 2015 at 11:14 am
Richard L Bunce says:
"Sending money to private schools in the form of school vouchers.."
Nonsense... parents deciding that the traditional government school to which their child has been assigned by a government education bureaucrat is NOT providing their child with the education the parent needs and so the PARENT is using the Education Voucher to enroll their child in an alternative education system. The "private school" does not get a dime until a parent decides to send their child to it. That would be a good funding model for traditional government school systems.
Poor performance is the issue, not teacher compensation (or as usually discussed by NC Policy Watch just teacher pay ignoring the rest of their substantial compensation.)
December 14, 2015 at 7:54 pm
Norm Kelly says:
First, it's important to note that the cost of living is lower in NC than Ohio. I know, not $30,000 per year, but everything MUST be taken into consideration when comparing salary & benefits. Including that the weather here is much much nicer than most of Ohio, if not all of Ohio.
Then we need to determine WHY after 10 years this teacher, a star, was only making $38,000. This sounds absurd! To say the least.
Could the low rate of pay have anything to do with the socialist pay system that the education establishment demands? By this I mean that 'star' teachers are forced into the same pay scale as every other teacher with the same number of years. There's such little differentiation allowed by the socialist pay scheme that is demanded by all who support government education monopoly systems. Stars should get paid like stars, regardless of which industry they work in.
But this can explain only part of the problem. What is the rest of the problem?
$38,000 per year is a decent starting salary, including benefits of course. But $38,000 is NOT a decent salary for someone who has 10 years experience and is said to be a top performer. So what happened? Where did the ball drop? This can't all be blamed on the legislature. Can it?
There is SO much more to the story of teacher pay that is almost never touched on by any editorial. There's simply not space or time to do it justice. But the answer is DEFINITELY NOT what is proposed by teacher unions, most government monopoly system employees, and many legislators. The answer is NOT to simply raise every teacher's salary to some arbitrary national average. There MUST be room for stars to be paid as stars. There MUST be room for top performers to be rewarded for being such. The turnover in private sector jobs is also high where people are not rewarded for their efforts. I once had a job where my manager told me the raise pot was only so big and in order to be fair to everyone my raise had to be kept to a certain (small) limit. My response was less than accepting. As a top performer I delivered more than was asked or expected, in multiple ways, and expected to be rewarded as such. If that meant that some 'lesser' performer got less of a raise, I was AOK with that and actually expected that. Cuz this is the real world where everything and everyone are NOT equal. Regardless of what you were taught in government monopoly elementary school, everyone simply is NOT equal. Some work harder/perform better than others. And they must be rewarded for it, or they leave. Plain & simple. And the example of the teacher who moved to Ohio demonstrates this.
But the first case listed in this post shows a deficiency in the system. Someone along the line of management in the monopoly scheme should have recognized how this star was being treated and done SOMETHING about it before 10 years and only $38,000! If I was making a mere $38K after 5 years, I would have left. Cuz it would have been the right thing to do for both me and my family. And I'm just selfish enough to care more for me & mine than for ANYONE else!
