Justin Parmenter, an NBCT teacher in North Carolina, explains in this article why Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed a pay raise for educators passed by the ultra-conservative state legislature.
He begins:
Asheville City Schools full-time instructional assistant Angel Redmond is in her 4th year with the school system and her 21st year in education. Angel has a degree in psychology, and her duties include teaching math and reading to small groups, handling discipline issues, proctoring standardized tests, and substitute teaching when needed. Her current salary is just $22,000 per year, which means that she has to put in 15 hours a week at her second job in order to make ends meet.
Under a General Assembly plan for educator pay which was vetoed last week by Gov. Roy Cooper, Angel would have seen an increase of only $18.26 per month. That’s enough for roughly half a tank of gas.
Cooper’s veto of the poorly-named “Strengthening Educators’ Pay Act” came at the request of public school educators and advocates. On the surface it might seem like a peculiar move for a governor who has vowed to bring much-needed improvements to public education in our state, and Senate leader Phil Berger wasted no time framing Cooper as an enemy of teachers.
However, the legislation would have provided little more than table scraps from a General Assembly majority that has consistently underfunded public education and deprived our schools of billions in potential revenue via massive tax rate cuts since taking control of the House and Senate nearly a decade ago.
Under the bill, teachers with 0-15 years experience would not have received any raise this year. Teachers with 16-20 years would see only $50 more a month before taxes. Teachers from 21-24 years of experience would get $150 more a month, while our most dedicated veterans with 25 years or higher would have salaries raised $60 a month. For school year 2020-21, teachers with 0-15 years would again get nothing, and teachers with 16 years or more would all get another $50 a month.
These measly raises were promised, not funded.
Governor Cooper was right to veto what amounted to an insult, not a pay raise.
Teachers deserve a living wage. Teachers deserve to be paid as valued professionals.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
$50 a month. What a joke! After taxes that doesn’t amount to much.
IT doesn’t amount to much before taxes either
I agree.
$22,000 a year is an insult to a part time Walmart greeter and I’m not disparaging Walmart greeters, they deserve a living wage, too. The woman cited in the article is a highly educated and experienced veteran professional and she’s being paid slave wages that would have been below par even 50 years ago. Why do the right wingers hate teachers and public education so much?
This sure looks like a political ploy by the nutcase Republicans in the North Carolina legislature to make Governor Roy Cooper, a democrat, look bad. What kind of cynic plays political games with the people who care for and educate North Carolina’s children.
A Republican cynic, that’s who. A pox on the houses of these people! For shame!~
Ok, I’m done (for the moment) with moralizing.
The problem is the ultra-conservative state legislature. Why don’t these congress people see that teachers can’t survive? I don’t see how anyone can teach full time and then have the energy to do a second job. I was exhausted after a day’s work.
Indiana’s GOP are always bragging about the state’s budget and how great they are to keep taxes low. What is never said is the perpetual underfunding of things that are needed in this state. Teachers in public schools are at the bottom of the list. [There is money for charter schools, however.]
The GOP has turned this country right not because voters believe the lies that the GOP tells, but because they believe the lies spouted by those who claim to be on the left and are just giving an “honest” appraisal of how corrupt and evil Democrats are.
When Cooper is up for re-election, look not for attacks from the right wing Republicans, which only other Republicans will believe, but for non-stop attacks from people claiming to be on the left about how Cooper sold out teachers and kids by vetoing this raise because he is no different than a right wing Republican.
scariest words for years, now: people claiming to be on the left
I made about $13/hr as an associate teacher (same thing as an instructional assistant) in a special ed classroom almost twenty years ago. I, too, taught math etc., which was actually against code. I designed my own instruction and was “supervised” by a teacher loosely. Teachers were supposed to provide all instruction; associates were supposed to deliver the teacher’s plans. We all ignored that directive since frequently the associates were better trained than the classroom teacher. Although we frequently provided all the support for a student (I did across the curriculum with a masters degree), we did not have the other duties (like IEPs) of the teacher. The district saved a ton of money using associates this way at the middle school level.
I have news for some readers here. It isn’t just “right-wingers” and “ultra-conservative legislatures” that disrespect and financially abuse teachers.It happens everywhere in the U.S., and it happens in affluent localities. Take, for example, Albemarle County, Virginia , an affluent central Virginia jurisdiction, which bills itself as innovative, and cutting-edge, and touts itself as one of the very best school division in the Commonwealth, and the country.
