More pay weighed for some teachers

Lawmakers are talking about raises for math and science instructors, or those at high-poverty schools

Math and science teachers are such hot commodities these days, legislators are considering offering them extra pay to fill North Carolina's classrooms.

The state has a spotty history with offering extra money to teachers-in-demand, but influential supporters want to try again.

Senate leader Marc Basnight has been talking about extra pay for science and math teachers for months. He made a big pitch for the idea in a speech to his colleagues launching the legislative session. Senate Minority Leader Phil Berger likes the idea, too, though he would make special education teachers eligible for higher salaries along with science and math teachers.

"To attract people into these fields, we need to offer more pay," said Berger, a Republican from Eden.

The state took a small step this year in bumping up pay for a handful of teachers. Thirty new math and science teachers in three districts could have up to $15,000 extra in their paychecks over the year.

A bigger experiment with higher pay for teachers in high-poverty schools in Guilford County has fans in the legislature. Guilford Superintendent Terry Grier has touted his district's success in hiring certified teachers to lawmakers this year. In Guilford, which has a differential pay plan funded by foundations and the U.S. Department of Education, a beginning math teacher working in a high-poverty middle or high school can make $42,000 a year.

"We run around talking about wanting to have a premier education system," Grier said. "Why don't we want to pay enough?"

Not everyone is sold on boosting salaries for hard-to-fill jobs.

The N.C. Association of Educators says differential pay kills teacher morale. And Rep. Ray Rapp, a Mars Hill Democrat who will help assemble the state education budget, doesn't think it is right to build a pay scale based on teacher specialty, when a school's English teacher may be working just as hard as the math teacher.

"It has the potential to create a situation that is terribly demoralizing and destabilizing," Rapp said.

The last statewide experiment in paying teachers extra ended in disappointment three years ago. Starting in 2001, the state offered an extra $1,800 a year to math, science and special education teachers at high-poverty schools or those where student performance lagged.

The program had a rough start. By the time the legislature approved it in 2001, nearly all teachers had been hired for the year, so districts couldn't use the money as a recruitment tool. The state Department of Public Instruction had trouble identifying which schools were eligible for the program. Even in its last year, teachers receiving bonuses didn't understand how the program worked, and some principals didn't know their schools were eligible.

A study by the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University said that, despite the problems, the extra money may have helped keep middle school math teachers in their jobs.

Barnett Berry, president of the Center for Teaching Quality in Hillsborough, said it's a mistake to set a blanket policy on which speciality teachers should get extra money. One school district may need math teachers, he said, while another may need an art teacher who knows how to make connections to other subjects.

Bill Ferriter, a teacher at Salem Middle School in Apex, said offering math and science teachers more money would be a good first step. But differential pay plans are often simplistic, said Ferriter, who is in a group of teachers organized by the Center for Teaching Quality studying teacher pay.

Ferriter said teachers in high-poverty schools should be given extra money because their jobs are harder and require more time.

But states that used money as the only means to lure teachers to tough assignments failed, Ferriter said, because the teachers didn't stay. Improving working conditions, carving out extra planning time, having more support staff and good principals are important to recruiting and keeping teachers in high-poverty schools.

"I'm not sure that any amount of money is going to be enough to truly solve the staffing problems in high-needs schools," he said.