BEST NC Releases Comprehensive Teacher Pay Report
BEST NC Releases Comprehensive Teacher Pay Report In 2023, BEST NC released a new report on teacher pay entitled Teacher Pay in North Carolina: A Smart Investment in Student Achievement. The BEST NC team, along with leading economists and experts from across the country examined the complex issue of teacher pay. In our analysis, we uncovered important new evidence that the existing teacher pay structures in North Carolina, and across the country, fail to address dramatic decades-long shifts in our national workforce and are inadequate for meeting the personal and professional needs of today’s teachers. This teacher pay report offers specific, actionable recommendations for both an increased and transformed teacher salary structure that can help retain exceptional educators and attract the next generation of top-tier talent into North Carolina public schools. You can access the full report and the executive summary here. Below is an overview of the report. This is the first in a series of blogs that will highlight key concepts and recommendations from the report. Background: Why Professional Compensation Matters Research has consistently found that teacher quality is the most important in-school factor for student success, with high-performing teachers producing significantly higher achievement gains than low-performing teachers. Given this reality, it is essential for teacher compensation to attract highly qualified candidates into the profession and to support continued professional growth throughout their career in the classroom. In his NYT best-selling book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink contends that professional compensation is fundamentally important to fulfill an individual’s biological need to support oneself and one’s family (compensation must be adequate), and individuals must feel that they are fairly paid for the skills they hold and the work they do (compensation must be equitable). The Teacher Pay in North Carolina report considers Pink’s framing of professional compensation, compared to the current, 100-year-old teacher step-and-lane pay structure that is used in North Carolina and across the country. Through this lens, the report finds that our teacher pay and retention practices are outdated and fail to recruit and retain the top-tier candidates our students deserve. Beyond baseline requirements of adequacy and equitability, Pink finds that high-skilled professionals are motivated to perform at their best when their jobs present the opportunity for mastery, autonomy, and purpose. Current teacher pay practices and organizational structures, in stark contrast, encourage a “one-teacher, one classroom” approach that stifles growth and leaves high-performing teachers with few opportunities for professional advancement. Five Key Challenges of Current Teacher Compensation Models An exploration of research on best practices in teacher compensation revealed five major challenges, each of which is examined closely in the Teacher Pay in North Carolina report. Challenge 1: Teaching is a Mostly Female Workforce, Yet Teacher Pay Has Not Kept Up with Increasing Opportunities and Pay for Female, College-Educated Professionals. Nationally, between 1985 and 2021, median income for women with a bachelor’s degree grew by 22% when adjusted for inflation, compared to just 10% for teachers. Earnings for college-educated women have now eclipsed earnings for teachers. Women still comprise the majority of the teaching workforce, but, as women have more professional opportunities than ever before, teaching is arguably less attractive now than ever before for top-tier female candidates. v Challenge 2: Under the Existing Salary Schedule, North Carolina Teachers Must Wait Far Too Long Before Their Salaries Provide a Living Wage that Can Support a Family. Outside of retirement, teacher attrition is highest in the first five years of a teacher’s career. These years coincide with the time that teachers are starting to build their families. At this crucial juncture, the traditional step-and-lane schedule does not provide a living wage that allows teachers to support a family. The Teacher Pay in North Carolina report uses the Living Wage Calculator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which leverages geographically specific data on living expenses (e.g. housing, health insurance, food, childcare), to estimate that nearly one-third of North Carolina teachers earned less than a living wage for a family of four in 2021-22. Even when compared to other public sector employees in our state, teachers earn less and take much longer to reach the top of the base salary schedule. Challenge 3: The Traditional Teacher Compensation Model Does Not Provide Meaningful Professional Promotions that Attract Top Talent and Keep Effective Educators in the Classroom. Research has demonstrated that the traditional step-and-lane salary schedule limits overall earning potential and discourages high-aptitude individuals from pursuing a teaching career. Reinforcing this notion, a report issued by McKinsey in 2010 revealed that 87% of top-tier candidates indicate that their preferred occupation provides opportunities to advance, compared to just 45% who believe teaching will provide similar advancement opportunities. The same report noted that nations that perform at the top on international assessments recruit 100% of teachers from students in the top-third of their class. In the United States it is 23%, and only 14% for teachers in higher poverty schools. Advanced Teaching Roles provide one pathway for highly effective educators to advance professionally as they take on greater responsibility and leadership. Currently, approximately 1,000 North Carolina teachers are working in advanced roles, earning up to $20,000 in additional pay. However, with just 21% of districts currently participating, there is significant room for growth. Challenge 4: Existing Pay Structures are not Designed to Fill Hard-to-Staff Subject Area Positions and Schools, Leading to Persistent, Critical Vacancies and Disparities in Student Access to Effective Educators. Like most states, teacher staffing inequities in North Carolina are driven, in part, by the structure of the state teacher salary schedule, which requires that teacher base pay is the same for equivalently experienced teachers, regardless of what, where, or how well a teacher teaches. In high-demand fields like STEM subjects, average teacher pay significantly trails average wages for recent UNC System graduates for those majors. These subject areas also see markedly higher teacher vacancy rates. Additionally, there are tremendous disparities in student access to highly qualified teachers […]
