The powers that rule in the North Carolina General Assembly have been waging a war against public schools in our state for the last four years. Under the guise of “reform,” GOP conservatives driven by ALEC-crafted policies have successfully enabled and instituted privatization efforts in many forms: unregulated charter school development, expansive growth of unproven vouchers, underfunding traditional public schools, and even propped an educational neophyte (Mark Johnson) as state superintendent who passively allowed the very department that is set to protect public schools to be heinously undercut.
However, this last budget is the latest move against public schools in North Carolina to signal the next step in overhauling education in the Old North State – the systematic elimination of the veteran teacher.
Let me rephrase that.
A gerrymandered lawmaking body has passed a budget that further indicates that many lawmakers in Raleigh will go to any length to poach the educational profession of veteran teachers.
In the last ten years, new teachers entering the profession in North Carolina have seen the removal of graduate degree pay bumps and due-process rights. While the “average” salary increases have been most friendly to newer teachers, those pay “increases” do plateau at about Year 15 in a teacher’s career. Afterwards, nothing really happens. Teachers in that position may have to make career-ending decisions.
Without promise of much pay increase and no graduate degree pay bumps, those teachers may have to leave a profession they not only excel in and love, but serve as models for younger teachers to ensure professional integrity, the kind that was allowed to shine in a North Carolina of yesteryear when Republican governors and lawmakers were in the forefront of making sure public schools were a strength. And those teachers will not have due-process rights that would allow them to speak up about issues like compensation for fear of reprisal.
Student will suffer; communities will suffer.
The taking away of retiree state health benefits for teachers hired after January of 2021 is a step to create a system where students are more or less taught by contractors because the endangered species known as the “veteran teacher” will come to the point of extinction.
Part of the problem is this narrative that we need to run our public school system like a business.
That whole idea of getting “the state more in line with perks private-sector employees get” might be one of the most misleading mantras that rules the mindsets of these lawmakers. Why make a public sector service run like a business when public schools aren’t allowed to be businesses? If that were a reality, then schools could treat lawmakers like a Board of Directors of sorts and then rally to oust them at any time beside election years.
If a lawmaker wants to argue that public schools should run like a business and that teachers, staff, and administration should be treated like private-sector employees, then that lawmaker might need to look at the converse and see how unrelated those two entities really are. In fact, I would invite any lawmaker who favors this budgetary move to try and see if he/she could run a business like a public school. Maybe the differences between a public service and private enterprise might become more apparent because one is not even comparing apples to oranges. One is comparing apples to rocks.
Rest assuredly, that lawmaker would really need to be prepared to:
- open up every book and have everything audited.
- publicize all of the salaries of the people who work for you.
- allow every stockholder to have equal power on how your run your business even if they own just one share.
- to abide by protocols and procedures established by people outside of the business.
- not get to choose your raw materials.
- have everything open to the press.
- not be allowed to advertise or market yourself.
- raise funds because you are not really fully funded.
- have your work hours, schedule, and calendar will be dictated by those who do not even work for your business.
- communicate with all of your clients’ parents and guardians.
- NOT MAKE A MONETARY PROFIT.
This General Assembly has gone out of its way to cut budgets, limit the governor’s constitutional powers, and keep assaulting the very people who still pose a threat against the privatization of public education – veteran teachers.
Oddly enough, retiree benefits are one of the last recruitment tools that our school systems can use to bring in teachers who make education a profession.
Right now, we are not attracting the best and brightest. Just look at the past ten years and see what has been done to make teaching an unenviable career in North Carolina. This recent budget is making sure that anyone who may want to teach in North Carolina in the future will not stay in the profession for long.
If the trends stay in place and we as a state do not replace those in Raleigh with lawmakers who will fully fund public schools and reinstate the very items that attract the best and brightest, then we will literally make the North Carolina veteran teacher an extinct entity. But there is something that people like Berger and Moore (who don’t have term limits) despise more than veteran public school teachers: open dialogue that may expose their hypocrisy.
And if they actually studied and researched, they would see that most every “reform” that they are enacting has a terrible track record in other states.
And they sure as hell don’t collaborate unless it is in a locked room with only those of like opinions.
Veteran teachers openly discuss, study, and collaborate.
And many will fight.
