The North Carolina legislature will go down in history as the most anti-education lawmakers in the history of the state. I would say the nation, but Wisconsin’s hostility to educators is tough to beat.
The legislature enacted a principal pay plan that cuts principal pay and drives out veteran principal. In North Carolina, this is called “reform.”
Education journalist Lindsay Wagner write about it here:
“State Board of Education members expressed shock this week upon learning just how seriously the General Assembly’s newly enacted principal pay plan could hurt school leaders, particularly those who have devoted decades of service to the state’s public schools.
“I don’t think it was anybody’s intent for principals to lose pay as a result of [this plan],” said the State Board of Education’s vice chairman A.L. “Buddy” Collins. “I have three different principals who are very veteran principals with over 30 years who believe they are being adversely affected to the point that they may need to retire—which is certainly not what we want.”
“North Carolina’s principals, whose salaries ranked 50th in the nation in 2016, watched this year as lawmakers changed how they are compensated, moving away from a salary schedule based on years of service and earned credentials to a so-called performance-based plan that relies on students’ growth measures (calculated off standardized test scores) and the size of the school to calculate pay.
“But the plan’s design has produced scenarios that result in some veteran principals conceivably earning as much as 30 percent less than what they earned on the old pay schedules—prompting some to consider early retirements.
“I just want to point out this one principal who wrote to me,” said vice chair Collins. “He’s got 35 years of experience, 58 years old…and he’s expecting to have his salary reduced by 30 percent next year. And I’ve got two others with greater [amounts] of experience with a similar result.”
State board members wondered who came up with this nutty idea.
“The new plan appears to create a disincentive for school leaders to take on the challenge of heading up low-performing schools, said Amanda Bell, a Rockingham school board member and advisor to the State Board.
“It is going to be almost impossible for us to find principals who would even want to take on that challenge,” said Bell. “Because eventually they’re gonna lose salary, based on this model.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
WOW!
I wonder which state will try to follow suit. Texas is great at trying old failed ideas, like letter grades for each campus (Lt. Dan).
I’m sorry, but maybe now that in- school admin are being affected, they will start to rally the teachers they have been threatening for so long. I now there are good Principals out there, but the majority just keep mandating teachers to teach to the test so that test scores in their school look good. They have been going along with the “rephorm” and now they are the next ones to be slashed.
Seconded. Having a hard time feeling sorry for principals. First they came for the….
In all fairness, most building principals are doing what they are told by their central office (superintendent). In turn, the superintendents are doing what the state legislature has enacted into law. Some legislation is based on federal mandates.
Now the legislatures are doing things according to who lines their pockets.
In the end, the ones at the bottom are doing what they need to put a roof over head and food on the table. This means, not getting fired for not following the law or directives.
The fight for public education cannot be teachers against the administrators. They should be on the same side fighting together for the betterment and survival of public education.
So in their defense, they were just following orders.
“In the end, the ones at the bottom are doing what they need to put a roof over head and food on the table.”
I can basically agree with this if we’re talking about teachers who are barely paid enough to survive, let alone save. But administrators are handsomely paid and part of that is the expectation of ethics – that they will resign in protest if need be rather than harm children. I’ve seen precious few examples of such ethics, sadly.
I wish more of them had the character to stand up or resign. Unfortunately, when most of them became administrators they had this special surgery where they had their spines removed.
“In all fairness, most building principals are doing what they are told by their central office (superintendent). In turn, the superintendents are doing what the state legislature has enacted into law. Some legislation is based on federal mandates.”
Just doesn’t cut it. That line of defense was thrown out many years ago at the Nuremberg Trials.
“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions]
Drext is right. Public schools feel more and more like a giant corporation where the orders come from the top in DC/NYC and superintendents and principals are simply middle managers who must do as commanded or be axed. I once worked as a waiter in a large restaurant chain and I pitied the store and regional managers because I could see they had absolutely no autonomy. Ridiculous mandates could not be appealed. When I started teaching, districts and even individual schools did not feel at all like this oppressive totalitarian company. Now they do.
Ponderosa,
What you explained doesn’t make anything any better in regards to educators standing up against malpractices that harm children.
“Everyone is doing it” has never been a valid excuse.
A PRINCIPAL IN THE ROCHESTER CITY SCHOOL DISTRICT MAKES $250,000 A YEAR.
Because they have utter contempt for the people who work in public schools, which they really don’t even try to hide.
I maintain it’s a kind of elitism. Read on the ed reform side. All of their hagiographies of charter leaders list the Ivy League schools they attended. If it wasn’t so important to them they wouldn’t so consistently use it as some kind of unimpeachable credential of “excellence”.
It’s such an echo chamber I don’t even think they see it themselves. It makes me laugh at the statehouse level because have you ever listened to a statehouse debate? A lot of these people are in no way “the best and brightest”. You’re lucky if they bothered to draft the bill they put their name on. They had to pull a bill once in Ohio because they left the generic ALEC caption on it. They didn’t even write the caption.
“YOUR STATE here” That’s the quality of the work they submit.
The first piece of legislation signed by Governor Scott in Florida addressed a very important matter–it addressed bestiality. Seriously, this is what the Florida legislature was worried about. Amusingly, the bill outlawed all “sex with animals.” Since humans are members of the taxonomic kingdom Animalia, the bill, as written, outlawed all sex in the state of Florida.
Public school principals could do a lot to better represent their schools. Public schools buy a lot, and vendors and consultants are a dime a dozen.
