The much-faster-than-expected economic recovery that’s followed the easing of the COVID-19 pandemic has produced several encouraging developments in the United States: low unemployment, rising wages, strong corporate profits, flattened or even falling poverty rates – just to name a few. And while the global spike in inflation that resulted from supply chain issues, CEO wealth grabs, and Russia’s war on Ukraine has taken a big toll on most households, that phenomenon has, thankfully, slowed significantly of late.
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teacher pay
teacher pay
North Carolina’s ranking as the best state in the nation to do business doesn’t square with its rank near the bottom of states — 48th — in public school expenditures, Mary Ann Wolf, president and CEO of Public School Forum of North Carolina said Tuesday. When adjusted for regional cost differences, the Tar Heel state is dead last in school funding effort, Wolf said during the public school advocacy group's annual "Eggs and Issues Breakfast" in Raleigh. More than 400 educators, lawmakers and public school advocates attended the event.
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The new year in K-12 education is likely to look a lot like the past year with the Leandro school funding lawsuit and a controversial teacher and licensure proposal likely among the key issues North Carolina lawmakers will debate when their 2023 "long session" begins later this month. Both topics garnered lots of attention toward the end of 2022. In November, the state Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling and ordered the General Assembly to hand over millions of dollars to pay for a long overdue school improvement plan.
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State lawmakers aware of the erroneous deductions in March Bobbie Cavnar, a Gaston County Schools high school English teacher, was shocked last month when his paystub showed $1,600 worth of unexplained deductions. Fortunately for the 2016-17 North Carolina Teacher of the Year, his spouse works, and the couple could transfer money from savings to cover monthly bills.
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Low salaries for public school teachers continue to hurt recruitment North Carolina should return to paying teachers who hold advanced degrees extra, in order to help school districts struggling to fill classrooms with certified teachers, a subcommittee of the state Professional Educator Preparation and Standards Commission (PEPSC) agreed Wednesday.
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“We don’t have any teacher applicants for our vacancies,” said two superintendents from rural North Carolina public school districts. Think about that. If they do not find qualified replacements or come up with alternative solutions, students will arrive on the first day of school Aug. 29 in classrooms without teachers.
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Superintendent Catherine Truitt denies plan would introduce "merit pay," but critics strongly disagree With just a few weeks left before the start of a new school year, districts are scrambling to fill teaching vacancies. North Carolina educators, and those in other states, are leaving the profession in large numbers on the heels of a traumatic COVID-19 pandemic that at its worst led to school closures, remote learning, and unprecedented stress and burnout for teachers.
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Life as a public school teacher in North Carolina has never been a walk in the park or a path to easy prosperity. Though the job has always been enormously challenging and of supreme importance, the pay and working conditions have – in part because teaching was for so long generally viewed by our sexist society as “women’s work” – always been below par.
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Despite assurances from DPI officials, some teachers worry that the plan would devalue classroom experience in favor of test scores and student surveys A new compensation and licensure proposal that rewards “competency and skill” has some state teachers worried that "classroom experience would no longer be valued in North Carolina,” State Board of Education member Jill Camnitz said Wednesday.
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Special provisions target executive branch powers of Democratic officials Budget-writing season started with talk of hoped for cooperation and budget that would gain significant bipartisan support. That’s all soured in the early stages of budget debates, with Senate Democrats questioning a Republican-written budget that’s pumped full of special provisions that would limit executive branch powers.
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