Commentary

Report: NC teacher pay second-least competitive in nation

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September 5, 2018
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Source: Economic Policy Institute, “The teacher pay penalty has hit a new high,” September 5, 2018

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute shows that the gap between wages for teachers and wages for other college graduates has grown to its highest-ever levels. According to the report, wages for American teachers are now 18.7 percent below the wages of their college-educated peers in other industries. This teacher wage penalty has grown substantially: the teacher wage penalty was just 1.8 percent in 1994, but has since grown to a record 18.7 percent in 2017.

These competitiveness measures are essential to operating a world-class education system. Teacher quality remains the most important in-class factor for student success. Countries with high-performing education systems, such as South Korea, Finland, and Singapore, understand the value of high-quality teachers and prioritize competitive teacher salaries to recruit and retain the best and brightest into the teaching profession.

Source: Economic Policy Institute, “The teacher pay penalty has hit a new high,” September 5, 2018

The report paints a particularly damning picture of teacher pay competitiveness in North Carolina, ranking the state 49th in terms of teacher wage competitiveness. According to their estimates, teacher pay in North Carolina is a whopping 35.5 percent behind pay for other college graduates in the state. Only Arizona offers a less competitive teacher pay package. Compared to simple rankings of state’s average teacher pay, this competitiveness measure paints a more accurate picture of North Carolina’s ability to attract and retain a high-quality teaching force. It is no coincidence that enrollment in North Carolina teacher preparation programs remains well below historical levels.

There is reason to believe that the EPI report might actually underestimate the extent of the teacher pay gap. My own 2016 analysis compared teacher wages against other full-time workers with a college degree. By this measure, U.S. teachers earn just 64 percent of what their full-time, college-educated peers earn. In North Carolina, teachers were found to earn just 57 percent of what other full-time, college-degree-holding North Carolinians earn.

Of course, teachers’ benefit packages tend to be more generous than those received in other industries. But these more valuable healthcare and retirement benefits fail to offset the gaping wage gap faced by teachers. According to EPI’s estimates, benefits only reduce the teacher pay gap by 7.6 percentage points. Even when benefits are accounted for, teacher pay significantly lags pay in other industries, making it more difficult to recruit and retain great teachers.

The report is an important reminder that – despite recent-year pay increases – North Carolina lawmakers must continue to invest in our teaching force if we hope to have a world-class education system. Ultimately, lawmakers must aim beyond simple national averages and instead ensure that our teacher salaries are competitive with the pay offered in other professions.

Commentary

New Mexico court ruling on inadequate, unconstitutional school funding should be wake up call for NC lawmakers

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July 27, 2018
In Commentary

On July 20th, a New Mexico court ruled that the state’s school funding system was inadequate and unconstitutional, violating the constitutional equal protection and due process rights of economically disadvantaged students, English Language Learners and Native American students. The ruling is an unmitigated victory for the residents of New Mexico, particularly those from underserved communities.

The evidence of New Mexico’s inadequate funding will sound familiar to North Carolinians:

  • New Mexico students lack adequate instructional materials, curricula and teachers.
  • The lack of resources is having a disproportionately negative impact on children from low-income families, Native American students, and English language learners.
  • To allow at-risk students to overcome the barriers they face, the state must provide programs such as pre-K, summer school, after-school programs, targeted class-size reductions, and research-based reading programs.
  • The state’s teacher evaluation system penalizes teachers for working in high-need schools, creating shortages of effective teachers in high-need schools.

These same arguments were echoed by the more than 20,000 educators who marched on Raleigh on May 16th of this year. Their message highlighted how nearly ten years of austerity budgets in North Carolina are making it increasingly difficult for teachers to meet the needs of all of their students. Specifically, there are direct local parallels to each of the findings from the New Mexico case:

  • North Carolina’s lack of adequate instructional materials, curricula, and teachers is evidenced by the 55 percent reduction in classroom supplies, 39 percent reduction in textbooks, and 2.5 percent reduction in classroom teachers from pre-Recession levels.
  • North Carolina’s disproportionate impact on at-risk students is evidenced by widening achievement gaps on the National Assessment of Student Progress.
  • North Carolina funds fewer Pre-K slots than from before the Recession. Districts have little funding for summer school or after-school programs. The General Assembly’s one-size-fits-all class-size reduction plan is forcing districts to abandon targeted class-size reduction plans that focused on at-risk students. North Carolina’s early-grades literacy efforts have ignored research-informed best practices, and has been associated with declining reading scores.
  • North Carolina has a school-based evaluation system that does a better job measuring students’ family incomes rather than how much learning is taking place, needlessly stigmatizing schools with a high proportion of low-income students.

In fact, school funding in New Mexico looks better than in North Carolina. Adjusted to reflect differences in regional wages, poverty, economies of scale, and population density, New Mexico outspends North Carolina by 29 percent:

Read more

Commentary

Artificial income tax cap would permanently hamstring our public schools

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June 21, 2018
In Commentary

By all accounts, the biggest issue facing North Carolina’s public schools is the lack of adequate funding. Adjusted for inflation, 18 of the 24 biggest school funding allotments remain below their pre-Recession levels, or have been eliminated altogether. As a result, North Carolina’s per-student state funding remains 3 percent below pre-Recession levels after adjusting for inflation. According to the most recent data from the National Education Association, North Carolina’s per-pupil spending ranks 39th in the country, trailing the national average by over $2,400, or 25 percent.

