Cranky Blogger Warning: I just spent the last 20 minutes listening to right wing radio hosts tear public school teachers here in North Carolina apart. I’m more than a little fired up. If you are looking for sunshine and rainbows or nifty tech tools or teaching materials, walk away now!
But if you want to arm yourselves with some facts that you can use in conversations about teacher compensation and school funding, read on.
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I made a mistake today, y’all: On the way home from work, I tuned into the Rick and Donna Martinez show on WPTF — our local right wing radio station.
Like most conservative radio hosts, Rick and Donna spent the better part of 30 minutes gutting public school teachers.
That’s a pretty common pattern on conservative radio nowadays. Striking teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona are driving those on the far right of our society straight over the edge. To them, teachers are nothing more than greedy folks failing children and collecting fat pay checks.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear this line of thinking from Rick and Donna. Neither are fans of public schools — and with North Carolina teachers planning a walkout on May 16th to protest poor funding for education in our state, now is as good a time as any to take some cheap shots at the profession.
I figured I’d answer a few of Rick and Donna’s questions — and to correct a few of Rick and Donna’s misconceptions — here:
Donna, while pointing out that North Carolina teachers only work 10 months of the year, asked: “What I’d like to know from teachers is how much should a public school teacher make? What should your salary be?”
My answer: How about we start with an across the board raise of 11.3%. According to this salary database, that’s what it would take to JUST GET EVEN with what I was making FIFTEEN YEARS AGO once you adjust for inflation.
Need some graphs to be convinced? Take a look these:
North Carolina Teacher Salaries over the Past 15 years
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North Carolina Teacher Salaries over the Past 15 years when ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION
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Percentage change in Teacher Salaries Nationwide from 2000-2017
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That’s not asking for too much, is it? Wanting to be paid AT LEAST AS MUCH as I was getting paid in 2003? Is it reasonable for professionals to expect their salaries to keep up with inflation? Does that happen in other professions?
#brokechat
Rick asked a different kind of question: “How will increasing salaries for public school teachers improve student achievement? No one wants to answer that. If you could prove that increasing salaries would improve achievement, I’d be all for it.”
Let’s start by recognizing the fundamental flaw in Rick’s question: He’s ignoring the fact that teachers in every state that has gone on strike over the last year AREN’T just asking for pay raises. They are also pushing for states to increase overall funding for schools.
That matters, y’all. Here’s why: MOST buildings — including those right here in North Carolina — have seen their budgets for things like basic classroom supplies, textbooks and technology cut dramatically over the past fifteen years. They’ve also seen funding for other essential programs and positions — think guidance counselors and school nurses and reading interventionists — cut, too.
Need proof? Check out this report — which highlights the 29 states (including Arizona and Oklahoma and North Carolina) that are spending less in inflation adjusted dollars per pupil than they were in 2008.
Want a graph?
Here you go:
Percent Change in Total State Funding Per Student (Inflation Adjusted) From 2008-20015
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So to focus ONLY on the pay increases that teachers are looking for in their collective action is disingenuous — a cheap attempt to make teachers look selfish in front of their communities.
But here’s a more direct answer to Rick’s question: Increasing teacher salaries helps student achievement by (1). Attracting better candidates to our classrooms and (2). Helping to KEEP experienced teachers in our classrooms. Plain and simple.
Now, we all know in our guts that more experience for teachers doesn’t AUTOMATICALLY translate to better results for students. There are great teachers who just entered our profession and their are terrible teachers who have been in classrooms for decades.
But if you dig into the research, you’ll find that generally speaking, teacher experience has a positive impact on student achievement.
Need proof? Check out the top four findings of this review of 30 studies of teacher effectiveness conducted by the Learning Policy Institute:
- Teaching experience is positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career. Gains in teacher effectiveness associated with experience are most steep in teachers’ initial years, but continue to be significant as teachers reach the second, and often third, decades of their careers.
- As teachers gain experience, their students not only learn more, as measured by standardized tests, they are also more likely to do better on other measures of success, such as school attendance.
- Teachers’ effectiveness increases at a greater rate when they teach in a supportive and collegial working environment, and when they accumulate experience in the same grade level, subject, or district.
- More-experienced teachers support greater student learning for their colleagues and the school as a whole, as well as for their own students.
And then go back to your gut. Does the notion that professionals get better at their work over time ring true to you? Does experience matter in YOUR profession? When you are hiring a professional in any field, do YOU consider experience?
Of course you do.
THAT’s how improving teaching salaries will have a positive impact on student achievement. If we pay teachers a competitive salary, they are far more likely to stick with the career rather than move on when they get sick of working second and third jobs to make ends meet.
Rick and Donna aren’t the only people pushing my buttons today. though.
A friend of mine who leans to the right asked me this question: “Why is it so hard to fire bad teachers? I could fire anyone on my team today for poor performance. Shouldn’t it be that way in teaching, too?”
My answer: At least here in North Carolina — where teachers aren’t unionized — it’s really NOT all that hard to fire teachers.
Need proof? Then check out this News and Observer article detailing how teachers are contracted in our state.
The highlights: ALL teachers hired in North Carolina after 2013 have been working exclusively on one-year contracts.
Translated: Just like the people that YOU work with, ANY North Carolina teacher hired after 2013 can be let go at the end of ANY school year for ANY reason.
Starting this year, teachers who have been employed for more than three years AND rated Proficient under the state’s teacher evaluation system — which includes, by the way, measures of student performance on standardized exams — can be offered two or four year contracts.
That’s it.
Sure, old farts like me still have “tenure” (read: a continuing contract and due process rights that keep me from being let go at the end of every year without an explanation), but the notion that getting rid of bad teachers is hard to do is just not true anymore.
Now in the interest of transparency, if you dig into the numbers, you WILL find out that even with their new contractual powers, principals STILL aren’t firing very many teachers.
Here’s why: There’s not a long line of people waiting to take the job, y’all — particularly in poor, rural counties where teacher vacancy rates can be as high as 11 percent.
Worse yet, enrollment in our university system’s education programs are down 40% since 2010. The general consensus from college students: Teaching just isn’t worth it.
So the REAL choice a principal has ISN’T “fire the marginal teacher and improve your school immediately.” It’s “fire the marginal teacher and HOPE that you can fill the position with someone better sometime soon.”
That’s an entirely different decision.
Long story short: I’m a realist. Teachers are never going to make a fortune. It’s not fiscally responsible — and the fact of the matter is that we HAVE to be fiscally responsible.
But let’s quit pretending that teachers who are using their voices to draw attention to the sad state of funding in our public schools and to the impact those funding choices are having on kids are bad people trying to fleece America.
We’re just trying to start an important conversation that’s long overdue.
#trudatchat
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Related Radical Reads:
The Truth About Teacher Salaries
The Truth on Thom Tillis and North Carolina’s “Historic” Pay Raises for Teachers
