Teacher pay and Cooper's fumble (03-11-2025--Hour1)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:28] And on Tuesdays, we usually welcome to the program Andrew Dunn. He is the publisher of Longleaf Politics, longleafpol.com, and also a contributing columnist to the Charlotte Observer. Hey, Andrew, how are you? I'm doing great. It's nice to be back.

[00:00:46] Yes, I appreciate you making time as always. I was reading through your latest over at the Observer that Republicans are finally leading again on teacher pay. Went over a little bit of the details on this last week. This proposal that comes from Republican Erin Paré. Is that how you pronounce her name? Paré? It is. Yep, you got it.

[00:01:11] All right, good. And so the idea is to take starting teacher pay to $50,000. So walk us through sort of, and you do a good job of this in the piece, to explain like where we were 10 years ago, 2014-2015 timeframe, and then what happened at the legislative level?

[00:01:59] Yeah, look. That's right.

[00:02:30] sort of raised whatsoever. Other years, it was relatively small. And then it kind of just went away from the overall messaging. You know, we started to hear a lot more about school choice, about opportunity scholarships. And I don't want to say that that wasn't good. I mean, that was fantastic. I think the legislature absolutely should have done that. But you just didn't hear as much about public schools and public school teacher pay. So basically, the gist

[00:02:57] of the column is that, you know, Republicans are getting back to that previous era. They're leading on teacher pay. And this bill from Representative Paré sounds like a really good start there. Yeah. And so and to your point about how the focus was, you know, a decade ago on rookie teachers and then veteran teachers and such, they Republicans kept trying to implement various kinds

[00:03:22] of, I mean, I guess I could call it merit based types of systems, right, versus just the straight up longevity pay, like, okay, you've been here x amount of years, that means you get this amount of money. And they wanted to kind of break up that model, but they ended up getting a lot of pushback. I think they even if memory serves, they got sued to try to preserve some of those those scales.

[00:03:47] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the teachers union is very much against merit based pay. You know, there's always been a lot of appetite for merit pay. But politically, it's more challenging. I think the appetite is still there to do it. And I do think that this is a first step towards getting towards moving in that direction. It's very strategic to raise entry level teacher pay,

[00:04:14] as opposed to later career teacher pay, because, you know, to kind of fill the pipeline of new teachers, you really need to recruit top teaching talent that's early on in their careers, and then, you know, have them establish their careers here. So I see this as a good first step in a more strategic teacher pay framework. You know, you raise entry level teacher pay, and then you get, you know, next year, the year after, then you start talking about more merit pay structures that can work.

[00:04:42] Mm hmm. One of the challenges I've often had is whenever having discussions about this topic, or on per pupil expenditures, also, I always ask what the number is, like, what's what's the optimal number that we need to spend? And usually, if I'm arguing with somebody on the left, they don't want to, they don't want to give me a number, they don't want to give a figure. And I don't know why that would be, they usually just say something like, you know, take us to the national average.

[00:05:11] Um, and so does this, I don't know, does this make us at the national average? Would this take us closer to the national average if we started at $50,000? Well, you know, exactly why they don't want to throw out a number. It's because it's a political tool, right? Yeah. You know, no matter if they throw out a number, then they can't, you know, whatever Republicans put out there, you know, seven, eight, nine percent, whatever it is,

[00:05:37] you know, the Democrats are always going to come back and say, well, that's not enough. It needs to be 11, 13 percent, what have you, because it's purely a political tool. And that's why it's so important to get out of that framework of only talking about teacher pay in terms of what percentage increase we're getting at. And I also think we need to get out of that the average teacher pay ranking discussion, too. I mean, it's somewhat useful, but your average teacher pay is always going

[00:06:04] to be weighed down on, you know, how many younger teachers do you have in your state versus older teachers. Right. And there are so many different ways to slice and dice that data that it's not the most useful tool in the world. Yeah. And cost of living is different state to state regions to regions, even in the same state. So it's yeah, it's difficult to to weight all of that appropriately. So I highly recommend if you have the Charlotte Observer, go check out the piece. Republicans are

[00:06:32] finally leading again on teacher pay in North Carolina. Andrew, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you, did you see the the Washington Post article? Trump vowed to help the North Carolina mountains rebuild after Helene. Frustration remains. So, of course, this article is focused on Donald Trump and how he's failing Western North Carolina. But I thought there was I thought

