Raise teacher pay the right way

Four Republicans members of the North Carolina House of Representatives — Erin Paré and Mike Schietzelt of Wake County, Donny Lambeth of Forsyth County, and Tricia Cotham of Mecklenburg County — have just launched this year’s policy debate on teacher pay in our state.

The legislation for which they are primary sponsors, House Bill 192, would allocate $1.6 billion in the 2025-26 fiscal year to raise the minimum starting salary by $9,000, to $50,000 a year, along with other changes. Base salaries would top out at $68,230 for teachers with more than 24 years of experience. The bill also reinstates pay bumps for teachers with graduate degrees, allocating $8 million a year to defray that cost.

The bill has an impressive 53 cosponsors. They range from conservative Republicans to progressive Democrats. Still, it won’t be enacted in its current form — a reality that is, I take it, widely acknowledged among its supporters.

For starters, the North Carolina Senate is unlikely to agree to resume the prior practice of paying teachers more if they have master’s or doctoral degrees. Their opposition is entirely justified. The empirical evidence here is overwhelming: teachers with graduate degrees are not more effective than teachers without graduate degrees.

This is one of the most thoroughly studied issues in education research. When the General Assembly got rid of the pay bump a decade ago, it was a great success for evidence-based policymaking. To backslide now won’t break the bank, and would no doubt delight those who work in underpopulated schools of education. But it would be deeply disappointing. Fortunately, Senate leaders have long memories.

Nor is the legislature likely to boost K-12 education spending by $1.6 billion in a single year, particularly given the current forecast for General Fund revenue and immediate needs for Hurricane Helene relief and reconstruction. Rather than raising teacher salaries in a freestanding bill, lawmakers will fold it into the 2025-27 budget bill enacted later in the session.

That having been said, Paré, Schietzelt, Lambeth, and Cotham are right to emphasize starting pay. As the school-reform group BEST NC discovered in a recent study of salaries adjusted for cost of living, the average first-year teacher makes nearly $1,000 more in Georgia than in North Carolina, $2,000 more in South Carolina, $2,500 more in Florida, and $8,000 more in Texas.

The argument here isn’t necessarily that our state is actively competing with our peers for teaching talent, although that sometimes happens. The stronger argument is that within each state, teaching competes with other occupational choices. It typically pays less, yes, but teaching also offers young people as well as mid-career professionals such offsetting benefits as health plans, retirement accounts, more time off during holidays and summers, and, frankly, more rewarding work.

In states such as Florida and Texas, this net compensation offer to current and prospective teachers is stronger, because their starting salaries are higher. As it happens, Florida and Texas have better public schools than we do — measured by reading and math scores adjusted for student background — even as both states have smaller tax burdens and state budgets. There’s no reason North Carolina can’t set better fiscal priorities and achieve comparable academic results.

Finally, I’d like to see the General Assembly build on prior efforts to reward teachers more on value added than years employed. North Carolina should expand its program for Advanced Teaching Roles and authorize greater salary differentiation for teachers who work in hard-to-staff subjects, such as high-level math and science, and hard-to-staff schools with higher-than-average rates of student disadvantage.

“Strategic investments in teacher pay,” a recent BEST NC report states, “are linked to larger increases in student achievement than broad, undirected increases in education funding.”

House Bill 192 represents a good start to the conversation. As the 2025 legislative session unfolds, here’s hoping that conversation leads to a widely supported, multi-year strategy of strategic investment in the teaching profession — and, therefore, in North Carolina’s future workers, innovators, voters, and leaders.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy and American history.