NC education leaders finalize request to raise pay, stakes for teachers

“We cannot afford to lose beginning teachers,” Superintendent Catherine Truitt said. “We’ve already heard that we need to fill the pipeline with more teachers than we currently have.”

The pilot program needs funding and special legislation that would exempt participating schools from following current licensure laws.

Truitt hopes five to 15 school districts of varying sizes and locations will participate in a six-year pilot as soon as the 2024-25 school year. How many districts and which ones participate would depend on the funding lawmakers provide, Truitt said.

The state would study the results before expanding the changes, and the Department of Public Instruction would produce an annual report to lawmakers on the pilot’s impact on attracting and retaining teachers and on student success.

The proposed licensure system would be unique nationally.

State leaders contend the plan would ensure more student success by providing teachers with more support and more rigorous evaluation. They say it would also be friendly to teachers who enter the profession from another profession and who don’t have degrees in education.

The North Carolina Association of Educators, among other groups, have opposed the plan. They liken it to “merit pay,” because it ties pay to the license a teacher has, and requires good evaluations to move up in licensure.

The group often posts individual teacher testimonials on social media in opposition to the plan, including one on Twitter as recently as last week that argued teacher mentorships are currently inadequately funded.

“Early Career Educators need the support of veteran teachers to be successful,” the group wrote. “Existing beginning teacher programs must be fully funded and followed with fidelity before experimenting with alternative approaches.”

NCAE has also criticized the lack of details on how teachers would be evaluated.

The plan, as approved by the board Thursday, does not expand on those evaluation methods.

The plan places teacher licenses on a tier that teachers would move up, based on their evaluations or, initially, on their attainment of certain degrees or credentials.

The first three licenses, along with an apprentice license, would be entry-level and non-renewable. Most teachers would theoretically fall into the fourth license, which would pay $56,000 with annual raises and could be renewed every five years based on evaluations.

Currently, teachers are paid based on the number of years of experience they have, beginning at $37,000 and topping out at $54,000. They must have a Bachelor’s degree.

About 40% of teachers are subject to the Education Value-Added Assessment System because their students take the state’s standardized tests. That would be one of the evaluation methods.

For those teachers, and for the other 60% of teachers, they could also choose to be evaluated through a review — an observation by a teacher leader and a student survey, both yet to be selected — or through “other tools.”

Working groups, with Department of Public Instruction insight and State Board of Education approval, would develop greater details on how the program would work, including how teachers would be evaluated.

In a separate vote, the State Board of Education voted unanimously to ask lawmakers to raise teacher pay by at least 10%.

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That would make North Carolina a “leader,” according to the resolution, among nearby states in compensating teachers.

A 10% pay increase would result in starting pay of $40,700 for first-year teachers (a $3,700 increase) and would make base pay $59,400 (a $5,400 increase) for the state’s most-experienced teachers.

Board members across political affiliations supported the proposal, as bipartisan teacher raises have been approved nationwide and as raising teacher pay, to some extent, is one of the few education issues North Carolina’s Republican and Democratic leadership have agreed upon.

Lawmakers have raised teacher pay each of the past two fiscal years by about $2,000 for each teacher. They also provided $170 million toward salary supplements in most counties based on a measurement of each county’s financial well-being, though it’s unclear how those supplements have been distributed and thus how they’ve changed average pay.

The board has supported higher teacher pay for years, Chairman Eric Davis said.

But board members emphasized Thursday that they don’t want to compete with nearby states on teacher pay so much as they want to compete with private businesses that can hire teachers away and pay them even more.

“It’s not just the neighboring the states, it’s that private employer that’s able to offer so much more than we’re able to offer,” Davis said.

Superintendent Catherine Truitt said she supports paying teachers competitively according to the degrees they have; while teachers may earn slightly above average pay overall, they earn significantly less than others who paid for, and received, Bachelor’s degrees or higher.

“We need to be able to attract more teachers… but specifically more teachers in special education and math and science at the secondary level,” Truitt said. “We must be able to compete with the private sector.”

Board Member Amy White suggested the board abandon the effort to compete with other states and set a higher bar, because of the role teachers play in children’s lives and futures.

Davis said North Carolina’s appeal to businesses moving and expanded here means they can hire away teachers with good pay, yet teachers are still needed in schools to support the education system that partly attracts businesses to move and expand here.

Lt. Gov Mark Robinson, a board member, agreed.

“We’re not going to have quality teachers if we’re not going to have quality pay,” Robinson said. Without good teachers, “We can forget about everything else, our economy, our future.”