A commission could recommend higher salaries for NC teachers. Will lawmakers fund it?

A controversial new plan could raise pay for North Carolina teachers, but there are questions whether state lawmakers will foot the potential bill.

The Professional Educator Preparation and Standards Commission (PEPSC) could finalize Thursday a new model for licensing and paying teachers based on their performance, as opposed to their years of education experience.

The plan would then go to the State Board of Education for its approval. But ultimately it’s up to the General Assembly whether to support the changes, including the additional pay for teachers.

“It has been a fiscally conservative General Assembly for some time, in particular when related to issues of public education,” Van Dempsey, PEPSC’s chairperson, said Monday. “That is the space in which we’re doing this. We have to make the best case we can to the General Assembly if and when that time comes.”

Dempsey was giving an update Monday to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s Teacher Advisory Commission.

Commission members were skeptical about whether the Republican-led General Assembly would provide the higher salaries in the draft model.

“Is there forward motion or is there going to be that history again of them not wanting to increase funding for education and for educators?” said Lisa Godwin, an Onslow County teacher and a teacher advisory commission member.

What the plan proposes

North Carolina teachers start at a statewide base salary of $37,000. They get annual state raises for their first 15 years, then less frequent raises after that. The scale tops out at $54,000, but school districts and the state often supplement the base pay.

The new model would set a minimum salary of $30,000 for apprentice teachers who haven’t yet received a bachelor’s degree. Teachers who have an education degree would start at $45,000 and reach $56,000 when they reach “expert teacher” status in potentially as little as three years

The model calls for expert teachers to get a 1% annual raise as well as receive $5,000 or $10,000 more a year if they take on additional leadership roles.

“Teachers have to be compensated and rewarded through a structure — not through an annual pay raise — through a structure predictable over time so that people understand what that rewarding compensation model is going to look like,” said Dempsey, the dean of UNC-Wilmington’s Watson College of Education

PEPSC will consider a recommendation from a subcommittee to ask state lawmakers to reinstate extra pay for all teachers who have a master’s degree. The model also calls for continuing to pay 12% extra for educators who have certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

The plan recommends a “hold harmless” provision where teachers would not see their pay go down if they’d make less in the new model.

‘Discredited’ pay model

Instead of advancing with each year of experience, teachers would move up in the model based on whether they’re considered to be effective. Teachers can meet these standards based on student growth on state tests, reviews by their principal, student surveys or other measures that would be developed.

The draft has drawn extensive feedback from teachers, with the North Carolina Association of Educators opposing the model, calling it a merit pay model.

Diane Ravitch, a former U.S. assistant secretary of education turned education writer, said using test scores to help set teacher pay is a “discredited” system that’s been a “very expensive disaster” in other states.

“So, North Carolina appears to be determined to drive its best teachers away, to increase its teacher shortage, when the solutions to their problems are obvious: increase teachers’ pay, reduce class sizes, and respect teacher voices,” Ravitch wrote Saturday in her blog.

Dempsey, State Superintendent Catherine Truitt and State Board of Education chairman Eric Davis have denied it’s a merit pay model.

‘Not a preconceived plan’

Dempsey repeatedly said Monday that PEPSC is developing a plan that it thinks will be in the best interests of the teaching profession and students. He said it’s not based only on what the commission thinks lawmakers will fund.

Public records obtained by Justin Parmenter, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg teacher and NCAE board member, show that the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) and the North Carolina Human Capital Roundtable helped develop the new model. Other emails show that SREB, the Roundtable and the public relations firm of Eckel & Vaughn plan to create a group called UpliftEd to promote the new model.

The Charlotte-based Belk Foundation provided a grant to fund a public relations campaign to help get the plan approved.

But Dempsey said only PEPSC is working on the plan right now, noting how it’s different in several areas from the initial draft.

“It is not a preconceived plan,” Dempsey said. “It’s not that we’re going to pull it out of a box and it looks like something that got determined 20 months ago.”

Mark Townley, a teacher advisory commission member, thanked PEPSC for putting itself on the hot seat.

“I’ve talked to a lot of teachers,” said Townley, assistant director of programs for N.C. State’s Kenan Fellows Program for Teacher Leadership. “They appropriately have very strong opinions about this.

“But my first reaction when I saw this was thank goodness somebody’s trying to innovate in North Carolina.”