Latest draft of teacher license plan reduces pay bump, adds detail

The planned overhaul has been floated by the Professional Educator Preparation and Standards Committee for months — and by education interest groups before that — while facing skepticism and opposition from many educators. Part of the skepticism has come from those arguing the draft plan doesn’t clearly lay out how the new licensure model would be implemented, including all of the ways in which teacher effectiveness would be measured.

Still, members of the committee have kept the bones of the plan in tact. Some committee leaders said Thursday they believed the overhaul could be “transformational” for the teaching profession and for education quality.

“Our major goal in this entire endeavor was to improve educational opportunities for kids and to get the right people into classrooms to be able to be their teacher,” said Maureen Stover, the state’s 2021 teacher of the year and a member of the committee. She cited the increased teacher leadership roles in the plan that would support teachers and improve individualized instruction. “All 1.5 million kids that are enrolled in our public schools deserve to have their needs met when they are enrolled in a public school.”

Committee leaders also emphasized that they’ve reviewed the volumes of feedback they’ve received, namely through the email address specifically set up for it: pathways.feedback@dpi.nc.gov.

The teacher licensure proposal is the first of many expected overhauls of educators licensure systems in the state.

The teaching profession, and other educator positions, are in shorter and shorter supply. The North Carolina School Superintendents’ Association reported an increase in teacher vacancies as of Aug. 15, compared to the same time last year — a rise from 2,355 to 3,619 in the 98 school systems that responded to the survey.

That’s the problem the committee wants to solve by raising pay and increasing support for teachers.

“Hopefully we are doing work that will encourage young students today to pursue a career in education,” said Aaron Fleming, superintendent of Harnett County Schools.

The North Carolina Association of Educators has been campaigning against the proposal. The group supports greater input from teachers and contends the proposal won’t adequately address ongoing issues with pay and working conditions and could cause more teachers to quit.

The North Carolina Association for Colleges of Teacher Education also has opposed the proposal, issuing a statement last month saying that the proposal would increase “off ramps” for currently employed teachers, “a tricky feat at best given how quickly districts are hemorrhaging teachers.” The statement came in part from people who are members of subcommittees that have made the recommendations to the plan.

The draft unveiled Thursday is the result of several months of feedback to the committee from four subcommittees largely made up of education administrators, academics and non-school leaders from across the state. Meetings have included significant back-and-forth on potential unintended consequences of the plan. In some instances, subcommittee members expressed concern about how quickly a new draft plan would be formed and felt more work needed to be done.

The draft is still months off of becoming a new state law. Next month, the committee will discuss the plan again and potentially vote on whether to send it forward to the State Board of Education. Once received, the board would then discuss it and likely vote the following month on whether to recommend it to the North Carolina General Assembly for consideration during the winter legislative session. Board leadership has already expressed favor toward the proposal. After that, stakeholder groups would flesh out the details on how the plan would be implemented.

The committee was created by the North Carolina General Assembly in 2017 to recommend changes to educator licensure.

The draft licensure model is largely based on a proposal from the Southern Regional Board of Education and the state Department of Public Instruction’s Human Capital Roundtable, which held private meetings before preparing a model in 2021. The Southern Regional Board of Education — funded by 16 state governments — proposed a similar model for Mississippi teachers, but it has not been adopted.

The plan would also still provide more leadership roles for teachers and offer more assistance to other classroom teachers, including early-career teachers. However, the proposed pay increases, while still drastically higher than current teacher salaries, would not be as high as those proposed in April.

DPI officials and many committee members suggested decreasing compensation amounts to make the model less expensive and more palatable to lawmakers.

The cost of the original proposal would have topped $1 billion for pay and other costs of implementation. It’s unclear what the cost of the new proposal would be.

“There is a finite state budget ultimately,” said Marcie Holland, a former human resources director in the Wake County Public School System.

But Sam Houston, president of North Carolina Science, Mathematics and technology Education, disagreed, arguing the state has more money to spend than it’s currently spending. Rather, he said, spending priorities are a matter of politics.

“I could contend that these are still not high enough but certainly a significant improvement over what we’re dealing with at the present time,” Houston said.

The pay scale looks different than originally proposed for fully licensed teachers.

A fully licensed teacher would still earn $56,000 to start. But instead of earning a $5,000 raise very five years, they would earn just a 1% pay increase each year.

The first level of an advanced teacher would be paid $5,000 more than the base pay for a fully licensed teacher, rather than 10% more, ultimately at least $600 less in annual pay than originally proposed. After that, the teacher would earn annual 1% raises.

An advanced teacher leader would be paid $10,000 more than the base pay for a fully licensed teacher, rather than 30% more, ultimately at least $6,800 less in annual pay than originally proposed. After that, the teacher would earn annual 1% raises.

An increase in pay at the amount proposed would be drastic, though not enough to close the gap between what the typical bachelor’s degree-holder earns in a lifetime compared to what a teacher earns. According to a 2021 Georgetown University report on “The College Payoff,” Bachelor’s degree holders earn about $2.8 million in a lifetime. Those with degrees in education earn about $2 million in a lifetime.

Without factoring in potential inflation adjustments, a WRAL News data analysis shows the proposed pay scale for North Carolina teachers would have the potential to increase lifetime earnings for a 30-year teacher by nearly $350,000 above the state’s current pay scale, from just less than $1.6 million in a lifetime to $1.9 million in a lifetime.

That’s only including state base pay, not any local school system salary supplements, which are distributed as either regular income or as bonuses. The average annual salary supplement of $5,123 per year would add $153,690 in 30 years of teaching.

The draft doesn’t change the requirements to become a fully licensed teacher and to renew that license: A teacher must prove they are effective three out of every five years.

But some of the details of how that would be done are different.

Proving effectiveness could be done in three ways for some teachers or two ways for most. They come down to standardized testing, evaluations or a to-be-named measurement.

The about 40% of teachers whose teach courses subject to standardized testing would be evaluated based on those test results, unless they choose not to be.

All teachers would be able to use two other methods of evaluation: a set of three surveys (principal, peer and student), yet to be selected, or “tools designed to measure impact on student learning.”

Previously, the proposal called for a qualitative growth review, yet to be fleshed out. Some people expressed concern it would resemble a portfolio review, which the state tried years ago but failed when the reviews became too time-consuming.

The standardized test score measurement would be based on whether a teacher showed “growth” in comparison to other North Carolina teachers.

The measurement, known as the Education Value-Added Assessment System, judges students — and, eventually, their teachers — against one another, in terms of how well they perform on a standardized test against how well they were predicted to perform on the test.

Because the results, including those for teachers, are placed on a scale, some teachers will always fail to meet expectations.