Facing an acute school staffing crisis, you might think North Carolina policymakers would enact teacher pay raises like they just did in Alabama and Mississippi—both states that, like North Carolina, have Republican legislatures. You’d be wrong.
Instead, North Carolina teachers are now fighting an attempt to scrap their experience-based pay scale for an unprecedented state-wide system of merit pay.
As in other states, early retirements and resignations mounted, and substitute teachers became hard to find as the pandemic dragged on. In the state’s biannual Teacher Working Conditions survey, more than 7 percent of school staff said they planned to quit education altogether.
North Carolina is currently entertaining a proposal to become the first state in the nation to completely do away with paying teachers based on their years of commitment, education, and certification. Instead, the state would compensate them based on their students’ standardized test results and subjective measures such as principal evaluations, peer evaluations, and student surveys.
It’s an approach that gained traction during the Obama Administration, when federal dollars were dangled in front of cash-strapped school districts. A handful of cities across the country, including Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, San Antonio, and Denver, all adopted some form of merit-based pay. And in 2007, Florida established a merit system for teachers to receive bonuses called the Merit Award Program, though it was limited in scope allowing both schools and teachers to opt in or out.
But merit pay for teachers has “failed again and again and has been conclusively discredited,” according to education historian Diane Ravitch. “I call such proposals ‘zombie policies,’ because they fail and fail but never die,” she writes. In North Carolina, this zombie has returned at the worst possible time.
“I call such proposals ‘zombie policies,’ because they fail and fail but never die.”
-Diane Ravitch
The state’s merit pay proposal actually predates the pandemic. In 2018, state lawmakers passed a budget bill which created the Professional Educator Preparation and Standards Commission (PEPSC). According to the bill, the purpose of this commission, which would operate under the authority of the North Carolina State Board of Education, was to “make rule recommendations regarding all aspects of preparation, licensure, continuing education, and standards of conduct of public school educators.”
The commission’s work would not begin for nearly three years. Instead, under the facilitation of the education nonprofit Southern Regional Education Board, a group called the North Carolina Human Capital Roundtable was created and began working on a proposal behind closed doors.
The Human Capital Roundtable worked on the merit pay proposal from 2019 to 2021. The group’s meetings were apparently never announced or live streamed, and no agendas, minutes, or any other documentation were made publicly available.
In early 2021, the Human Capital Roundtable made a presentation to North Carolina’s State Board of Education. The group revealed that its membership included a member of the board of education, high-ranking employees of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, and the chair of the PEPSC Commission. Notably, it also included the CEO of Best NC, a pro-business education reform group whose board includes Ann Goodnight, Director of Community Relations for SAS Software, the company that produces EVAAS. EVAAS software uses a proprietary algorithm to calculate a teacher effectiveness score based on students’ standardized test results—in other words, the kind of software that could be put to more use under a merit-based pay system for teachers.
The Human Capital Roundtable dubbed its creation “Pathways to Excellence for Teaching Professionals.” It asked the state Board of Education to formally consider its proposal: a system of seven levels of licensure in which teachers must demonstrate “continuous positive impact on students” or be directed to “off ramps.”
North Carolina Board of Education
Just weeks after the Human Capital Roundtable’s presentation, PEPSC began to work on the project via four subcommittees. Subcommittee meetings were announced and livestreamed and meeting minutes posted in accordance with state law.
After about a year of work, the state’s Department of Public Instruction presented a draft proposal to the Board of Education in April 2022 on behalf of PEPSC. They recommended an approach that looked strikingly similar to the Human Capital Roundtable’s proposal.
North Carolina Board of Education
PEPSC’s “Pathways to Excellence for Teaching Professionals” proposal adhered very closely to the Human Capital Roundtable’s work but fleshed it out with specific dollar amounts and other details. Those details included how the proposed program’s positive impact on students would be assessed. Not surprisingly, PEPSC proposes using SAS’s EVAAS software to measure educator effectiveness. Teachers may also use principal evaluations, peer evaluations, and student surveys in the model. Years of experience would no longer be a factor in determining compensation or career advancement.
Teacher reactions to the proposal were overwhelmingly negative. The Department of Public Instruction swung into damage control mode and conducted a series of invitation-only teacher listening sessions across the state. To date, the feedback collected in those sessions has not led to any significant changes in the proposal.
While educator opposition to the merit pay proposal grew, public records revealed a Raleigh-based communications firm called Eckel & Vaughan had been brought in to market the proposal. The firm recommended avoiding “phrases that emphasize the plan’s complexity or the burden it may put on districts to manage.”
“It’s in our best interest to always speak about the plan in a positive manner, emphasizing its benefits rather than pointing out possible complications,” it added.
Eckel &Vaughan also proposed a media strategy which would use a North Carolina Teacher of the Year and former North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt to gain the trust and support of a skeptical public about the plan. (Governor Hunt recently withdrew his support after significant teacher opposition.)
Along with disingenuous marketing plans, public records showed North Carolina State Superintendent Catherine Truitt working to prevent independent organizations from collecting feedback from educators on the proposal.
None of these developments inspire confidence in a merit pay approach for North Carolina teachers. And it doesn’t take much research to find out why our state has such a serious staffing shortage to begin with. Since Republicans took control of the state legislature in 2010, they’ve passed law after law making teaching in North Carolina less desirable. These include measures that:
- Stripped master’s pay
- Removed longevity pay
- Eliminated due-process rights
- Cut retiree health benefits
- Uncapped class sizes for grades 4 through 12
- Took away state funding for professional development
- Cut 7,000 teaching assistants
- Passed several tax cuts reducing available education funding
Not surprisingly, over this same period we’ve seen a precipitous decline in the number of people entering university teacher preparation programs.
North Carolina’s teacher shortage didn’t happen overnight, and it can’t be solved quickly. It will take reversing some of the policy changes that got us here and paying educators competitive wages. Unfortunately, the state’s policymakers seem more inclined toward an unpopular, experimental merit pay system which will only make matters worse.