BEST NC Launches Updated Per Pupil Expenditure Data Explorer Tool (2018-19 to 2020-21) BEST NC is pleased to announce the update of its Per Pupil Expenditure (PPE) Data Explorer and landing page, designed to facilitate the understanding and exploration of North Carolina’s school-level spending data and its relationship to other key education indicators. The updated tool features school-level and district-level expenditure data from the 2018-19, 2019-20, and 2020-21 school years. Charter school expenditure data has also been added. Additionally, the tool now offers the ability to examine longitudinal changes in spending at the school level and the ability to view COVID relief fund expenditures at the district level. About the Tool The federal Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 requires each state education agency to release school-level per pupil expenditure data. The 2018-19 expenditure data were released in 2020, marking the first time spending data were made available at the school level in North Carolina and uncovering trends that have been masked by district-level data. BEST NC’s web-based Per Pupil Expenditure Data Explorer allows education stakeholders to explore per pupil funding trends across individual schools, within districts, and across districts in North Carolina. Educators, school leaders, parents, policymakers, advocates, and other members of the public can utilize this tool to examine education spending and student outcomes for similar schools based on size, grade level, geography, percent students with disabilities, poverty, and more. By comparing schools with similar characteristics, school leaders and other education stakeholders can identify schools with strong student performance at varying levels of funding and/or relative to the characteristics of their student body. Promising or innovative practices from these schools might then be examined to help improve teaching and learning in similar schools. Note: Student performance metrics are unavailable for the 2019-20 school year, as all end-of-year tests were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, in 2020-21, students took end-of-year tests, but North Carolina was granted a waiver from federal accountability requirements, meaning that student proficiency numbers are available, but other school-level metrics – such as School Performance Scores, School Achievement Scores, and School Growth Scores – are not. These data will be available for the 2021-22 school year. The Per Pupil Expenditure Interactive Data Explorer can be accessed on BEST NC’s PPE landing page, alongside summary analyses (see below) and additional resources. Insights and Trends from the Per Pupil Expenditure Data Explorer: Key Findings About North Carolina’s Public Schools With the release of school-level expenditure data, and with the help of BEST NC’s Per Pupil Expenditure Data Explorer, North Carolinians can now explore trends in school spending at the school level, instead of being limited to district-level metrics. Several school-level insights are highlighted on the PPE landing page. Examples of these findings include: Generally, total per pupil expenditures in North Carolina are higher in schools with greater numbers of economically disadvantaged students. In 2020-21, about $3,100 – 32% – more was spent per pupil in the highest poverty schools (schools where 76-100% of students are economically disadvantaged), compared to the lowest-poverty schools (schools where 0-25% of students are economically disadvantaged). In a school with 500 students, this equates to around $1.6 million in additional resources. In this way, North Carolina defies national trends in which lower income schools generally receive less funding than more affluent schools. In general, expenditures of local funds, even within an individual district, appear to be uncorrelated with poverty, so funding equity in most districts is a function of state and federal funding allocations. Total per pupil expenditures (including state, federal, and local funds) increased by $726 per pupil, or 7.5%, over the three-year period from 2018-19 to 2020-21.* $524 of this increase was due to an influx of federal COVID relief dollars. *The 2018 North Carolina state budget was passed in June 2018. Partially due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was not another comprehensive state budget bill passed into law until November 2021, though some smaller appropriation bills were passed that funded education items. Since March 2020, North Carolina’s K-12 public schools have received over $6 billion in COVID relief funds from the federal government. Schools and districts spent $90 million in COVID relief funds during the 2019-20 school year, $660 million during the 2020-21 school year, and over $2 billion during the 2021-22 school year. Schools have until September 30, 2024 to spend the remaining COVID relief dollars. While COVID relief fund expenditures are not available at the school level (but are embedded in the state and federal fund amounts), district-level data reveal that more COVID relief were spent by districts with higher percentages of students identified as economically disadvantaged. This is likely because COVID relief funding was allocated according to the federal Title I funding formula which is designed to support schools with high concentrations of students in poverty. An in-depth analysis from the 2022 Facts & Figures guide found that districts in the highest poverty quartile received 79% more COVID relief funding, per pupil, than districts in the lowest poverty quartile, and the 10 highest-poverty districts received 163% more COVID relief funding, per pupil, than the 10 lowest-poverty districts. In 2020-21, average per pupil expenditures were $10,623 in traditional public schools and $8,765 in public charter schools. Charter schools, meanwhile, tended to serve students with lower levels of poverty: 54% of charter schools had less than one quarter of their student population living poverty, compared with 15% of traditional public schools. Rural schools in North Carolina (as identified by the U.S. Department of Education) spent about as much, per pupil, as non-rural schools in 2020-21. Local funding for rural schools was lower than non-rural schools by 33%, but state and federal funding for rural schools is higher than in non-rural schools by 7% and 16%, respectively, making up most of the difference in per-pupil funding. North Carolina has the second largest population of rural students in the country, behind only Texas. By prorating school-level per-pupil expenditures at the school level according to the proportion of students in each racial/ethnic subgroup, it is possible to calculate per-pupil expenditures by race/ethnicity. In 2020-21, per pupil expenditures were highest for American Indian and Black students, and lowest for Asian/Pacific Islander and White subgroups. We encourage state, district, and school leaders to examine these data and look for […]
Growth and Achievement in North Carolina
Growth and Achievement: you have probably heard these terms in conversations about education. But what are they? How do they differ, and what do they tell us about North Carolina’s students and teachers? Our new video “Growth and Achievement in North Carolina” explores some of these questions. Find out more at www.best-nc.org/growthandachievement.
(Not) Taking Sides: Civil Discourse with Michelle Rhee and George Parker
Are you frustrated about how polarized our country has become? I certainly hear it on the news and in the voting trends; people are discouraged by the inability of our society, particularly our politicians, to find common ground and work together.
ADVISORY: Rhee, Parker, BEST NC to hold media availability Tuesday
DVISORY: Rhee, Parker, BEST NC to hold media availability Tuesday. Cary, NC – BEST NC will host a media availability Tuesday featuring unlikely education reform allies Michelle Rhee and George Parker, who will discuss their work to improve education in Washington, DC.