We wrote this week about how the Senate budget sneakily pegs teacher pay raises to unpopular provisions: taking away tenure, slashing education and kicking 14,000 needy people off of Medicaid.
This makes teachers look greedy and Democrats anyone who votes against the budget look like they don’t care about teachers.
In a blog post reprinted by the Washington Post Thursday, veteran educator James Hogan breaks down the teacher salary schedule.
He explains that the Republican majority’s budget provides further disincentives to teachers who plan to retire from teaching by denying them a raise for a decade, while appeasing teachers in the early and middle stages of their careers.
“(The budget) is designed to work them through twenty years of service and then quietly encourage them to leave teaching by keeping their salaries flat,” Hogan writes. “And if they don’t leave on their own, they have a handy, built-in mechanism to get rid of them—the complete absence of career status.”
Teacher pensions cost the state a lot money, Hogan argues.
“My guess is the fiscal conservatives in Raleigh are interested in doing whatever they can to change that.”
