Teacher salaies are still controversial

For years, I served as devil's advocate whenever N.C. teacher salaries were discussed. For decades, as editor of a daily newspaper in the state, I chased beginning teacher salaries as a benchmark for newspaper reporters' salaries to aspire to. When I got into the newspaper business, I was making less than $9,000 a year as editor of a weekly paper. Starting teacher salaries at the time were around $13,000 or $14,000. Teachers were demonstrating for higher salaries and benefits. Journalists were getting by on their miserly salaries or finding other jobs. I was never able to get starting reporter salaries even close to starting teacher salaries. The few times I won higher pay rates for my reporters, teacher salaries would jump far higher as the state played catch-up with rising prices.

Teacher salaries are an annual topic of state politics, and teacher advocates have grown more vocal the past two or three years. One reason for this is the General Assembly's cuts in school spending. Even though teacher salaries in North Carolina have risen, they lag behind other professional salaries. Teachers in Oklahoma, Kentucky and other states have gone on strike.

As Paul Krugman points out in this column, Republican-dominated state legislatures are cutting taxes as a means of ensuring that teacher salaries can't be raised and overall school spending cannot keep up with rising costs for books, equipment, construction and maintenance. Taxes pay for state services, primarily education, transportation and law enforcement. Cutting taxes drastically will ensure that the needs of an expanding population will not be met.

North Carolina's average teacher pay is now above $50,000 — a figure unheard of in this state through all the years I tried to raise reporter salaries to the state's teacher benchmark. But $50,000 does not put the average salary in North Carolina in the top quintile of states.

There are two reasons state legislators should be more generous with teacher salaries and benefits. First, public education is the best opportunity we have of ensuring a fair, upwardly mobile society and ensuring America's leadership in the world economy. The uneducated are a burden to the economy; the educated are a creative asset. Second, children have changed so drastically in the past two generations that teaching is a far more difficult, intensive, dangerous occupation. Pop culture, absent parents, an antagonistic society, entrenched poverty, irresponsible families all combine to make teaching more difficult.

Only by training and paying teachers well, modernizing and equipping schools, and providing discipline and motivation to students who get none at home will schools be able to reach their promise of preparing each generation for tomorrow. 

Journalists, maligned by the president as "enemies of the people," will continue to suffer as among the poorest paid of college graduates. I'm glad I'm no longer fighting that salary battle.