John Hood analyzes here the teacher compensation plan proposed by Gov. McCrory and why it is key to look at the empirical evidence in this area.
The McCrory administration applied these empirical lessons well when developing its Career Pathways proposal. While all teachers get at least a 2 percent raise, pay goes up more for starting and early-career teachers, flattening out the schedule to reduce the influence of longevity. Instead, more money goes to teachers who take the most challenging jobs and those who demonstrate high performance. Within this broad outline, the governor then provides for local flexibility by introducing the system in stages, allowing districts to design their own performance-pay plans if they wish and aiming for statewide participation by 2018.
The plan also restores a pay boost to teachers with graduate degrees. But this is not a reversion to the previous, discredited policy, which mostly rewarded teachers who got advanced degrees in education. Instead, the plan offers teachers more for advanced education in the subjects they are teaching. My preference would have been to pay more for high teacher test scores or other direct markers of subject-matter knowledge — the evidence linking student success to graduate degrees in subjects other than math is quite weak, actually — but this is a reasonable compromise.