[00:06:57] there was something pretty interesting in sort of about, I don't know, a third of the way through the piece talking about how the former governor, Roy Cooper, never appointed a disaster recovery coordinator to take charge of communicating with federal agencies. And this this was like shocking to the the disaster experts that were interviewed at the Washington Post. And I found it odd that

[00:07:23] that did not get the top billing. Does will anybody care? Yeah, I did see that article. Really remarkable article. You know, the number one thing that jumped out to me, you know, people shouldn't have to tweet at Elon Musk to get disaster relief. That seems pretty clear. But yeah, I mean, I think it's absolutely the lack of leadership is something that I've been talking about for months.

[00:07:50] You know, the failure in the Helene response wasn't just FEMA. It was North Carolina's own leadership and or lack thereof. I do think it was a big miss for Cooper not to appoint a recovery coordinator. I mean, one of the big things that you kept hearing from former Governor Cooper in his press conferences was, oh, well, it's really complicated. There's a lot of moving parts. You know, there's that. You know, we were talking about how many missing people are there. And he couldn't give an answer to how many missing people there were. And he blamed,

[00:08:20] oh, well, there's databases here and databases there. I mean, that's exactly why you appoint a coordinator is to solve things like that. But of course, you know, having that coordinator doesn't solve all the problems. You know, you see, you know, Governor Stein has appointed a disaster response coordinator, Matt Calabria. But honestly, I haven't heard a word from him since he's gotten appointed. So I'm not sure exactly what he's doing or where all that stands. But just having

[00:08:46] somebody's name out there doesn't solve all the problems. But at least it's the first step. It is kind of amazing how much of a free pass Roy Cooper has received on his ineffective leadership when responding to natural disasters, whether it was Hurricane Matthew, Hurricane Florence or Helene, and even the pandemic, right? I mean, like all of these examples. And it just seems like

[00:09:13] he skates by. I'm sure you may have noticed something along those lines as well. When he was when he was governor, and you were working with Dan Forrest. So like, I'm, I'm still kind of perplexed as to why this doesn't get more attention. Yeah, I am as well. I mean, and there's some theories I

[00:09:36] have on on why that is. A lot of it, you know, especially in this context, you know, Helene hit at the end of September in a presidential election year, and the media is not going to go after a top Biden-Harris surrogate a month before election time. I think we're starting to see the narrative change a little bit, which I think is a huge issue for Cooper if he actually does want to run for U.S.

[00:10:02] Senate. I have a feeling that with, you know, that amount of money coming into the race, you know, Tillis or who, you know, it's going to be Tillis most likely who gets the Republican nomination is going to be able to effectively prosecute that case, because that's the other component of it, is Republicans in North Carolina just haven't had enough money to really drive home that message, especially going up against the Cooper machine with, you know, unprecedented millions of dollars

[00:10:30] to run his own playbook. Yeah. Andrew Dunn, you can read his work at Longleaf Politics, longleafpol.com. Also, he's a contributing columnist over at the Charlotte Observer. Andrew, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina, just a quick drive up the mountain. And Cabins of Asheville is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an

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[00:11:47] accommodations. Call or text 828-367-7068. Or check out all there is to offer at cabinsofashville.com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. I've got a couple of messages here. One from John, who says, number one, in the future, anytime you are going to be out without prior notice, you need to send me a personal email or text message at least one hour prior to the start of

[00:12:14] the show so I can be mentally prepared for your absence. John, that's not going to happen. Number two, the Republicans have controlled the General Assembly now for 14 years. School teachers have not received a pay raise six years or had not received a pay raise six years prior to that. So any teacher pay raises in the last 20 years have come from the Republican-led General Assembly.

[00:12:40] Yet the Democrat Teachers Union only protest Republicans over the pay. They never had their moral Monday marches on any or anything like that under the Democrats' control, even when Governor Bev Perdue forced them to take the unpaid furlough. Yeah, that always, yeah, I focused a lot on that when I was up in working, you know, up in Asheville at the time when the MoMoMo began.

[00:13:08] And there were a couple of reasons for it. You know, at the time you had a hollowed out North Carolina Democrat Party, didn't really have any leaders. They had no figurehead. They had been just embroiled in multiple corruption scandals and illegal activities. A bunch of their people got, you know, charged with crimes and went to jail. And so it was a, it was a husk of a party.

