Friday Report – November 4, 2016

The chairman of the State Board of Education on Wednesday said board members “need to encourage and prod the General Assembly to take action” to increase the pay of public school administrators in the state. Chairman Bill Cobey’s comments came after a presentation showing how pay for principals and assistant principals has changed over the years.

North Carolina ranks 50th in the nation, including Washington, D.C., for principal pay. Under the state’s pay structure, some teachers are paid more than assistant principals. “I think the General Assembly’s going to be very serious about correcting this,” Cobey said. “We should be concerned here, because leadership in school is so important.”

State school board member Becky Taylor called the salaries “startling” and “astounding” and said “it really brought out how severe it has been” for public school leaders. “How in the world do we even have assistant principals in our state?” she said.

Lawmakers have begun to discuss the issue. Last week, a joint legislative study committee on school-based administrator pay unveiled a preliminary proposal to reform the way North Carolina pays its principals, according to EducationNC.

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Hinchcliffe, K. “State school board pushes for principal pay raises after seeing ‘startling’ salaries.” WRAL. 11/2/16.

Under Democratic and Republican control over the past two decades, North Carolina has been steadily producing more degree earners. But the state is stuck in the country’s bottom 10 when it comes to paying its teachers and funding its students.

Education, as always, is a central issue in the North Carolina gubernatorial campaign. Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Roy Cooper, talk a lot about how the state does or doesn’t support its public school classrooms.

As part of an assessment of how the state is doing on several fronts ahead of the Nov. 8 election, The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer looked at five key metrics on education and how North Carolina compares with neighbors Virginia and Georgia, as well as the national average. The papers analyzed data about degree attainment, teacher pay, college entrance exams and spending on students.

There is good news and bad.

In 2015, 29.4 percent of North Carolinians 25 and over held a four-year college degree, and 86.6 percent had a high school diploma. Both measures have risen steadily in the past two decades, though North Carolina tracks behind the U.S. average and Virginia. It has moved slightly ahead of Georgia in high school graduates.

While teacher salaries have risen in the past couple of years, North Carolina ranked 42nd in the country in 2014-15, according to the National Education Association. It also trails Virginia, Georgia and the country as a whole on per-pupil spending for K-12 schools; in 2014-15, it was 43rd. The NEA has projected that this year, North Carolina will rank 41st in teacher salaries and 44th in per-student spending.

The NEA rankings of teacher pay do not account for differences in cost of living among the states, notes Terry Stoops, director of education studies at the John Locke Foundation. When the Council for Community and Economic Research’s cost of living index for 2015 is applied, he says, North Carolina rises to 33rd, still trailing Georgia (7th) and Virginia (24th).

In the past few years, the Republican-led legislature has ushered in significant changes in education, including reductions in K-3 teacher assistants and increases in charter schools and vouchers to help students attend private schools. It also toughened rules to make sure students are reading by the third grade, and required a new letter-grade rating system for schools. The pay raises were approved, including more competitive pay for teachers early in their careers. Veteran teachers received smaller raises.

McCrory has touted the recent raises, saying average teacher pay and benefits now exceed $50,000 for the first time. Meanwhile, Cooper ran a TV ad showing a North Carolina teacher moving to another state for a higher paycheck, saying, “Someone needs to fix this.”

Debate over spending

Education makes up a big chunk of state spending and always has.

But in inflation-adjusted dollars, public school spending has not returned to pre-recession levels. A report this month by the national Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning research and policy institute in Washington, said North Carolina was one of eight states that had cut per-student funding by 10 percent or more since the recession. It’s one of five states that also cut income taxes during that period.

“In the last few budgets it’s clear that tax cuts have been prioritized over education spending,” said Keith Poston, president and executive director of the Public School Forum, a group that advocates for higher spending.

“The [pay] increases are welcome, but we’re nowhere near where we were before the recession,” Poston added. “There’s a lot of ground to be made up.”

The UNC system has announced the eight campuses likely to establish K-8 lab schools at the direction of the legislature.

The schools are proposed at Appalachian State, East Carolina, N.C. Central University, UNC Charlotte, UNC Greensboro, UNC Pembroke, UNC Wilmington and Western Carolina University. The UNC system’s General Administration submitted a plan to the legislature’s Joint Legislative Commission on Governmental Operations.

