RALEIGH – My favorite provision of the state-budget proposal from the North Carolina House is to rationalize the treatment of teachers and state employees on the matter of pay increases.
Gov. Mike Easley sought a 7 percent hike in teacher salaries in his quest to push average teacher compensation in North Carolina to the national average. I’m tempted to endorse the national-average standard myself, because North Carolina teacher compensation is already well above it when properly measured. Pushing our pay (down) to the national standard would save North Carolina taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
No, not even I’m in favor of that. Still, the notion that state teachers deserve a hefty pay raise and other state employees do not is indefensible. It’s more about the political power of the largest teacher union, the North Carolina Association of Educators, than about real facts and sound priorities. What about state workers who carry out the most basic governmental responsibility, to protect public safety and incapacitate dangerous criminals? What about those who care for wards of the state such as mental patients and abandoned children? What about those who build and maintain public infrastructure?
Indeed, what about the state teachers who really are woefully underpaid, to the detriment of educational quality? I’m referring to community college instructors, whose compensation is well below average no matter how you measure it. The state community college system asked for $48 million this year to boost average salaries, which are lower than in the public schools. Easley preferred to devoted $300 million to his teacher-pay hike while giving community college instructors the same 1.5 percent raise offered to other state employees.
I’d like to see significant improvement in the pay and working conditions at community colleges, but I don’t think lawmakers ought to just shovel additional tax dollars into the system. I’ve long thought that the tuition is far too low. At about $1,300, tuition and fees in North Carolina’s public two-year colleges is close to the bottom of the national scale. It covers only a small percentage of the true cost of educating students. One disruptive and wasteful consequence is that a large number of students drop out of classes before the end of a semester – they don’t have a lot of “skin in the game,” once financial aid is factored in – while colleges derive inadequate resources to give students a higher-quality educational experience.
Preserving access to community colleges for low-income North Carolinians ought to be done directly, via means-tested assistance, rather than indirectly by keeping tuition artificially low.
The House budget at least doesn’t let political heft trump sound policymaking. It offers K-12 teachers a 3 percent raise and other educators and state employees a raise of 2.75 percent or $1,100, whichever is higher. Perhaps the Senate will try to preserve Easley’s preference, but I doubt it will survive in its original form by the end of the process.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.