State should raise teachers' salaries
Published November 17, 2013
Editorial by Rocky Mount Telegram, November 17, 2013.
It certainly was encouraging last week to hear Gov. Pat McCrory say he is looking at ways to increase teachers’ salaries next year.
McCrory said his administration is weighing several options for raising pay for pubic school teachers, including providing raises earlier in a teacher’s career as an incentive to stay in the profession.
The governor said he’s considering placing a greater emphasis on performance-based pay and offering higher salaries for teachers in high-demand fields such as math and science. He also said he hasn’t ruled out providing an across-the-board pay increase.
The state’s teachers have received just one pay raise in the past five years. And the N.C. General Assembly this year phased out higher salaries for teachers with advanced degrees – something the McCrory administration has hinted that it might urge lawmakers to revisit next year.
The Republican governor had proposed a 1 percent across-the-board pay raise for teachers and state employees in his budget this year, but the GOP-controlled legislature didn’t include it in the final budget plan they approved.
The average starting teacher salary nationwide was $35,672 in 2011-12, according to the National Education Association. A North Carolina teacher with a bachelor’s degree who started work in the 2009-10 school year makes a base salary of $30,430.
Education funding certainly has taken a hit from the N.C. General Assembly in recent years, and teachers have borne a substantial share of the spending reductions. They are continually asked to achieve better results with fewer resources while their salaries stagnate. That is not the recipe for maintaining high morale among the state’s educators.
Providing the state’s children with a quality education depends heavily on having highly qualified and motivated teachers. Providing fair and competitive salaries is the best way the state can not only attract quality educators but also keep them in the classrooms.
While no one becomes a teacher to become rich, financial considerations are key in attracting the best teachers and sending the message that North Carolina places a high value on the important work they do each day in classrooms across the state.
November 18, 2013 at 1:45 pm
Norm Kelly says:
Across the board pay increases is not the best answer for this. It does NOT encourage those who choose to be above average. It treats those who do just enough to get by exactly as it treats those who choose to excel, either because they love what they do, they know it's best for the kids they teach, or because it's the way they were raised and don't know to do it any different. Giving the same raise to both groups of teachers MAY be worse than not providing pay raises at all.
Don't care who you are, where you work in the education establishment, what your degree is, or even if you aren't in the classroom, or even if you are simply a union lacky. The truth sometimes hurts. Pay can make a major difference in motivation. Only union rules provide for equal pay based on irrelevant things like length of service. When I held a job, I expected/demanded to be rewarded in my paycheck for excelling at what I did. If I were compensated exactly the same as the slacker in the next cubicle, what was the incentive to remain there or to continue to excel? Teachers are human also. I refused to work with Del because he was a slacker who wanted to be paid comparable to me. He didn't deserve it but management had a hard time explaining it to him. So I found other employment where I was fairly compensated. And when Del applied to that company I started a campaign to prevent him from being hired. (note: name changed to protect the slacker)
Add to this equation that the education establishment is over-burdened with administrators. There are simply too many highly paid 'executives' running the system for the number of teachers in the system. There is no logical explanation as to why so many layers of 'management' need to be in place. There is no logical explanation for why Boards of Ed, like in Wake County, make the financial decisions they do that negatively impact teaching and the morale of the taxpayers. When Wake County education establishment personnel were caught embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars, the establishment told us not to worry, that the money would not be felt in the classrooms - they had funds to offset the lost money. Really? Why? How? When the newly elected Demoncrats took over control of the Wake County Board of Ed, the first thing they decided to do was spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to remove the leader because they didn't like him. They decided it was better to spend the money to relieve him of a job, to buy out his contract, and spend money on replacing him, than to simply let him work until his contract expired. This is wasteful spending and a major slap in the face of taxpayers. But we are told that we must fork over even more of OUR money to pay for their bad decisions.
The education establishment may be it's own worst enemy. Continuously growing overhead. Continuously growing budgets. No increase in performance. No increase in graduation rates of kids who are at grade level. But they always claim the answer is MORE money and MORE money and MORE money. Somehow if taxpayers just pay for an iPad for every kid, a smartphone for every kid, or whatever the latest technology is, the system would improve. Or we are told we need to buy the same technology devices for EVERY teacher and administrator throughout the system. Except this isn't the answer either.
There's a happy medium on all of these ideas. But more money and more money and more money is NOT the only answer. But the only answer we get from the education establishment (what liberals would call Big Education, if they weren't buddies!) is more money would help the problem. My answer to that is: too simple an answer. And I remember slimey Mike Easley too well. He told us, just like Obama lied, that the education lottery (misnomer!) would solve every problem in the state except for snow on the roads. Go back & listen to his statements and you will realize this is not an exaggeration. But it didn't solve any problems and created more overhead in the state.
Libs always claim that conservatives offer no solutions, they are only the people of NO. So, libs, your turn. Offer another solution besides more money. Conservatives actually offer alternatives, it's just not ones you love, so you reject them outright claiming no alternative was proposed. We don't hear an alternative from you libs, but we don't stab you in the back for it at every turn. We'll start doing that now. Are you prepared? Can you offer an alternative? Are you willing to admit that Big Education is top heavy?
