NC teacher: There’s a teacher pipeline crisis in NC. This plan won’t fix it.

In an era of bitter political division, common ground is refreshing. Nearly everyone agrees — and research supports — that the most important factor in student success is access to excellent teachers. Polling consistently shows that North Carolinians believe low educator pay must be addressed.

That’s why engaging with state education leaders over how to tackle our ruined teacher pipeline has been so frustrating for those of us who are in the classroom. We don’t appear to agree on what problem we’re trying to solve.

North Carolina teachers with a decade or more under their belts can tell you exactly how the career has become “wholly undesirable,” as a Buncombe County teacher told the State Board of Education. It has been death by a thousand legislative cuts as our General Assembly:

▪ Cut thousands of teaching assistants

▪ Eliminated master’s pay and longevity pay

▪ Removed due-process rights

▪ Took away retiree health benefits

▪ Ended state-funded professional development

▪ Got rid of class size caps in grades 4-12

▪ Cut taxes repeatedly, depriving public schools of sorely needed revenue

▪ Passed meager raises far outpaced by inflation

As if completely unaware of that history, State Superintendent Catherine Truitt recently framed the main problem as our “overly complicated, burdensome licensure process.”

Changes being proposed by Truitt’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI), the Professional Educator Preparation and Standards Commission (PEPSC), and the State Board would fundamentally change how teachers are licensed and paid, making North Carolina the first state in the nation to scrap the experience-based pay scale and replace it with an experimental system where both compensation and ability to stay employed are based on measures of teacher merit. Suggested measures include standardized test results, evaluations by principals and peers, and student surveys.

The State Board is also proposing the creation of “advanced and lead teacher roles,” which would see teachers paid more for taking on additional responsibilities.

From the time the Pathways to Excellence reform proposal went public, the teacher reaction has been overwhelmingly negative.

Hundreds of messages from N.C. educators to state education leaders have poured in, pointing out flaws with the plan. Similarly pointed feedback was collected in invite-only “teacher listening sessions” the DPI held when the backlash erupted.

Common themes in teacher concerns have emerged:

▪ Standardized testing is unhealthy for students and negatively impacts learning as it encourages teachers to “teach to the test.” A single data point cannot accurately capture a whole year of student growth.

▪ Evaluations and surveys are useful tools for growing educators, but they are too subjective for fairly determining pay and career advancement. Those completing evaluations will do so understanding the staffing implications, and ratings may be inflated to decrease turnover.

▪ Teachers are already doing “advanced roles” in every district in North Carolina. We mentor beginning teachers, design and lead professional development, and chair departments and grade levels to name a few. We do that extra work with no compensation for it.

▪ Proposed salary bumps sound good but rely on the General Assembly committing to a major increase in education funding. There is very little recent history to indicate such a commitment is likely. There is much more cause for concern that legislators would elect to keep salaries low and pass the more problematic parts of the proposal.

▪ Teachers already have to jump through enough hoops. We should be advocating for significant raises within the current structure that rewards long-term career commitment along the lines of recent moves in Alabama and Mississippi.

Rather than using teacher feedback to create more effective policy, DPI and the State Board have thus far focused on marginalizing educator concerns through marketing and public narrative control.

Moving forward, our leaders need to commit to a policy process which acknowledges the actual causes of our pipeline crisis and meaningfully involves classroom teachers in crafting an effective solution. That’s the kind of leadership that North Carolina’s long-suffering teachers and our 1.5 million students deserve.