A provision in this year’s state budget required that UNC establish lab schools – which are essentially charter schools that could test new techniques and train future teachers and administrators. According to the legislation, the schools must be in public school districts where at least 25 percent of schools have been classified as low performing based on state test scores.

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from: 

Stancill, J. “Eight UNC campuses proposed to operate lab schools.” News & Observer. 11/1/16.

A legislative proposal that would have allowed Robeson County to use state money saved from school staff reductions to make lease payments on new schools is an issue in the race for state treasurer.

Dale Folwell, the Republican candidate for the office, says he opposes the plan, one state Treasurer Janet Cowell, a Democrat, fought when it surfaced last spring. Folwell says his Democratic opponent, Dan Blue, is taking campaign money from Robeson County businessmen who are pushing for the deal. 

“Finding long-term solutions to school construction needs is a serious matter,” Folwell said. “It cannot be approached on a pay-to-play basis or a patch here, a patch there.”

Blue said contributions will not influence his decisions. Through late October, he’d received a total of $12,000 from two officers from a construction company and an engineer from a Robeson-based firm who wanted the legislature to approve the bill. Blue has raised more than $640,000 for his campaign, reports show.

Folwell has raised about $850,000 for the campaign, including a $350,000 personal loan.

The bill was pushed by businesses in Robeson and a Raleigh architectural firm, but the plan could have been used by any county.

Four North Carolina school boards and the state retirement system are continuing their fight over who will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for four retired superintendents’ pensions.

On Thursday, the Board of Trustees for the retirement system denied the school boards’ petition that would have adopted a rule to require a third-party review process. The third party would review a cap, that when exceeded, triggers a penalty against government agencies that inflate high-earning employees pensions as they near retirement.

The school boards plan to appeal that decision in Superior Court.

The four school boards – Johnston County, Wilkes County, Cabarrus County and Union County – sued the retirement system in April after those school districts were sent bills to compensate for their retired superintendents’ pensions. The lawsuits have since been dismissed. Their bills ranged from $208,000 to $590,000, which were the highest of the more than 50 governmental agencies assessed bills.

While the four schools districts have not paid those bills, the majority of the other agencies have. The rule-making process would have given those agencies notice and the opportunity to provide input or alternatives to imposing a penalty.

But if the board had granted the school boards’ request, then it also ran the risk of voiding all the payments made by the other governmental agencies who had employees that exceeded the cap. As of September, the bills that were already paid ranged from $5,000 to $252,000. In all, 38 agencies have already paid the retirement system because they had retirees whose pensions exceeded the cap.

Students who attend high-poverty schools or schools with high minority enrollments are far less likely to enroll in college, and less likely to complete degrees than their more advantaged peers, according to a new set of data released  last Thursday.

The fourth annual “High School Benchmarks” report from the National Student Clearinghouse offers numbers and charts for what most educators already know about how concentrations of disadvantage influence educational outcomes. 

The findings examined a huge pool of students: 5 million, more than one-quarter of all graduating high school seniors each year. But it was drawn from a voluntary sample: schools that pay about $425 to participate in the Clearinghouse’s Student Tracker system. That participation allows schools to put their students’ progression into a national context. But the participants skew toward urban schools with higher minority and low-income populations.

Georgia voters will soon decide whether to change their constitution to clear the way for state officials to play a more aggressive role in taking over long-struggling public schools.

The ballot measure—known as Amendment 1—has generated heated debate and created strange political bedfellows, with teachers’ unions, the state’s school boards’ association, the Georgia PTA, and some conservative Republicans lining up against the measure.

On the other side is GOP Gov. Nathan Deal, who proposed and championed a state-run district modeled on Louisiana’s Recovery School District and Tennessee’s Achievement School District. His allies include the state chamber of commerce, some Democrats, and supporters of charters and school choice.

The state last wrestled with such a contentious education issue in 2012, when another constitutional amendment to establish a state Charter Schools Commission was on the ballot. That measure passed.

While some of the key players and arguments remain the same, more money appears to be pouring in this time around, said Dana Rickman, the policy and research director at the nonpartisan Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education, which is not taking a position on the ballot measure.

A ‘Rescue’?

An estimated $3.3 million had been raised through the end of September by groups both supporting and opposing the measure, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The pro-amendment side has raised $1.2 million toward that effort with contributions from Georgia Leads, a Deal-backed group, the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, and 50CAN, an education advocacy group. On the other side, the National Education Association was expected to spend $1.5 million opposing the measure, the paper said.