If New Teachers Got Now What Veteran Teachers Got Then, NC Would Not Need To Recruit Teacher Candidates

/ caffeinatedrage

Last week this electronic interactive flyer was sent out to many in the state:

What’s TeachNC? It’s to recruit teacher candidates for our public schools. It began here:

In March of 2019, then state Superintendent Mark Johnson released his budget recommendations for the next two-year cycle for the North Carolina General Assembly to use in their shaky investment in NC’s public schools.

He published those recommendations on his website (it may not exist any longer). Here is part of that list.

budgetrequest1

There was a $750K request for TeachNC  described by Kelly Hinchcliffe on WRAL.com as:

His second initiative is a collaboration among the Department of Public Instruction, BEST NC and Teach.org, with support from the Belk Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Coastal Credit Union. “Teach NC,” launching this spring, is a “public-private teacher appreciation campaign to better align the image of the teaching profession with the fruitful, fulfilling career it is and develop a statewide teacher-recruitment system to attract the next generation of North Carolina teachers.”

It was first introduced as part of Mark Johnson’s #NC2030 initiative.

Well, Johnson is gone and we had this pandemic thing happen. And that budget request was attached to a budget that was never fully passed.

Yet TeachNC is still “recruiting.”

When I came back as a “new” teacher sixteen years ago for my second tenure in NC, Phil Berger and Tim Moore were not in power. And as a “new” teacher the following was freely given to new teachers as part of the agreement to be employed by the state of North Carolina:

  1. A salary schedule that had step increases for every year of service.
  2. The opportunity to receive due-process rights when I had obtained a continuing certificate after three successful years of teaching.
  3. A schedule that included a seven period day with two planning periods and five classes that were capped in size.
  4. Graduate degree pay as I had obtained my masters degree.
  5. Health benefits as a retiree if I retired as a teacher in NC.
  6. Money paid by the state to pursue National Boards.
  7. Paid professional development from the state as it was in the budget.
  8. The opportunity to receive longevity pay after 10 years of service like other state employees.
  9. The absence of a school performance grading system that weighs test scores over student growth.
  10. The knowledge that all monies designated for public education was actually going to public schools.

If I was to become a new teacher in 2020 with years of Berger and Moore and all of their “reforms,” how many of those would be available to me now?

None.

Funny how if those things were reinstated, then there would never be a need for TeachNC.