The North Carolina House of Representatives is proposing 4.4% average teacher raises, a restoration of higher pay for master’s degrees and hundreds of millions more toward families’ private school tuition.
Teachers currently earn between $39,000 to $55,100 per year in state base pay, before local supplemental pay is included. Starting pay is set to rise to $41,000 next year. But under the House proposal, released late Monday, it would rise to $44,000, up 12.8% from the current rate. Maximum pay is set to rise to $55,595 next year but would rise to $56,510 under the House proposal, a 1.5% increase from the current rate.
The budget would also restore extra pay for educators who have a master’s degree — something lawmakers stopped doing in 2013 except for those educators already receiving that differential pay or still enrolled in a master’s degree program. Since then, fewer teachers have gotten master’s degrees. The House estimates it would cost $8 million more next year to restore the benefit from anyone who has become eligible since 2013.
The $487 million proposed for the state’s private school voucher program, known as Opportunity Scholarships — as well as the associated Personal Education Student Accounts for Children with Disabilities funds — represents a major increase to what was already budgeted for the program in the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years. The House is proposing spending $175.6 million more from the general fund for those two programs, plus $97 million from the State Lottery Fund and $215.5 million from a savings fund, to pay for the vouchers for tens of thousands of more students.
“Parents must be empowered to make the best education choices for their families regardless of income status, but school choice is not a zero-sum game,” House Speaker Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, said in a news release announcing the budget proposal. “Therefore, the House budget also raises starting teacher pay to $44,000 and restores master’s pay for teachers, ensuring every public school classroom has a qualified teacher who is compensated like the professional that he or she is.”
The House proposed its budget Monday after unsuccessfully negotiating a budget in private with the Senate. Senate leadership tends to propose lower spending and said the House was wanting more dollars in the budget than the Senate was comfortable with. Both chambers would need to reach an agreement if changes to the existing budget were to be enacted.
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has proposed an average raise of 8.5% for teachers and a $1,500 retention bonus.
Cooper has opposed expanding voucher access, saying the private schools that receive the funds aren’t held publicly accountable and that traditional public schools need more funding to recruit and retain quality teachers.
If Republican legislative leaders were to pass a new budget, and if Cooper were to veto it because of vouchers, a supermajority of the legislature would need to override the veto. Republicans have veto-proof supermajorites in both chambers and so far this session have overridden all of Cooper’s vetoes.
Raising teacher pay
Teacher pay is set to rise an average of 3% next year, though bigger increases to beginning teacher pay bring that average up.
The House is seeking to bump that up to 4.4% next year, on average. It would cost $99.8 million to raise pay further for teachers and instructional support, according to the House’s money report.
The budget also opposes 1% more for principal, assistant principals, other administrative staff and non-certified personnel, such as bus drivers. All of those workers are set to receive 3%, and the 1% increase would be on top of that.
While raises can help slow the leak from the teacher pipeline, experts say it could take years and significant policy changes to fully restore it to the relative health of two decades ago. Changes would need to address both pay and working conditions, two things teachers cite for pushing them out of the profession or keeping young people from deciding to enter it.
Teacher turnover in North Carolina hit its highest point in at least two decades last year, with 11.5% of the state’s more than 90,000 traditional public school teachers leaving the profession in the state. That’s up from 7.8% the year before.
The state now declares a shortage in almost every subject area.
At the beginning of the current school year, more than 6% of all teaching positions in the state weren’t yet filled, or they were filled by a person who wasn’t qualified — the highest percentage in years.
The National Education Association released updated rankings last month showing North Carolina in the bottom half of U.S. states in terms of educator pay and public education spending.
Incremental pay increases for North Carolina teachers — approved in the state budget for the current fiscal year — haven’t reversed the turnover.
Meanwhile, some local school boards are considering small pay bumps while others are offering nothing. Many boards are also cutting retention and recruitment bonuses that they funded using temporary federal pandemic relief dollars — money that will be gone by next school year. Some boards have found new funding sources to keep them.
In many North Carolina counties, teacher pay isn’t high enough to live comfortably, and the dollars aren’t going as far as they used to. Someone who signed up to be a teacher in 2008 would have earned $30,430 in state base pay ($43,550 in today’s dollars) and would have expected to earn $41,760 in state base pay after 15 years ($59,765 in today’s dollars). But in the current school year, a first-year teacher is earning $39,000 in state base pay and a teacher with 15 years of experience is earning $53,600 in state base pay.
For a Wake County couple with two children, each partner should earn just under $61,000 per year to live comfortably, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage calculator. But a teacher in Wake County doesn’t earn that until their 15th year — when most teachers would be in their mid- to late-thirties. That’s even with a Wake County supplement of more than $6,000; state base pay never reaches that amount, no matter how long a teacher has worked, stopping at about $55,000 per year for people with 25 years of experience.
Expanding private school tuition assistance
Of the voucher spending, $248 million would be for the 2024-25 school year. That would nearly double spending for the state’s program that writes checks to families who wish to send their children to a private school instead of a public school.
The increase for next year would be on top of the $293.5 million already appropriated for next year from the Opportunity Scholarship fund and from two other funding sources, leading to a total appropriation of $541.5 million.
The budget would also clarify that non-North Carolina cannot apply until they either move to the state or show they are being transferred to a North Carolina military base.
Called Opportunity Scholarships, the voucher program is set to be short on funding next year by more than $200 million, not providing vouchers to about 54,000 students. Next year is the first year that families of any income and families of current private school students have been allowed to receive a voucher, resulting in about 72,000 new applicants for the program that already enrolled more than 32,000 students. The voucher covers at least $3,000 for families and up to more than $7,000 for the lowest-income families, unless actual tuition is lower than that.
Voucher opponents argue it siphons money away from the public schools that more families are able to attend and that are not adequately resourced.
The state spends more than $11 billion on public schools, and counties spend another more than $3 billion on public schools.
It’s unclear how many of the 72,000 new students who applied for an Opportunity Scholarship already attend a private school, because the state Educational Assistance Authority doesn’t ask for that information when students apply.
About one-fifth of applicants were from families in the highest-income tier. That means a family of four earning more than $259,740. About two-fifths were from families with incomes in the tier below — between $115,400 and $159,740 for a family of four. But none of those families are set to receive a voucher next year. Very few families in the second-lowest income tier — between $57,720 and $115,440 for a family of four — are set to receive a voucher. All families in the lowest-income tier — $57,720 for a family of four — are set to receive a voucher, and all families who already have a voucher are set to receive one again.
Median income for a family of four in 2022 was about $105,000 in North Carolina, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
