RALEIGH – The North Carolina General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a state budget last week that raises General Fund spending by about 10 percent in a single year, uses hundreds of millions of dollars in one-time revenues to finance ongoing expenses, and fails to repeal immediately the “temporary” tax increases lawmakers first imposed in 2001.
But don’t be surprised if many North Carolinians learn little more about the bill than the fact that it gave public schoolteachers average pay raises of 8 percent. This fact was probably the single-most reported aspect of the budget. And you can count on legislators supporting the budget to talk the teacher pay raise up big during the fall elections. It may win votes. That doesn’t mean it was the right choice.
On teacher compensation, policymakers and the public alike are under some misconceptions. First, as has been noted repeatedly in the past, North Carolina’s average teacher pay is not below the national average. As far as I can determine, it hasn’t been below average for at least 20 years. Among other adjustments, you have to account for differences in the age or experience distribution of teachers in each state (otherwise, fast-growing states that aggressively hire younger teachers will always look less competitive than they are) and you have to account for variations in state or local cost of living (otherwise, the comparison would be based on the idea that a $40,000 salary stretches as far in Manhattan as it does in Morganton, which is absurd).
Second, teachers as a whole are not woefully underpaid compared to every other profession with comparable educational requirements. Converting the data to compensation per week or hour, rather than simply looking at annualized averages, helps clarify the situation. Economist Michael Podgursky offered the most recent statistics I’ve seen, for the Spring 2006 edition of the magazine Education Next. Obviously, there will always be public-school teachers who could make more money by taking a different job in the private sector, and some have done exactly that (including one of my favorite high-school teachers, who became a stockbroker). But many more choose to stay in teaching, realizing (in addition to the important non-tangible benefits of the job they love) that the apparently higher pay available in some other professions would come with less vacation, longer days, and less job security.
Third, about that oft-cited teacher-turnover problem, it is exaggerated. To say that a large minority of teachers leave the profession within the first five years is not to say that there is huge turnover in the teaching pool as a whole. This is a basic stock-and-flow problem one might study in statistics class. New entrants do not comprise a large share of the overall workforce. There are, of course, serious recruitment and retention problems for particular teaching jobs – math and science positions, for example, and placements at chronically low-performing schools – but raising average teacher pay is not the proper tool to fix them.
A bit of legitimate good news about the 8 percent teacher-pay hike enacted this year: there is some variation built in, and it makes sense. Specifically, North Carolina public schools do seem to be less competitive in starting teacher pay (even when correctly measured) than ae those of neighboring states, and the budget bill directs a sizable share of the pay raise to shrinking this gap. But it would have been far better to set the average teacher-pay hike a bit lower, closer to the 5.5 percent offered to state employees, and then increase even further the incentives for teachers to fill high-priority vacancies. Better yet, why not condition an 8 percent average raise on the willingness of public school teachers to give up tenure protection?
Maybe next year.
Or not.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.
p.s. Please spare me the predictable email invective of the “walk a mile in my shoes” variety, please. I know and care for many teachers. Both of my parents were public-school educators. They took on extra work to help raise five children, all of whom spent some of their school years in private education. We didn’t have a lot of luxuries. We set priorities with the funds we had. Guess what: lots of other families, parents employed in other professions, also make sacrifices and live modestly. Let’s stick to the facts of the matter.