The North Carolina Board of Education’s struggle to implement new rules for tenure for K-12 schools has caused a lot of controversy, according to Wake County School Board members.
The North Carolina General Assembly passed legislation requiring school principals to select the top 25 percent of teachers, in terms of performance in their schools. Principals will then offer those teachers a contract giving them a $500 raise every year for four years. The catch is, if the offer is accepted, the teacher must give up his or her tenure.
Only teachers who have been teaching for at least three years will be eligible, according to Jim Martin, a chemistry professor at N.C. State and a member of the Wake Country School Board.
The new legislation is part of a broader set of state-education laws which includes Read to Achieve and the masters pay policy, according to Michael Maher, assistant dean for professional education and accreditation.
Maher said this series rules proposed by the legislative rules are considering teachers to be somewhat similar to technicians rather than professionals because they will only be allowed to sign one, two or four year contracts.
Martin said rather than helping teachers, the new laws are hindering them.
“They’re just counterproductive,” Martin said. “If you want the best people going into teaching, you have to make it an honest-to-goodness profession.”
Kevin Hill, assistant social-studies program coordinator who previously served as a school principal for 14 years, said he doesn’t agree with most of the legislation, and many supporters are just ill-informed about what tenure actually provides for a teacher.
“People are misguided and think we have a lot of lazy and crummy teachers, and that this is a way we can get rid of them, but that’s not the case,” Hill said. “All that tenure ensures is that a teacher who is dismissed has the right to appeal.”
After talking to several teachers, Hill said he hasn’t spoken with many that want anything to do with the contracts.
Martin said he felt the legislation arbitrarily makes the assumption that only 25 percent of teachers are doing a good job while there is no data to support this.
Once a principal chooses a teacher, that teacher must then be approved by the board of education that reserves the right to veto the teacher for any reason. Officials aren’t sure of how the quality of a teacher will be decided, however, there will be a rubric and student test scores may play a role, according to Hill.
While there are no firm deadlines, it is likely that the decision concerning how the teachers are chosen will be made this month, according to Martin.
It does not seem like the increase in pay, $2000 more than a teacher’s base pay, would be a permanent change, Hill said. He said it’s more of a bonus that would only happen once because the offer will be extended one time.
Hill said the legislation is underfunded, as only $10 million was set apart to implement the law. This sum would only cover the first year of raises, meaning that if something were to happen and the money could not be provided by the state government, it is unclear where the money would come from in later years.
Hill said he also had a problem with the fact that this set of laws would make cooperation between teachers strained like it did when merit pay was implemented in the past.
“If people are going to be evaluated for being a better teacher there is less incentive to share with your colleagues,” Hill said.
Even though some of the school board members are calling the law unconstitutional, according to Martin, they must abide by it.
The Guilford County Board of Education has decided to hold a poll on Feb. 11 to decide whether or not they will be enforcing the new law. While board members said they are not sure what will happen, they are willing to find out, according to the News & Record.
According to Hill, the North Carolina Association of Educators filed a suit in December against the legislation and is currently awaiting the outcome.
Concerns regarding how the new set of laws is going to affect North Carolina’s pool of teachers are also arising.
“We are losing a lot of teachers,” Hill said. “You can go to Virginia, Tennessee or South Carolina and easily make more money.”
Maher said he is concerned about how this is going to affect students who are interested in becoming teachers.
“Not only here at N.C. State, but across the state and across the nation we are seeing a smaller number of education majors,” Maher said. “The more negative the environment becomes, the harder it gets to recruit students.”
According to Martin, law states that by the year 2018, no career status teachers will remain in the North Carolina K-12 school system.