When it comes to crafting school-reform policies for North Carolina, elected officials can choose the path of least resistance or the path of greatest assistance.
The easy path avoids controversy and minimizes political risk. To follow it, you proclaim your fealty to the current system, say that the only real problem with it is a lack of funding, and then do the education establishment’s bidding until it leaves you alone.
The harder path — the one that actually leads to better education outcomes — requires that you do your homework. It requires that you demand evidence of results rather than protestations of good intentions. And it requires that you create systems that reward excellence rather than protect mediocrity. Fortunately, that’s what Gov. Pat McCrory has chosen to do with his new Career Pathways proposal.
When it comes to raising teacher pay in North Carolina, the easy political path would be just to offer across-the-board raises. But that would not be in the interest of taxpayers or of students, whose educational fates are closely linked with the quality of the teachers they encounter.
By definition, across-the-board raises don’t differentiate. Excellent teachers with proven, consistent results in the classroom get the same raises as mediocre or horrible teachers do. Those who take on challenging jobs, such as teaching high-school mathematics or working with at-risk kids, get the same raises as do those who opt for less-demanding tasks.
North Carolina’s current teacher-salary schedule spends too much money rewarding longevity and credentials and too little money rewarding effort and excellence. We’re hardly alone in committing this error. Most states do it, too, which is why there is no strong correlation between school dollars spent and outcomes achieved.
During the past quarter-century, there have been some 90 studies published in peer-reviewed journals that examined the relationship between average teacher salaries and student outcomes such as achievement levels, high school graduation, or subsequent rates of college and career success. Higher pay was linked to higher outcomes only 42 percent of the time.
The reason becomes clear when you break the research down further. The vast majority of studies found no relationship between student outcomes and factors once assumed to be linked to teacher effectiveness, such as years of experience or graduate degrees in education. On the other hand, students tend to do better when their teachers are well-versed in the subject matter (especially math) and have consistently high ratings by principal evaluations and value-added assessments.
The McCrory administration applied these empirical lessons well when developing its Career Pathways proposal. While all teachers get at least a 2 percent raise, pay goes up more for starting and early-career teachers, flattening out the schedule to reduce the influence of longevity. Instead, more money goes to teachers who take the most challenging jobs and those who demonstrate high performance. Within this broad outline, the governor then provides for local flexibility by introducing the system in stages, allowing districts to design their own performance-pay plans if they wish and aiming for statewide participation by 2018.
The plan also restores a pay boost to teachers with graduate degrees. But this is not a reversion to the previous, discredited policy, which mostly rewarded teachers who got advanced degrees in education. Instead, the plan offers teachers more for advanced education in the subjects they are teaching. My preference would have been to pay more for high teacher test scores or other direct markers of subject-matter knowledge — the evidence linking student success to teacher graduate degrees in subjects other than math is quite weak, actually — but this is a reasonable compromise.
Critics of differentiated and performance pay argue that financial incentives won’t make teachers work harder. Although some studies of performance pay show otherwise, that’s not really the point. North Carolina should pay our best teachers more so they’ll stay in our classrooms, while encouraging our worst teachers to find a career more suitable to their skills and abilities.
Those who walk the easy path pretend that teachers aren’t normally distributed from good to bad. The other school-reform path is harder, yes, but actually leads somewhere productive.
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Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.