Crabtree 1 Ashton Crabtree Campbell English 1102 10 February 2014 Teaching in America Of all the pretty things that

the state of North Carolina has to offer teaching is considered one of our more uglier sides. Teaching in North Carolina has multiple negative effects. Some include a very low salary, most of which are frozen, and we have also taken away pay raises for teachers with a Masters degree. With all of the negative aspects of being a teacher in the state of North Carolina it can be very difficult to be a teacher, especially a good one. When teachers do not get paid what they should it is very common for them to not perform the best they can. Money is not everything but it can be a very good motivational tool. The basics of teachers salaries Before, North Carolinas teacher pay was based on how long a teacher has been teaching and their credentials. If you had a Bachelors degree you, on average, were paid around $30,000. If you were to have the maximum experience and credentials possible, you could potentially make up to $65,000. That is a very big range of salaries a teacher could have. Teachers who have taught longer usually get paid more than the new teachers with less experience. As of recently, the system of determining pay will now be based off of classroom results. This means that a teacher will get paid according to how well his/her students perform on the state standardized tests. Officials think that this is a good thing. They plan to reward the top

Crabtree 2 twenty-five percent of teachers by giving them an extra $500 a month increase in pay for four years. Supposedly this is a way of motivating teachers to better themselves. I see the opposite. When a teacher knows that he/she is doing a good job at teaching and sees a younger inexperienced teacher struggling, they are most likely not going to share their secrets. Especially since they are getting paid more according to how well the students do, why would they share what works and risk someone else besides them getting a raise? This helps no one. Instead it is harming the students because their teacher is unequipped. Bill Ferriter, a current teacher, said that he spent two months teaching his students vocabulary words and facts over and over again. He says my classroom went from being a place of inquiry where I gave kids the chance to answer their own questions about the required content in a process that mirrored the work that professional scientists engage in everyday to a drill-andkill zone where memorization trumped thinking in my daily lessons. When it came time for testing he outperformed county and state averages. Because of this he will most likely be up for a raise at the end of the year, but how does this help the kids? Just because you can memorize something does not mean you have learned it. We should not be paying teachers to get a certain score on a test regardless if the student understands and remembers the material. The correlation between salaries and performance Some people do not think there is any correlation between teacher pay and teacher performance. If you look at other countries around the world you will see that the more teachers get paid the better they are at teaching and also the better their students are at performing in the classroom. Look at the Republic of Korea; here teachers are paid the highest salary in the world.

Crabtree 3 North Korean students have the highest reading proficiency. This is proof right here that students learn and perform better when their teacher is satisfied and feel that they are being paid enough. If you needed more proof then lets look at Mexico. Here teachers are paid the least of any teacher around the world. Their kids have the lowest average reading proficiency. It is not just in the United States that teacher salary is not what it should be; it is a world-wide problem we need to fix if we want our students to truly comprehend and know what we are teaching them. Lets face it; they are our future. Teachers salaries just are not enough Every year it seems like there is a cut in the schools budget. In reality though, something somewhere has to get cut and money has to go somewhere else. Education cannot afford to be cut anymore. According to a new survey, teachers on average spend $448 of their own money to buy their classroom and students instructional materials and supplies. If education is the number one priority then we should be supplying teachers will all the materials they could possibly need. That extra money they are spending could be rent or groceries. The National School Supply and Equipment Association have found that teachers pay for 77% of the school supplies needed for their classroom. These materials should be coming from the government. What the teacher does not supply comes from parents, the school, and other school funds. Education plays a tremendous role in our lives. Teachers teach us the basics to everyday life; without them we would not know how to do basic math or how to even read. We end up being with teachers for more hours a day than we are with our own parents. For what their job entitles, teachers deserve to be paid more than what they are currently being paid. Not only would salary increase motivate them more to be a better teacher but you will also see the success

Crabtree 4 of their students increase as well. The bottom line is that education matters and we need to take it a lot more seriously.

Crabtree 5 Works Cited Brooke, Pamela. Does Increasing Teacher Salaries Yield More Learning? www.womenadvance.org. Woman AdvaNCe. 7 July 2013. Web. 7 February 2014. Durand, Maria. Teachers Spend own Money for Supplies. www.abcnews.com. ABC News. 31 August 2013. Web 7 February 2014. Ferriter, Bill. Three Reasons North Carolinas New Plan for Paying Teachers is a Bad Idea. www.teachingquality.org. 21 October 2013. Web. 7 February 2014. Helms, Ann Doss. North Carolina Teacher Pay Stranded by Shifts in Education Laws. www.newsobserver.com. 17 August 2013. Web. 7 February 2014.