John Hood explains here why former Gov. Jim Hunt’s argument about increases in teacher pay having led to gains in student achievement is faulty.
Gov. Hunt is a smart man and a successful politician, but this is a poorly constructed argument, to say the least. There was a period during which North Carolina posted a 40-point gain in SAT scores and a large gain in NAEP scores. But this period predated the implementation of the Excellent Schools Act and its teacher-pay hikes.
From 1990 to 2000, the state’s average SAT score rose by 40 points. During the following decade, 2000 to 2010, it rose by only 16 points. As for the NAEP, North Carolina’s average 8th-grade math score rose a dramatic 30 points from 1990 to 2000, but only 10 points from 2000 to 2013, compared to the average national gain of 12 points. In reading, North Carolina experienced solid gains during the early to mid-1990s. From 1998 to 2013, however, our 8th-grade scores rose just three points compared to the average national gain of four points.
It is simply impossible for an increase in teacher pay to the “national average” by 2001 to have caused test-score gains that occurred before 2001, and indeed for the most part that occurred before 1997. If anything, the data show that gains in North Carolina student performance were smaller after the teacher-pay hike than they were before it.
