Pay more for high-quality teachers who teach in high-poverty schools

In a school system where all teachers were handsomely paid, enjoyed supplements for supplies and great field trips, and got resounding support from parents and their supervisors, this ideal could exist:

The most experienced teachers would be assigned, and would willingly go to, those schools with more low-performing students and higher poverty rates, which tend to go hand-in-hand as a challenge to school administrators.

This would make perfect sense. Obviously students who need the most help need to get it from teachers who have seen all the challenges there are and have devised, through their experience, ways to bring students’ learning abilities up to where they need to be.

Teachers who can help students who need it most are indeed noble and gifted people, and students – all students, really – need to be exposed to them.

But it’s no surprise, given the freedom to move to other jobs in other schools, or other jobs period, that the most experienced and very best teachers in Wake County – the example used by The News & Observer’s T. Keung Hui – tend to go to the best schools with the best students, and likely the most engaged parental corps. The system’s partnership with Harvard University in a study and a resulting report turned up some clear conclusions: Beginning teachers tend to get more low-scoring students; schools with the higher numbers of low-income students also have higher percentages of inexperienced teachers; teachers tend to transfer at a higher rate out of schools with a higher share of students from minority and lower-income homes.

The draw from more affluent schools for teachers with experience, who are highly regarded, is easy to understand. Teaching kids who are lower-achieving and from lower-income homes is a challenge; it means more work for the most dedicated teachers, which describes most of them.

But let’s go back to that dream-case scenario where all teachers are well-paid and well-supported. If administrators, and more importantly legislators, were willing to push for higher salaries as incentives for teachers to go into schools where the need for extra attention was greatest, and if they were willing to arm those teachers with specialized training (also expensive) then great teachers would have more reason to challenge themselves.

As it stands, a system such as Wake County’s can’t very well say to an experienced teacher: No, you can’t transfer; you have no choice. Because good teachers do have choices, including other nearby counties or private schools. So good teachers can demand transfers, and given the strain and the low pay in even a sound teaching job, it’s understandable why they would want to ease their stress as much as they could.

So what North Carolina needs to do is simple: Pay teachers who agree to go to high-poverty or low-achieving schools more, substantially more, and give them stronger support systems by providing more money for supplies and for assistants and even outside consulting. Get serious about improving opportunities for all students by giving all students the very best teachers there are.

North Carolina has gotten by with going on the cheap in many ways in public education, and it’s been lucky not to face teacher shortages year after year or a reputation in its public schools that ranks with teacher pay – meaning systems that are dimly viewed. Somehow, the state has, since the days of Gov. Terry Sanford (1961-65) and carrying through with four-term Gov. Jim Hunt, managed to maintain its reputation as a “good schools” state. But unless the state does something to address issues such as teacher transfers and the perils of having inexperienced teachers in classrooms where experience is needed most, that reputation – and the futures of tens of thousands of children – is going to be at risk.

This story was originally published June 21, 2017 at 6:10 PM with the headline "Pay more for high-quality teachers who teach in high-poverty schools."