Legislators, at long last, need to value education
Published May 7, 2015
Editorial by Winston-Salem Journal, May 4, 2015.
“You get what you pay for” is a slogan that has long stood the test of time. It’s past time to apply its wisdom to North Carolina teachers.
School districts across the state – especially large, urban districts like Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools – have been struggling to fill their teaching positions, the Journal’s Arika Herron reported last week. Teachers in competitive fields such as math and science have been particularly hard to find, Beverly Emory, superintendent of the district, told the Journal.
“They are very marketable and employable,” Emory said. “You may go into the major very convinced you want to go into the classroom, but when you’re offered (another) job at $50,000, it’s just really hard.”
“This is the first time we’ve had more math vacancies than EC (exceptional children) vacancies,” Emory told the Journal.
Math and science are fields that are lucrative now and will be in the future. Students who are proficient in those fields need competent and reliable teachers to help get them where they belong. It doesn’t help when, for example, a single math class at Jefferson Middle School has had three successive teachers this year, as the Journal reported.
Good teaching means more than plugging a body into the front of a classroom. “Students need to have a comfort level that the teacher they have is somebody they can build relationships with. If there is something we have to get through, it is building that relationship. With a new teacher, you have to start the relationship all over again,” Spencer Hardy, the principal at Parkland High School, who has also had trouble filling slots, told the Journal.
Speaking to a group of business and community leaders in March, Emory said, the vacancy problem is “unheard of. If the state of North Carolina doesn’t start valuing, paying for and honoring the hard work that go on in classrooms, we’ll have way more (vacancies).”
Preach on it, Superintendent Emory. We wish legislators would hear and understand that message.
Starting teacher salaries in North Carolina are $33,000 this year. The General Assembly is expected to raise that to $35,000 for next year. But that follows many long years with no raises and there have been no raises for veteran teachers.
And it’s below what the private sector will pay for their expertise.
The struggle to fill positions follows many missteps from the legislature, which has at times appeared downright hostile to the crucial education profession. The legislature has also attacked benefits for teachers, including several that were deeply ingrained, like tenure and a stipend for earning advanced degrees. And while tax cuts seem easy to come by, schools still struggle with their budgets.
Aside from the slight raise, it’s hard to note anything the legislature has done to show its regard for the very educators who helped them get where they are today. If we want our state to continue to prosper in the future, that needs to change.
