The following is currently posted on TEACH North Carolina’s (TeachNC) website as a recruitment tool for the teaching profession here in NC.
What that graphic above doesn’t tell you is that not all local schools systems offer the same local supplements. And if you have been following the local news in New Hanover County (the school system used as an example), you would see a partisan school board that has lost the confidence of almost all teachers in the county.
Look at the interactive table of 2022-2023 local supplements offered by each LEA for which a portion is shown.
You can find a lot of info here.
Chapel Hill/Carrboro, Wake County, Charlotte-Meck, and New Hanover all offer local teacher supplements of over $9000. The state average is a little over $6,000.
Over 95 LEAs have a local supplement under that state average. Interesting that the TeachNC website focuses on New Hanover County. It is not representative of the whole state.
That is incredibly misleading as is this:
In the example given, that graduate degree pay is for a teacher with five years of experience.
Graduate degree pay was taken away from teachers in 2014 – almost ten years ago. A teacher with five years experience would have been hired after 2014 and probably not have gotten a graduate degree before 2014.
That increase in pay would not exist for that teacher.
Here’s another item:
Math truly is a “hard-to-fill” subject area. But according to another web site associated with TeachNC, it appears that every subject area “hard-to-fill.”
And that coaching supplement?
What that does not tell you is how many hours that “duty” entails. Imagine being a JV coach for a school in soccer. There is a competitive season and then there are off-season workouts and the hours spent just maintaining facilities. JV coaches often help with varsity teams thus adding even more time needed to perform the duty of coaching
How much time is a coach investing to get $1.5K? The amount of money per hour is rather minuscule.
So what does the average teacher make here in NC? Well…
The operative word here is “average”. What GOP stalwarts purposefully fail to tell you is that most of the raises have occurred at the very low rungs of the salary schedule. Of course, you can raise the salary of first year teachers by a few thousand dollars and it would give them an average raise of maybe 10-15%. You would only have to give veteran teachers a very small raise funded by longevity pay (which we no longer get) and the OVERALL average raise still looks good, and not much money has to be invested.
“Average” does not mean “actual”. Actually it’s like an average of the average. But it sounds great to those who don’t understand the math.
This reflects a whopping double standard of the NC General Assembly and a total contradiction to what is really happening to average teacher pay. Just follow my logic and see if it makes sense.
The last twelve years have seen tremendous changes to teacher pay. For new teachers entering in the profession here in NC there is no longer any graduate degree pay bump, no more longevity pay (for anyone), and a changed salary schedule that only makes it possible for a teacher to top out on the salary schedule at 54K per year (if we stick with the 2022-2023 school year that is still being used as the standard with TeachNC).
So how can that be the average pay in NC be over 54K when no one can really make much over 54K as a new teacher in his/her entire career unless they all become nationally certified (which takes a monetary investment by the teacher to start)?
Easy. North Carolina is counting all of the veteran teachers’ current salaries in that figure. The very people whose salaries simply disgusted the former governor and the General Assembly to the point that they had to take measures to “lower” them are actually being used to tout this new wonderful “average.”
Furthermore, this average is counting on local supplements. This comes in the face of budgets that are allocating less money to each central office of each school system for administrative costs. Now each county has to raise more money to actually offset those costs and also allow for local supplements. And not all localities provide the same supplements.
Any veteran teacher who is making above 50K based on seniority, graduate pay, and national boards are gladly counted in this figure. It simply drives up the CURRENT average pay. But when these veteran teachers who have seniority, graduate pay, and possibly national certification retire (and many are doing that early at 25 years), then the very people who seem to be a “burden” on the educational budget leave the system.
In actuality, that would drive the average salary down as time goes on. If the top salary that any teacher could make is barely over 50K (some will have higher as National Board Certified Teachers, but not a high percentage), then how can you really tout that average salaries will be higher?
You can if you are only talking about the right here and right now.
The “average bear” can turn into a bigger creature if allowed to be mutated by election year propaganda.
Remember the word “average” is a very easy word to manipulate. Politicians use it well. In this case, the very teachers who are driving the “average” salary up are the very people that the state wants to not have in a few years. There will then be a new average. It can’t possibly be over 50K then if current trends keep going.
