Pay For Performance, Not For Politics

By John Hood

RALEIGH — The North Carolina General Assembly approved substantial pay increases for public schoolteachers earlier this year. If a bipartisan commission has its way, teacher compensation will soar over the next few years, as well. Fiscal conservatives should welcome these developments — so long as schools use higher pay as a means of attracting and retaining highly effective teachers, not of scoring political points or placating interest groups.

The state budget enacted this summer hiked teacher pay by an average of 8%, but that headline fact obscures some important details. A key part of the package, for example, was to raise the state’s baseline pay for starting teachers to $48,000. With most districts supplementing that state minimum with local funds, North Carolina now has one of the highest starting salaries in our region. Assistant principals also got large raises, while lawmakers wisely ignored calls from Gov. Josh Stein, the N.C. Association of Educators, and other groups to spread pay increases more evenly across the teacher population and reinstate salary bumps for those with graduate degrees.

The Blue Ribbon Commission on Public Education, co-chaired by Sampson County business owner and philanthropist Anne Faircloth and former Winston-Salem/Forsyth Schools superintendent Don Martin, is recommending that by 2028 North Carolina become “a regional leader” in teacher pay (not just on starting salaries), a move that commission member Brenda Berg of BEST NC estimated might consume $3 billion a year in taxpayer funds.

While supportive in concept, Berg observed that this is “probably not going to happen.” Agreed. But that doesn’t mean state lawmakers are unwilling to accept any of the commission’s recommendations. I think they are willing — and should be.

I also think legislators, commissioners, and other policymakers should peruse a new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality chronicling best practices in teacher compensation across the United States. “Salaries and benefits compose roughly 80% of school budgets, making teacher compensation both the largest line item and the most powerful lever available,” wrote NCTQ senior policy analyst Michael Sheehy. “It influences who enters the profession, how teachers distribute themselves across schools and districts, and whether they stay. Used well, teacher compensation is an essential resource that can improve the quality and impact of the teacher workforce.”

The report offers three broad recommendations: 1) states should offer at least a 7.5% annual salary supplement (approximately $5,000) for teachers working in hard-to-staff subjects such as math or science and hard-to-staff schools with high poverty rates or discipline problems; 2) states should reward high-performing teachers based on transparent and rigorous evaluation criteria, not just seniority or credentials; and 3) states should reform their funding systems to incentivize practices strongly correlated with student achievement.

When NCTQ applied these standards to North Carolina, it found some alignment. Across all three recommendations, the maximum score a state could receive was 13. North Carolina earned a 4 — a disappointing score but actually higher than all our neighbors but Georgia (which also got a 4). States receiving the highest scores were Utah (12), Texas (10), Nevada (10), Arkansas (9), Florida (8), Hawaii (8), and Indiana (7). As it happens, five of these seven states rank higher than North Carolina in national reading and math scores adjusted for student background (the performance of Arkansas students is about the same as ours, while Hawaii’s is significantly lower).

The NCTQ report encouraged North Carolina to increase our salary supplements for hard-to-staff subjects and hard-to-staff schools. Another approach to differentiated pay worth pursuing is to expand North Carolina’s existing program for advanced teaching roles, such as instructing more students or training and mentoring other teachers.

When state or local policymakers allocate funding for teacher compensation, they cannot wish away the inherent tradeoffs. A dollar spent on pay is a dollar not spent on other educational needs, or other public services, or left in the hands of households to spend on their own pressing priorities. Still, whatever the level chosen, we should be spending it smarter.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).