CMS teacher: Eye-popping bonuses for a handful of teachers won’t help our schools | Opinion

At last week’s Charlotte Mecklenburg Board of Education meeting, CMS officials announced proposed $15,000 bonuses “for teachers who have demonstrated the ability to move the needle in terms of student outcomes.” However, the bonus would be paid to just 32 teachers who have specifically moved that needle in Math I classes at Title I schools.

There are many other teachers among CMS’s more than 9,000 who are moving the needle in terms of student outcomes every single day. None of them will be considered for an eye-popping bonus they could use to erase debt, put a downpayment on a new house, or quit their second job in order to have more time with their families.

Teachers in North Carolina are facing tremendous challenges right now. In the chaotic Donald Trump economy, prices are skyrocketing, and our new state treasurer has promised “uncomfortable things” for state employees including sizable increases in health insurance premiums. Although educators may receive local or state salary raises in upcoming budgets, it seems all but certain they will be swallowed up by the escalating cost of living.

Trump and Elon Musk’s destruction of the Department of Education has just begun but will undoubtedly disrupt the flow of federal funds to CMS’s 105 Title I schools. That disruption could swell class sizes that have been kept somewhat manageable through federally funded teaching positions. Anyone who has taught classes of 40+ children can tell you it makes for an extremely long day.

Already DOGE’s chainsaw has lopped off nearly $90 million in federal grants to North Carolina universities and school districts, money which was being used specifically to attract and retain teachers in high-need schools all over our state, including more than $12 million in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. The universities which historically served as a reliable pipeline of new North Carolina teacher talent now can’t find enough people to enter the profession. According to recent Department of Public Instruction data, 2024 saw an 18% decline in students enrolling in educator preparation programs, and only half of those who enroll go on to graduate and teach in a North Carolina public school. The cavalry is not coming.

Our public schools are facing an existential crisis, and giving massive bonuses to 32 teachers isn’t going to solve it. If anything, this narrow financial incentive seems more likely to have the broader impact of harming district-wide morale by inadvertently telling 99.7% of CMS’s teachers that their own faithful needle moving has gone unnoticed. It would not be the first time a well-meaning attempt at boosting student learning outcomes fell short because of a lack of understanding the dynamics of the schoolhouse.

Research on the impact of performance bonuses in education shows that, not only do they fail to increase student achievement, in some cases they even decrease it. The competitive nature of such incentives isolates teachers and harms relationships so critical to maintaining a positive school culture. If sharing best practices could mean losing $15,000 they desperately need to pay their medical bills to an educator in the classroom next door, who could fault a teacher for choosing to work in a silo instead? And how does that understandable teacher isolation impact student learning?

It would be nice if we had $15,000 for every cash-strapped, stressed-out teacher in our district. We don’t. But what we do have is an opportunity to empathize with the tremendous challenges teachers are currently experiencing and those we can clearly see on the horizon. Now more than ever, we cannot afford any policies which result in our teachers feeling disrespected.