The National Education Association and the state chapter the North Carolina Association of Educators have a huge disagreement about the status of education funding in North Carolina.
The NEA found that North Carolina was number one in the Southeast and number seven in the nation in increased public education funding in 2019-2020.
The NEA also reported that North Carolina was number one in the Southeast in the increase of funding per pupil and number six in the nation.
NCAE members have argued that while overall funding may have shown an increase per pupil funding was down.
The Republican-led North Carolina legislature had increased teacher salaries every year since 2011, until the 2019-2020 fiscal year when Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the budget that included a teacher pay increase. Cooper said he was vetoing the budget because it didn’t expand Medicaid and the teacher salary increase wasn’t high enough. But as the result of not passing a budget teachers, unlike other state employees who received raises through mini-budget bills, didn’t get a raise at all.
Republicans maintained that Cooper’s real issue was Medicaid expansion and Cooper’s statements that the Medicaid issue had to be settled first before negotiations on the rest of the budget could take place seemed to support that stance. Cooper said that he wasn’t holding up budget negotiations because of Medicaid, at the same time saying that the Medicaid issue had to be settled first.
The mainstream media allows Democrats to make nonsensical statements like that without requiring an explanation.
The NEA also reported that in 2018-2019 the increase in instructional staff salaries was number one in the Southeast and the increase in teacher salaries was number one in the Southeast and number three in the country.
Since 2011, when the Republicans took control of the state legislature, education funding in North Carolina has increased by $1,748 per student. The total K-12 education budget has increased from $7.6 billion in 2011 to 9.8 billion in 2019.
Statistics are always fun, and the hoops people will jump through to avoid a real conversation about education funding never fails to amuse. All those numbers are true, but worthless, because there is no baseline and it ignores inflation. If you dig into the numbers you will see that per pupil spending from 2011-2016 increased at almost exactly the rate of inflation, meaning there was no real increase in resources for education (whether or not there should be is, of course, debatable). Real per pupil spending is up about 2% since 2016, but this was after the election of Gov. Cooper, so the Republicans alone cannot claim credit for this. There are also no stats on what this money is actually buying (higher test scores, better graduation rates?) or are we just building shiny new buildings? If someone could figure out how to get us back to 2011 per pupil spending with higher test scores and graduation rates, they’d get a gold star in my book, not a rotten tomato.
I am certain Cooper has done nothing to increase funding…nothing but veto the last budget…hard to increase funding when the do-nothing gov. has vetoed more bills than every previous governor combined.
Well there you have it, ‘teach’, stop your whine (and wine) and support a new GOP Gov’ ! Dan the Man.
Really a very irresponsible and quite uneducated view of education funding and teacher salary (especially using the comparison between SE states as some sort of validation of NC’s education funding – it’s like saying we’re the best of the worst).
I’ll make this one easy – using adjusted for inflation statistics, a normalized and acceptable way to help interpret statistics about funding – NC has a lower teacher salary than in 2000. A remarkable achievement considering how poorly educators are already paid in the state.
Something to be proud of, I’m sure.
So, Jim C – maybe think as you drink that kool-aid and consider the disservice a lack of understanding and awareness of the issue on the legacy of NC in terms of supporting children. Really shameful.