[00:13:35] And in walks, you know, Reverend William Barber. And he, he galvanizes these activists inside the Democrat Party, but also teachers. And that's why the, the protest marches were so well attended at the

[00:13:56] beginning was because of the years of, um, prior to Pat McCrory becoming governor and prior to the Republicans taking over the legislature. You had Democrat control and yes, they furloughed teachers. They gave them, they froze their pay, um, because they had, you know, they, they had budgeted recklessly and they ended up with structural deficits and they couldn't afford to keep paying when the downturn came around, uh, you know, Oh nine

[00:14:26] timeframe. And, um, that's what ushered in the Republicans victories in 2010. And, uh, the teachers still hadn't gotten pay raises, but the Republican legislature was trying to, uh, fix the structural deficits. And so the first thing they had to do was shore up the revenue. They had to, uh, you know, enact their, uh, tax reforms that they could, and they did it over time and people wanted it to move

[00:14:53] faster. And, uh, Barber was able to, uh, to motivate teachers to march on Raleigh. And as soon as the Republicans started doing teacher pay increases, the protests, uh, trickled down to, you know, very few numbers because they didn't have all of the motivated, uh, teachers that were now attending. So, uh, that's where we were a decade ago. People new to the state probably are unaware of that. You know, stories are

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[00:16:15] you and all who came before you. And they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creativevideo.com. I got a message on Twitter from Bubba who says, it's a Pete tweet. He says, great conversation about teachers pay. Did I miss the information about postgraduate degree pay or no? When will this be looked at? As of now, the only incentive is to become nationally board certified.

[00:16:42] Nothing though for master's degrees. So we did, yeah, and we talked about this last week when the bill first was filed and you've got the raising of the teacher pay starting at five grand. This is for a 10-month salary. So, you know, five grand per month. That's $50,000 for a 10-month salary.

[00:17:08] That's the first part. Licensed teachers who have the national board certified standing, they shall receive a salary supplement each month of 12% of their monthly salary. So that's a 12% in addition add. And then licensed teachers who are classified as M,

[00:17:32] masters I assume, shall receive a salary supplement of 10% of their monthly salary. And then it breaks down some of the numbers here. By the way, this is House Bill 192. And you can look it up on the legislature's website, ncleg.gov. Again, that's House Bill 192. Now,

[00:17:59] Andrew Dunn, who we spoke with at the beginning of the hour in this piece at the Charlotte Observer, and well, in the News and Observer, the McClatchy Papers, he describes the bill as a raising teacher paid of $50,000. That would be up from where the starting pay currently is now. That's $41,000. So

[00:18:20] this is a $9,000 increase in starting teacher pay. And if I remember correctly, when they raised the rookie teacher pay the probably about 10 years ago when they did that, they were attacked, the Republicans were attacked for only focusing on the new hires. And we need to focus on the veteran

[00:18:44] teachers, right? Now, there was that attack. But then there was also this ignoring of how raising the base pay for the new hires creates more wealth in the long term. Because you're now you're getting this

[00:19:09] large salary and $50,000 a year is a large salary for somebody with no experience. Okay, right out of school, $50,000. That's a good job, right? That's a good salary. Plus, you get the benefits. So there is also this compounding effect that occurs over years, right? Because $50,000 this year,

[00:19:35] and then the next year, you would go to $50,091. Then the years of experience, $51,83, $52,74, right? And so just keeps on stacking on top. It's a $1.6 billion total plan. And it would put North Carolina among the most competitive states in the country for new teachers, even Democrats admit it would be a strong move. Andrew Dunn says, will it be enough to change the conversation?