About fiften years ago or so, it created what it called a “competitive market.” The Career Ladder pay model used previously was going to become more costly as more experienced teachers reached the top of the Ladder and received higher pay. So the county moved to a 31-tier pay scale, and then it put into the “market – purposefully – poorer and much poorer localities like Augusta, and Buckingham, and Danville, and Fluvanna, and Greene, and Lynchburg, and Madison, and Montgomery, and Nelson, and Orange, and Staunton. You get the picture. The “market” was deliberately skewed downward, rigged to reflect primarily the salaries of poorer localities. In essence, each year the county balanced its budget on the backs of teachers, especially its most experienced teachers since most of the salary increases did occur were front-loaded on the salary scale.
But wait. It gets worse. The human resources department has sometimes purposefully used inaccurate numbers. It refused to make any adjustments for the tiered salary schedules some localities used to transition teachers to higher levels of pay. It has refused to count into the salary data the longevity stipends (ranging from $1000 to $7000) that some localities paid their more experienced teachers, claiming that (a) those stipends wee specially approved each year, and (b) those stipends wee not vested in the Virginia Retirement System, and (c) that those stipends accrued ONLY to teachers who spent their entire careers in those particular school systems. All of those assertions made by top Albemarle human resources personnel were untrue. They were lies. The real purpose? To keep salary costs for more experienced teachers down.
Now, who was left out of the “market?” Fairfax, and Alexandria, and Arlington, and Falls Church, all high-payers, and localities the county compared itself with when it suited a purpose. For example, some years back, when the county forced all of its teaches to undergo TSIP (Technology Standards for Instructional Personnel Proficiency) training, the county used Fairfax as its TSIP model. But not for teacher pay. Loudoun was included in the “market,” but human resources capped – arbitrarily – the top-tier salary data, claiming that a teacher who transferred from the county to Loudoun would only make that amount. The truth was that a transfer would come in at the capped amount, but each year thereafter pay would increase on the Loudoun scale. The difference between the salary number used by the county and the actual top Loudoun salary was $30,000. Not peanuts.
And it matters. A lot. The net result was a deliberate diminution of salary data, to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, that harmed most those who chose teaching as a life-time profession. It’s fairly easy to calculate that a teacher stiffed by the county would lose $250,000 or more in retirement pay. That’s not chump change.
Meanwhile, each year, the central office asked for more and more money. Where did it go? To the superintendent’s pet projects (which she used to make herself “look good”). Millions and millions of dollars were thrown at technology. Millions more at STEM (science, technology, engineering, math), even though there is a nation-wide glut of STEM workers. Interestingly, when the STEM mania started in Albemarle, the superintendent said that research proved the need for STEM. But when asked for research citations, she couldn’t provide any. Neither could the director of the Math, Engineering and Science Academy (MESA) at one of the high schools.
Meanwhile, school division “leaders” refused to amend their bad practices. The county continued to give its biggest, and often wealthiest, landowners huge land use tax subsidies amounting – in 2016 – to nearly $1.5 billion in deferred taxation with a direct tax cost of close to $15 million.
The fact that administrators in the county – who got paid through a very different “market” – endorsed the “efficacy” of the teacher “competitive market” shows just how out of touch with teachers they were, and remain. As one said some years back, “I know who butters my bread.” It’s a beyond-sad true story. And it was and remains pathetic.
It isn’t JUST the right-wing conservatives who don’t value teachers and public schools. It’s also some of the so-called “good” guys, who aren’t really so good after all.
Democracy,
What makes you say that the people in charge of those affluent districts are not “conservatives” and “right-wingers”? Doesn’t sound as though they are “progressives.”
Diane, because some of them belong to the local Democratic party, and some ran with Democratic support…they are clearly NOT Republican right-wingers, but they do suffer from lots of misinformation. One, a former school board chair whose husband is the president of the local community college, once said that there was no relationship between the PSAT and the SAT. Many if not most of them still think the SAT is a valuable test which measures something important about student “smartness.” They think that Advanced Placement courses are what Jay Mathews says they are. They though it was far-sighted to put in STEM academies. And they found it easy to balance the budget on the backs of teachers rather than to do the right thing.
Diane,
Thank you for writing such a well-informed post about what the teachers in North Carolina and in other states, such as my own, are currently experiencing. I write strictly from an educator’s point of view and not a political one. Teachers, teacher assistants, our school counselors and support staff have failed to receive recognition in salary and through simple acts of acknowledging how hard and dedicated all partners in education are throughout the United States. I know many in my home state were concerned because the raise granted last year gave a slightly higher increase to teachers with 5 years of experience or less in the hopes to recruit new teachers. There are county-wide districts that recruit teachers from foreign nations because highly qualified teachers are not going to those places to be paid and treated poorly.
Thanks,
~ Tense and Lynn’s
And we’re supposed to grovel and be grateful for their crumbs.