Monday numbers: North Carolina is home to divergent education policies and attitudes

By any fair assessment, North Carolina public schools are struggling these days. In many schools, staff vacancies and turnover are sky high, morale is low, and facility needs are many.

Interestingly, these facts on the ground have given rise to some competing and even contradictory narratives and attitudes.

For most progressives, the situation is obvious. They see the current situation as the inevitable result of a decade-plus of systematic disinvestment in (and attacks on) public education.

When teachers can easily find much better paying work in the private sector while simultaneously leaving behind the hassles that come with overcrowded, under-resourced classrooms and the sustained attacks of right-wing culture warriors bent on micromanaging their jobs, these folks say it’s unsurprising that finding a retaining quality personnel has become so difficult.

From this standpoint, if our school system was a house, it would have broken windows, a leaky roof, a worn-out furnace, and a lawn overgrown with weeds.

And yet, supporters of traditional public schools have not given up hope. Polling indicates that most parents – despite their worries about the overall system – still have faith in their own schools. Similarly, a recent North Carolina Department of Public Instruction survey found a stubborn prevalence of positive attitudes among the educators who remain.

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the political spectrum, one sees some similar contradictions.

While many on the far right regularly blast the state of K-12 education and some are clearly ready to abandon public schools – what they often derisively refer to as “government schools” – altogether, leading conservative politicians still pay frequent lip service to the idea that the state’s schools are doing well.

When confronted with complaints about declining funding or the rise of private school vouchers, they will point out that overall state spending on public K-12 schools in sheer dollars (if not per pupil or adjusted for inflation) is higher than ever, and readily take credit whenever any positive trends in student performance or test scores come to light.

All of which, one supposes, is a way of saying that the die has not yet been cast when it comes to the long-term fate of K-12 education in North Carolina.

While North Carolinians hold many strong and divergent opinions about public education, the debate over whether it will continue and, if so, what it should and will look like remains unsettled.

At present though, as the following numbers illustrate, Republican legislators continue to grow increasingly bold in their embrace of school privatization agenda.

$56,559 – average annual salary for a North Carolina K-12 teacher

38 – where North Carolina ranks nationally in teacher pay, down two spots from last year

$69,544 – the national average

$63,103 – average annual salary for a Virginia K-12 teacher

$64,461 – average annual salary for a Georgia K-12 teacher

$69,544 – average annual salary for n Alabama K-12 teacher

$40,136 – average salary for a starting teacher in North Carolina

42 – where that ranked nationally

$13,173 – K-12 per pupil spending in North Carolina

38 – where that ranked nationally

49 – where the state ranks in terms of “funding effort” (share of state GDP it spends on public schools)

1.5 million – number of North Carolina children who still attend K-12 public schools

$463 million – amount of additional dollars that legislation advancing in the North Carolina legislature would spend on private school vouchers

$3,000-$7,000 – amount that families can receive annually in a school voucher to defray the cost of private school tuition

$800 million – amount North Carolina will spend annually on vouchers by Fiscal Year 2031 if the bill becomes law

0 – amount that North Carolina’s school voucher program made available to upper income families when it was first introduced

70 – percentage of vouchers funded in the new legislation that would flow to families earning more than $115,000 annually

23 – percentage of vouchers funded in the new legislation that would flow to families earning more than $260,000 annually

0 – number of private schools accepting vouchers that are required to serve students with disabilities

0 – number of private schools accepting vouchers that are required to provide transportation

0 – number of private schools accepting vouchers that are required to provide free or reduced-price meals

Sources: National Education Association — “2024 reports: Educator pay in America,” NC Newsline — “Bill to increase spending on private school vouchers scores key win in NC Senate,” and NC Newsline – “Putting the investments needed to uphold children’s education rights in context.”