[00:20:04] I, me personally, I'm going to say no, I'm going to say no, that no, this issue is too important for Democrats to demagogue. So I'm sure they will find, you know, some argument to be made that it has to be even more. North Carolina would leapfrog states like New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut to land among the top 10 nationally in starting pay and first in the Southeast by far. That's a big deal for

[00:20:32] recruitment, especially when 23% of the state's education graduates don't take teaching jobs in North Carolina within two years. So this is an interesting data point. I'm curious, though, if that if some of that is due to starting of families, right? Do they not take do the new graduates not take jobs because they are having kids, right? And then they go to then they go into the workforce

[00:21:00] later? Or do they go back to their home states? Or do they go to a different state that's paying more, right? A lot of different data points inside of that the average starting salary for a UNC Chapel Hill graduate is $58,000. The average starting salary. But if you look at he says NC State, humanities majors,

[00:21:24] they average 47,000. An English major averages just 37,000. Right? So what's driving those average starting salaries? I would guess it's probably your engineering, your science, technology, engineering, math, right? At 10 years post-graduation, the average salary for a UNC system graduate is $60,000,

[00:21:52] while liberal arts majors make about $47,000. So under this plan, a teacher in a typical North Carolina school district would also make $60,000 after 10 years, which would be right in line with other professional careers. So does this take the issue off the table? Republicans do this. And Andrew makes

[00:22:18] the argument that this will break the cycle. This will break the cycle that the teacher pay debate has been stuck in this loop for a decade. And he thinks that this might do the trick. All right, if you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do too. And you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News.

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[00:23:37] transparent. So Andrew Dunn writing at the Charlotte Observer in his op-ed. And look, I just want to point out here, we used to have Andrew on the show long before he got all famous and got his op-ed contributorship over at the Observer. And so we love the fact that he's writing and he's got a wider

[00:24:04] platform to do this on. But he's talking here about this plan to raise teacher pay. And if you are new to the state or you hadn't paid attention to what occurred in North Carolina politics, specifically when it comes to education 10 years ago, you may think, and I encounter people all the time, that

[00:24:26] they have no idea the damage that the Democrats had done when they were in charge because of the way that they budgeted. And they kept on spending and spending and spending. They took one-time money, used it for ongoing operations, like for salaries and such, and then they ran out of money. And they had to furlough people. They had to do a step pay raise freeze. So people that were supposed

[00:24:56] to get, and they had them all set up in these weird permutations where it was like, you know, your first year you get like a 10% raise. And then year three, another raise of a smaller amount. Year four, another raise of a higher amount. Then year seven, it's just like weird years and then weird percentage bumps and stuff. So they had all these different steps that were just kind of

[00:25:18] all over the place. And they froze those. And it generated a lot of anger towards Democrats. Republicans came in, they cleaned up the books, right? You also had the problems with Medicaid. They had to clean those books up. They had to clean up the unemployment insurance books. We owed

[00:25:42] something like $3 billion to the federal government for unemployment insurance benefits that we were paying out. We had the high, we had like some of the highest unemployment benefits in America. And then we had to take loans from the federal government to keep paying them out. And so Republicans came back, came in and they, they slashed the rates. They paid back the debt. They got us debt free.

[00:26:11] So like they, there was a lot to clean up after a century and a half of Democrat control and, you know, media and Democrats, but I repeat myself, they were not too patient. Right. And, and meanwhile, predicting all sorts of catastrophe would occur if the Republicans did their tax reforms and such. Of course, what we have now seen after a decade of, or a decade and a half of Republicans

[00:26:38] in control in Raleigh, um, we have seen surpluses. We've seen the rainy day fund funded. Uh, we have seen school vouchers funded. We've seen Medicaid expanded now, and now they're talking about raising teachers, starting teacher pay at $50,000 a year. Um, and so what Andrew Dunn then says is that Democrats

[00:27:02] have a choice. They have spent years demanding higher teacher pay. And now that Republicans have put forward a real plan, can we move on from debating how much is enough? North Carolina can keep replaying the same tired teacher pay debate, or finally build a system that rewards and retains great teachers. It's time to start making real progress. So here's my hope, because this is, you know,

[00:27:32] what I have said, uh, whenever we talk about teacher pay, I always say the same thing that I think great teachers should get paid way more money, but I refuse to pay the bad ones the same amount. And so if this is what it takes now to get, uh, Democrats to move off of their opposition to a merit-based type of a system, you're going to say everybody gets $50,000. And I don't know where this is going either, by the way.

[00:27:59] So like this may not even bear fruit, but this would be the time to do it, right? I feel like if you're going to do this bill and you're going to raise all of the teacher pay, then there needs to be some sort of a merit component into this. So this way we don't end up having to pay the bad teachers the exact same amount as we're paying the great teachers, um, simply because they managed to not

[00:28:24] get fired over the course of their career. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendershow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and, uh, don't break anything while I'm gone.