North Carolina education has fallen to such poor levels that a school district from Houston, Texas, hosted a job fair offering teaching positions to North Carolina teachers.
According to The News & Observer, Houston has boasted a pay $12,000 higher and bonuses of up to $13,000 a year to teachers whose students have certain test scores.
It’s embarrassing that North Carolina lawmakers have lowered pay so much that a school district more than 1,000 miles away can reasonably advertise for teachers to work there.
North Carolina ranks 47th in the nation for teacher pay, according to The N&O. Lawmakers need to implement policies that support teachers rather than lower their morale. Otherwise, the future of education here is very bleak.
The new Senate budget includes a plan to raise teacher pay by 11.2 percent, provided they give up their tenure. It’s great teachers’ pay will be raised, but it’s wrong to make them choose between that and their constitutional right to tenure.
When a law passed in 2013 took away teachers’ tenure, it was soon deemed unconstitutional. Lawmakers are currently trying to get around this ruling by leaving the decision to the teachers. Currently, tenured teachers need evidence from their performance as to why an institution wants to fire them, should it want to do so.
There’s no reason to make teachers choose between a pay raise and having a sense of job security. Teacher morale in North Carolina is so low right now that job opportunities such as those presented in the Houston job fair seem like legitimate possibilities.
Who could blame them, though, when according to NPR, their pay has been nearly $10,000 less than the national average for educators nationwide?
This seems more like an election-time ploy for Republican lawmakers to gain a better image, instead of a well-thought-out plan to help teachers in a meaningful and significant way.
In North Carolina, there should be incentives offered to those who have been teaching a long time instead of the opposite. Baiting teachers with a pay raise in exchange for a right they are entitled to is constitutionally wrong, as decided in 2013.
The Wake County Public School System warned that the pay raise would likely result in job layoffs, according to The N&O. The school system warned that it would cause cuts to the education system, such as with driver education and the bus service. The budget for teaching assistants would also be cut in half.
In February when lawmakers made many changes to public education, NPR reported, “No state has seen a more dramatic decrease in teacher salary rankings in the past 10 years…”
It doesn’t make sense at all that lawmakers obviously aren’t making the education of the next generation of North Carolinians a top priority.
How will North Carolina ever have plenty of good teachers if their pay continues on its downward spiral and if they’re drawn to employment opportunities in other states? If this doesn’t improve, it makes me wonder if I’d want my future children to get an education in North Carolina. At this rate, the answer is no.