Increase pay for teachers, classroom coaches, experts tell North Carolina lawmakers

The House Select Committee on Education Reform on Monday heard presentations from the Fiscal Research Division and BestNC, a nonprofit that represents the education interests of business leaders in the state.

Brenda Berg, BestNC’s executive director, urged lawmakers to raise teacher pay to $58,000 for most teachers. That would be an increase of a few to several thousand dollars for most teachers. Base pay for teachers is currently below that at all experience levels.

Teachers need to earn a living wage sooner than 15 years in, Berg said. A living wage might be between $52,000 and $53,000, but BestNC is encouraging the pay of $58,000 to make it more competitive with other industries. Once teachers reach $58,000, they’d ideally get cost-of-living adjustments passed in each state budget, rather than a pre-established annual wage increase, Berg said.

Many teachers prefer the predictability of the pre-established annual wage increase. Other organizations that have pushed raising teacher pay have also pushed keeping annual increases.

Beginning teachers should also earn more than the $41,000 they are set to make this year, Berg said. North Carolina last school year was last among all southeastern states in beginning teacher pay, paying $39,538. Texas paid the highest at $47,607. Beginning teacher pay is critical because that’s when young prospective teachers are more interested in moving around for a job, Berg said.

Teachers earn less than the average bachelor’s degree holder, male or female.

“We’re not attracting top-tier candidates into teaching,” Berg said.

Rep. John Torbett, R-Gaston, committee co-chair, said early career teachers should be able to afford to support a family. Not paying them enough was essentially “penalizing” them for pursuing a normal lifestyle.

“We’ve got to do much better,” Torbett said. But Torbett said doing better would include more than just more state funding. He said counties would need to help, too.

Fiscal Research Division representatives didn’t urge pay raises but listed things for lawmakers to think about if they want to change the teacher pay structure. They should weigh whether the changes would have the potential to meaningfully change turnover and staffing shortages, as well as whether teachers understand the reasons for the change and accept them.

Teacher turnover is higher in the first few years for teachers, when they earn the least. But that’s also when they are first thrown into the challenging job of leading a classroom and working under a principal with, on average, 50 direct reports.

Schools need to change structurally, too, Berg said. The organizational chart shouldn’t be the principal at the top, directly overseeing every other employee below. That’s not a recipe for a successful principal.

“No healthy organization would do that,” Berg said.

Representatives from both groups touted the state’s Advanced Teaching Roles pilot program for improving student and school performance. Schools in the program assign leadership responsibilities to higher-performing teachers, who can then mentor their fellow teachers and provide extra classroom support. Some schools receive grant funding to pay those teachers more, but there’s not enough to go around.

“We’re seeing this work,” said Leah Sutton, vice president of policy and engagement at BestNC. That’s in spite of the fact that BestNC recommends schools have twice as many teachers leaders as they do now.

Experts said Monday they want lawmakers to consider expanding funds for the program, eventually making the program statewide and loosening limits on class sizes to allow more schools to assign teachers to leadership roles.

The program works better if the leadership teachers don’t have classrooms of their own, they said. But the state provides only a certain number of teachers based on ideal class sizes; it doesn’t provide leadership positions. That makes it difficult for some schools to free up teachers for leadership responsibilities, unless they either increase class sizes among the teachers who aren’t leaders or reassign a different school employee into a teaching position.

Schools currently only have flexibility from those limits for the five years they have a grant for the program, but they can’t continue them afterward.

Amanda Fratrik, a fiscal analyst with the Fiscal Research Division, suggested lawmakers also consider increasing the number of teachers they fund. Fratrik said some schools try to assign leadership responsibilities to teachers with their own full classrooms, and it doesn’t work well.