More sophisticated measures of school spending paint an even bleaker picture. For example, EdWeek’s Quality Counts report gives North Carolina an F (47th in the nation) for level of school spending. Research from the Education Law Project and Rutgers University reaches a similar conclusion, ranking North Carolina 48th in terms of total school spending.

Compared to other states, North Carolina devotes a shockingly small share of its wealth towards funding our public schools. North Carolina’s spending on public schools accounts for less than 2.8 percent of the state’s gross domestic product. By contrast, Vermont makes twice the effort, devoting 5.6 percent of its state wealth to its public school system. Overall, North Carolina ranks 46th in terms of school funding effort; a ranking that has fallen even as the national recovery officially began.  Rather than invest when it has been possible to do so, the current leadership of the General Assembly has continued to reduce their commitment to our classrooms and children.

If North Carolina’s lawmakers were interested in addressing the inadequacy of North Carolina’s school funding, they should want to have every revenue-generating tool at their disposal. Particularly, lawmakers should prioritize revenue options that minimize the tax burden on lower-income North Carolinians who have mostly been left behind in North Carolina’s economic recovery. Read more

Commentary

N.C. State’s hyped voucher study tells us nothing about N.C.’s voucher program

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June 12, 2018
In Commentary

Normally, when somebody hears about an evaluation of an education program, they reasonably assume the evaluation will tell them whether the program is working or not. When reading an evaluation report, policymakers, parents, and educators hope the evaluation will tell them if the program is helping the participating students. These seem like obvious, uncontroversial points.

On Monday, June 4, researchers from N.C. State released “an evaluation of the North Carolina Opportunity Scholarship Program,” North Carolina’s largest private school voucher program. The authors enthusiastically publicized and distributed the report, making sure to provide advance copies to media organizations and pro-voucher advocacy groups. The report has been highlighted by all of the state’s major media outlets, including being the first story greeting visitors to EdNC.org all of last week.

But there’s a problem: the report fails to tell us whether the Opportunity Scholarship program is working. The researchers’ efforts tell us nothing about whether accepting an Opportunity Scholarship will help or harm a student’s education.

The report’s primary flaw is that it has no external validity. That is, the students tested as part of this study are different from the average Opportunity Scholarship student. As a result, there’s no reason to think that the untested Opportunity Scholarship students would similarly outperform their public school counterparts. As the Charlotte Observer‘s Ann Doss-Helms noted, just over half of the voucher schools that participated in the study were Catholic, while only 10 percent of all schools receiving Opportunity Scholarship vouchers are Catholic. Additionally, the report only looked at students who were recruited and volunteered to take a test. These students are different from the average voucher student.

Because of these differences, you can’t use the report to make claims about the average voucher student or the impact of the voucher program overall. The effects highlighted by the researchers only apply to the 89 Opportunity Scholarship students (in the researcher’s preferred comparison) who volunteered to be tested, representing just 1.6 percent of the 5,624 Opportunity Scholarship students in the 16-17 school year. The report tells us nothing about the other 98.4 percent of Opportunity Scholarship students

Unfortunately, one would have to carefully read the report to reach these conclusions. The press release fails to adequately warn readers of the paper’s limitations. One would have to dig into the ninth paragraph of the Charlotte Observer’s story on the report to find a clear description of the report’s shortcomings: Read more

Commentary, Education

With HB 514, legislature unambiguously embraces school segregation

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May 31, 2018
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In Commentary, Education

There’s a word for what happens when majority-white suburbs pull their children from a majority-minority school district and place them into exclusionary, majority-white schools: segregation. With the advancement of HB 514, lawmakers are unambiguously embracing school segregation as state policy.

HB 514 allows four Charlotte suburbs – Cornelius, Huntersville, Matthews, and Mint Hill – the authority to create and operate their own charter schools. These suburbs can then limit enrollment in these schools to municipal residents. Cornelius is 85 percent white. Huntersville is 77 percent white. Matthews is 78 percent white. Mint Hill is 73 percent white. Students in these majority-white suburbs are assigned to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), where white students comprise just 29 percent of enrollment.

To facilitate the funding of the schools authorized by HB 514, a related budget provision (Section 38.8) creates a new authority allowing North Carolina municipalities to spend property tax revenues on any public school that “benefits the residents of the city,” including charter schools. As national school finance expert Michael Griffith notes, similar provisions in other states have led to school funding becoming “divided on class lines and on racial lines.”

It’s quite the one-two punch. First, the General Assembly allows these suburbs to create schools with the legal authority to exclude children from nearby communities comprised mostly of non-white students. Then, these suburbs can then use their out-sized property wealth to provide their racially-isolated schools with resource levels denied to other students in the school district. In other words, these schools will be both separate and unequal.

Authorizing the creation of racially separate and unequal charter schools is not only immoral, it’s educationally harmful, and almost certainly unconstitutional, to boot. Read more

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