Dive Brief:
- North Carolina's state Senate offered to raise teachers' salaries by 11.2% — on the condition that they give up tenure.
- The plan may also mean giving up some other things, too, as the education budget would see cuts in other areas to make the raises possible.
- In one county, 278 teacher assistants would lose their jobs along with 28 teachers. The transportation budget would also be cut by $1.1 million.
Dive Insight:
This "trade-off" proposal puts teachers in a difficult situation. The state's teachers do desperately need raises, as evidenced earlier this week when hundreds of them showed up for a Texas schools job fair. The main selling point for the job fair? Higher salaries. However, if teachers accept this deal, it could give critics ammunition against the union for being self-serving.
As Beverly Emory, the superintendent in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County, the district that would lose so many assistants, said, "It looks like addition by subtraction."