In the midst of recent teacher protests in Oklahoma, West Virginia, and even our own state, the General Assembly has now passed budget adjustments for the coming year’s state budget. The plan will boost teacher pay by 6.5 percent, according to The News and Observer. The budget, drafted mostly by Republican legislators, falls short of the 8 percent requested by Governor Roy Cooper and favored by Democrats.
Although this boost is promising, it fails to address the systemic underfunding of North Carolina’s education system by the state. The News and Observer published a number of statistics on how well the state compensates teachers, finding that we rank 39th in the country. Despite our progress from being 47th in 2013, teachers still receive lower inflation-adjusted wages — by about $5,000 annually — than before the recession.
It is important to note that North Carolina has a much lower cost of living than California or New York, which post among the highest teacher wages. However, NPR released numbers showing that the state’s ranking barely moves up to 34th, even when adjusted for cost of living.
All these facts demonstrate that North Carolina is not where it needs to be in ensuring that students have access to the highest quality educators.
This should trouble all students at NC State, not just the 1,586 undergraduate and graduate students in the College of Education whose future salaries may depend on this funding. Our university benefits when it has a large volume of qualified applicants, and too-low teacher pay can negatively influence the prospects of students, especially in rural counties which have fewer resources to provide pay supplements for their teachers.
There is a growing body of scientific research that supports the correlation between higher teacher pay and student performance. Such studies cannot easily prove cause and effect, but in the absence of a simple explanation for how student performance directly boosts teacher pay, it is at least reasonable to expect that higher pay will attract better teachers.
British researchers, in a paper published in the Journal of Public Economics, described a number of previous studies which have used different techniques to extract the effects of wages on student performance. While earlier research had failed to find any relationship, later papers found that higher wages increased student retention.
One study compares developed countries, finding that a 10 percent increase in wages correlated with a five to 10 percent improvement in performance. This study highlighted the importance of relative teacher wages in attracting talent, noting that an increase of five percent in teachers’ position in the national income distribution would achieve the same effect.
The authors note, “This paper would suggest that the route to hiring higher quality teachers is to pay them more – which will mean paying them at a higher point in the country’s income distribution.” They add that large and sudden pay increases will not immediately improve the quality of current teachers, but that over time maintaining teachers as a high-status profession increases the draw for a society’s most qualified individuals.
Although they may not earn as much as doctors, teachers still deserve a high caliber of respect. Teachers help train future generations of doctors, engineers, and community leaders. As a society, we should expect these crucial individuals to be experts in their disciplines, or they won’t have the background to effectively answer all the questions students may have.
Educators are already held to a fairly high standard. All teachers in North Carolina are required to have a bachelor’s degree and complete “a state approved teacher education program from a regionally accredited college or university.” While teachers can receive higher salaries for earning graduate degrees, they are still often underpaid compared to other professionals.
According to Money magazine, the average American graduate from a bachelor’s program makes an average of $50,556 right out of school. Comparing that to the base salary of a 25-year veteran teacher under the current NC budget of only $52,000 makes clear that we are not spending enough to attract large numbers of these professionals.
The article breaks down that earnings number by degree, showing that the average education major makes only $35,000, far less than the average math or science graduate ($55,000) or even the average humanities major ($46,065). It’s absurd that the people teaching future generations about math, science, literature and history are making drastically less money than other professionals in their fields.
Students at NC State recognize the power of an education, so much so that we are each willing to shell out $20,000 per year for the experience. Knowing this, we must advocate for more state funding, not just at the university level, but for students at all school levels, to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to access the benefits of a quality education and North Carolina’s thriving economy.
