Former teacher and school board member: I’m on board with NC’s new pilot teacher pay plan | Opinion

Welcome to NC Voices, where leaders, readers and experts from across North Carolina can speak on issues affecting our communities. Send submissions of 350 words or fewer to opinion@charlotteobserver.com.

Give new teacher pay plan a chance

I am a former National Board teacher, N.C. Department of Public Instruction employee who worked in recruitment and retention, and a former a Wake County Board of Education member. I fully support the new teacher licensure system, N.C. Pathways to Excellence for Teaching Professionals.

I have lobbied on the state and local levels for a new structure for teacher compensation including a career ladder and performance pay for decades with no success. There’s got to be a new system in place because what we continue to do now isn’t working.

A teacher should not have to leave the classroom for career advancement. The best should be paid handsomely and should be leaders in training others.

There should be multiple factors in a teacher’s compensation including, but not limited to, education and advanced degrees, years of experience, credentials and certifications like National Board, additional leadership roles like mentoring and coaching, student test scores where growth is the measure, performance evaluations, and so on.

We all know that the current training and compensation model isn’t effective at recruiting and retaining the best. I don’t understand why, instead of being proactive and helping to develop new models, North Carolina Association of Educators categorically opposes the new plan.

The teaching profession must be restructured so that teachers are open to performance review and scrutiny like every other profession and rewarded for superior performance like every other profession. NCAE could have been and should be instrumental in development of a teacher compensation plan. Play offense, not defense.

If not now, when? It’s time. The proof: How many of you readers would encourage your son or daughter to become a teacher? Yep, thought not. Let’s give this new model, Pathways to Excellence, a chance. If nothing changes, nothing changes.

Eleanor Goettee, Cary

Moms for Liberty, but only for some

The word liberty has two main definitions. The first is the state of being free from oppression or control. The second is an action that breaches normal limits or violates facts, as in “that old history book takes liberties with the actual events.”

When we think about the first definition — liberty as being free from oppression — it is understood that liberty applies to everyone, as stated in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. Whatever freedoms you have are the same freedoms everyone has. That’s liberty for all.

When we think about the second definition — liberty as a violation of normal limits — it’s understood that liberty applies to some people who are taking freedoms beyond what everyone else gets. That’s liberty for some.

For example, parents have the right to educate their children according to their personal values. That is liberty for all. Parents do not have the right to educate all children according to the parents’ own personal values. That would be liberty for some.

A curriculum should be developed by educational experts, and it should teach critical thinking and problem solving so all kids can succeed. That is liberty for all.

A curriculum should not be developed by people who are not educational experts with the goal of perpetuating their personal beliefs. That would be liberty for some.

Public education should be inclusive of, and accessible for, all students. That is liberty for all. Public education should not exclude any students for any reason. That would be liberty for some.

The people who voted for the current school board trust experts to create a curriculum that teaches children about the real world outside their homes and their churches. That is liberty for all.

Moms for Liberty, whose members think it is their right to dictate what all children learn because they believe their personal values override other parents’ values, believes in liberty for some. Moms for Liberty, whose members oppose a curriculum developed by experts because it challenges a world view in which their beliefs trump all others’, believes in liberty for some.

Moms for Liberty does not speak for all people, or even all parents, in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools — nor in any N.C. public school. Not by a long shot. We the people believe in liberty for all.

Michelle Partridge-Doerr, Charlotte