Education

NC education board votes for teacher evaluation plan that could raise pay

Next up: The North Carolina General Assembly must decide whether and how wide to pilot the changes.

Posted Updated
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By
Emily Walkenhorst
, WRAL education reporter
RALEIGH, N.C. — The North Carolina State Board of Education will seek permission and funding for a pilot program that would drastically raise teacher pay while subjecting them to more consequential evaluations.
The board voted Thursday without opposition or discussion to move forward with a pilot program, after discussing the merits of doing so during their meeting Wednesday. State leaders are proposing the changes in an effort to improve teacher recruitment and retention.

The program approved Thursday is a scaled-down pursuit from initial discussions to implement a licensure program statewide. Leaders said a pilot program would be wiser to do before a broader rollout of the overhaul, which at one point was estimated to cost more than $1 billion.

The North Carolina General Assembly must permit a pilot program by changing laws as necessary and appropriating funds for it. Without any funding yet, it’s unclear how many districts — or schools or teachers — would be able to participate. Board members said this week they hoped a wide variety of districts would be able to.

Board member Olivia Oxendine said she wanted schools districts that are big, rural, better-resourced and resource-poor, as well as geographically spread throughout the state. She argued that the varying conditions of school systems could influence how well the licensure program would work in each place.

“These large districts will probably do fine, but we’ve got to see who it plays in every corner of this state,” Oxendine said Wednesday.

If the North Carolina General Assembly grants permission, a fraction of the state’s approximately 90,000 public school system teachers would be subject in the coming years to a new teacher licensure system.

That system would boost pay for most teachers to at least $56,000, add teachers who would serve in mentorship and leadership roles, and subject teachers to evaluations that would determine whether they could maintain or renew their licenses. The evaluations would be weighed over five year periods, meaning a teacher doesn’t have to meet expectations every year, just three out of every five years. Although teachers would be able to select which evaluation method to use, most of those evaluation methods haven’t been selected yet. What happens to teachers who don’t pass them hasn’t been decided yet.

Those uncertainties have prompted skepticism of the licensure overhaul among teachers and their advocates, including the North Carolina Association of Educators. The only method currently selected — the Education Value-Added Assessment System — evaluates teacher performance in a single year by measuring how well a teacher’s students did on standardized tests compared to how well an algorithm predicted they would do, then stacking the teachers up against one another and automatically classifying a share of the bottom as not meeting expectations.

A subcommittee of the board, the Professional Educator Preparation and Standards Committee, is revisiting licensure laws after being formed by the General Assembly in 2017 to “establish high standards for North Carolina educators.” Superintendent Catherine Truitt and Board Chairman Eric Davis, among others, have argued the current system isn’t friendly to many people trying to enter the profession from outside education, doesn’t help support teachers and doesn’t ensure adequate compensation.

The state’s current licensure system isn’t tied to compensation, regular evaluations or support based on those evaluations. Rather, licenses are obtained or renewed based on teachers meeting continuing education requirements, often pursued on the teachers’ own dime. People entering the profession from outside the field must complete an education degree program within three years, which critics have argued drives some of those prospective teachers away.

While licensure isn’t currently tied to regular evaluations, teachers are already subject to regular evaluations based on multiple tools as a condition of employment. They can be, at the discretion of their principal, placed on improvement plans or terminated based on those evaluations.