Ashton Crabtree Campbell English 1102 17 March, 2014 Why teachers are not excited about their job,

is your child at risk? Of all the pretty things that the state of North Carolina has to offer teaching is considered one of our uglier sides. Teaching in North Carolina has gone downhill in the past couple of years and we have started to see some negative effects happening. 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. Teachers are a central factor in the learning process that takes place in schools, and teachers attitudes and effectiveness can vary depending on the incentives they face (Kingdom). Money is not everything but it can be a very good motivational tool.

The basics of teachers salaries North Carolinas teacher pay has been based on how long a teacher has been teaching and their credentials. If you have a Bachelors degree, on average, your starting salary will be 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. Now that the pay raise for teachers with a Masters degree has been taken away it makes teachers salary look even worse. 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. Teacher incentives elicit more effort form teachers, resulting in higher test scores (Figlio). Officials think that this is a good thing. They plan to reward the top twentyfive percent of teachers by giving them an extra $500 a month increase in pay for four years (Ferriter). Supposedly this is a way of motivating teachers to better themselves. I see the opposite. The teachers who do not earn the extra $500 a month will get discouraged and could possibly slack off. You need to reward every teacher and not just the top twenty five percent. 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 for them and risk someone else besides them getting a raise? This helps no one and just creates competition among teachers. Instead it is harming the students because their teacher is unequipped. Should we pay teachers based on experience and educational attainment or the number of students that pass? Bill Ferriter, a current six grade teacher in Raleigh, 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-and-kill zone where memorization trumped thinking in my daily lessons

(Ferriter). 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. I think you should go back a couple months after the test and retest the students to see if they really and truly did learn the material or if they just memorized it the night before. We should not be paying teachers to get a certain score on a test regardless if the student understands and remembers the material. We want to motivate teachers in a positive way. Rewarding teachers based off of test scores is not a good way to motivate teachers. A teacher should want to better themselves because they want their kids to be better students; not to see a pay raise. They should be rewarded for that; not test scores.

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. You will also see that a higher salary makes teachers feel appreciated and happier about their job. Look at the Republic of Korea; here teachers are paid the highest salary in the world. North Korean students have the highest reading proficiency (Brooke). This is proof right here that students learn and perform better when their teacher is satisfied and feel that they are being paid enough. When a teacher has no motivation or desire to teach the students will also have no desire to learn.

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 (Brooke). 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 (Durand). If education is the number one priority then we should be supplying teachers will all the materials they could possibly need to effectively do their job. Can you think of another job that requires employees to purchase the materials they need to do their job? That extra money they are spending could be spent on 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 (Durand). 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. Education

reform advocates in the United States frequently argue that other then the intrinsic rewards of teaching, there is no incentive for teachers to do a good job (Figlio). Not only would salary increase motivate them more to be a better teacher but you will also see the success of their students increase as well. The bottom line is that education matters and we need to take it a lot more seriously. Ashton, I really enjoyed this reading and your topic is very interesting because it has affected us all. The opening caught my attention and the rest of the paper held my attention. It's good that you had the story about Bill Ferriter, it's good to have a personal story which helps with the point you're trying to make. A fews questions I had about your topic are "Is a teacher's motivation based directly on their salary?" and "If a teacher is truly passionate about their students and what they do, does their pay really matter?". I also noticed a few grammatical errors, I've underlined those.

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. Figlio, David N. Individual teacher incentives and student performance. Journal of Public Economics 91 (2007): 901-914. Print. Helms, Ann Doss. North Carolina Teacher Pay Stranded by Shifts in Education Laws. www.newsobserver.com. 17 August 2013. Web. 7 February 2014. Kingdom, Geeta Gandhi. Does performance related pay for teachers improve student performance? Some evidence from India. Economics of Education Review 26 (2007): 473-486. Print

Milburn, Caroline. Why our best teachers are worth $150,000. Newsbank. 21 May 2012. Web. 10 March 2014.