There’s no obligation for a public school to hand public money to vendors or consultants who lobby to eradicate public schools. Pick an equally qualified vendor or consultant who isn’t moonlighting with a side job destroying the schools who pay them.
Eva Moskotwiz wouldn’t do it if they were lobbying against charters. There’s no obligation to hire or purchase from these people. There are thousands of vendors and thousands of consultants.
The contempt expressed for our public school teachers is just another BLAME game. It’s too easy to do this in Ameri-DUH. Then non thinkers jump on the bandwagon. It’s crazy.
I have a cousin who attended public schools and she had a really good education. She’s a freelance writer. When I asked what she writes about she said, “Business.” When I asked if she writes about education, she vehemently retorted. “NO! My high school friends and I think, “If you CAN’T then you become a teacher.”
I have another cousin by marriage, who used to be a Boy Scout leader. Even he thinks he can teach in our public schools, He has a high school degree. When I told him about ALL the WORK and how much teachers have to know, he reluctantly admitted that he PROBABLY wouldn’t make a good classroom teacher.
What is it about this “narrative” that gets repeated over and over again?
North Carolina actually has a law against collective bargaining. All the power is in the hands of the state which has been usurped by the Tea Party. Workers have few rights and must settle for whatever the state decides to give them.
“Collective bargaining was banned in North Carolina in 1959 by NC General Statute 95-98, which declared any contract between state or local government and any labor organization as “against the public policy of the state” and thus “illegal, unlawful, void, and of no effect.”
The Electoral Integrity Project recently gave the state a score of 58/100. EIP stated that North Carolina was no longer a democracy due to the Tea Party takeover. It compared NC to Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone rather than other states in the USA. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/north-carolina-not-democracy-elections-cuba-iran-venezuela-gop-a7494561.html
Public school families are the majority in North Carolina, however.
Continuing to support politicians who go after your kid’s school is optional. It’s not required. I’d bet money every one of these lawmakers travels to their district and swears undying love for public school families when they’re running. They have to call them on it.
Throw the bums out.
The test-based “Value-Added Method” (VAM) of evaluating teachers and now principals, too, has been “slammed” — quoting The Washington Post — by the very people who know the most about data measurement: The American Statistical Association (ASA). The ASA’s authoritative, detailed, VAM-slam analysis, titled “Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment” and has become the basis for teachers across the nation successfully challenging VAM-based evaluations.
Even though it’s anti-public school and anti-union, the Washington Post said the following about the ASA Statement: “You can be certain that members of the American Statistical Association, the largest organization in the United States representing statisticians and related professionals, know a thing or two about data and measurement. The ASA just slammed the high-stakes ‘value-added method’ (VAM) of evaluating teachers that has been increasingly embraced in states as part of school-reform efforts. VAM purports to be able to take student standardized test scores and measure the ‘value’ a teacher adds to student learning through complicated formulas that can supposedly factor out all of the other influences and emerge with a valid assessment of how effective a particular teacher has been. THESE FORMULAS CAN’T ACTUALLY DO THIS (emphasis added) with sufficient reliability and validity, but school reformers have pushed this approach and now most states use VAM as part of teacher evaluations.”
The ASA Statement points out the following and many other failings of testing-based VAM:
“System-level conditions” include everything from overcrowded and underfunded classrooms to district-and site-level management of the schools and to student poverty.
A copy of the VAM-slamming ASA Statement should be posted on the union bulletin board at every school site throughout our nation and should be explained to every teacher by their union at individual site faculty meetings so that teachers are aware of what it says about how invalid it is to use standardized test results to evaluate teachers or principals — and teachers’ and principals’ unions should fight all evaluations based on student test scores with the ASA statement as a good foundation for their fight.
Fight back! Never, never, never give up!
North Carolina trails Massachusetts on this issue. Under the ed “reform” act of 1993, principals lost the right to belong to a union. They also became essentially at-will employees, as they are subject to one year contracts. In wealthy towns, this isn’t a problem, because superintendents don’t play that game. But it has a big impact resulting in the hiring of transient, cheap, inexperienced principals in the cities. How this improves the stability of public schools is a mystery.
North Carolina is a living example of what will happen if the Alt-Right ends up taking over the United States. Tyranny anyone?
My idea is strange I will admit but I have believed for a long time that people who don’t have children often really do not care about public education. Why should they have to pay for someone else’s child to be educated? Why do children need computers, art, music, yada yada yada? “They didn’t have computers back in my day…” Right, they didn’t because they weren’t invented yet. In my case neither were calculators.
These are some of the people who voted Tea Partiers into office. Cut public spending! Lower benefits! Get rid of entitlements such as Medicaid and food stamps! What, children don’t need to eat or see a doctor!!! Public housing, gone! Public schools, cut them to the bone. Now the state of North Carolina plans to discontinue retirement pay and insurance for new hires in the near future. We won’t have to worry about paying for public education for many more years because no one will teach in the Great North State.
Just my two cents worth.
Don’t underestimate the effects of this approach on teachers who lost tenure many years ago. They will now be fired at will because of their inability to increase student scores on state exams.
Think about the divide that will cause when this starts occurring.
“State board members wondered who came up with this nutty idea.”
Smells like VAM to me. Teachers and admins alike.
There are no headlines screaming about just how moronic a system of evaluation it really is and how adversely it effects the lives and careers of so many people in the field of education.
There are no headlines because the people who own the mainstream media outlets are the same people who want to bust the teachers unions and privatize our educational system.
VAM is one means towards that end. Junk science. Now the admins are starting to feel the pinch.