Terry Stoops

Since 2014, the N.C. General Assembly has signaled a commitment to raising pay for public school teachers. Over the last five years, the average salary increases approved by the state legislature have produced a 19.3 percent increase in average pay.  Competitive starting pay has been their specific focus.  According to the…

The N.C. Department of Public Instruction (NC DPI) calculates teacher pay averages by February of each year.  Because NC DPI has not produced the official figure for the current school year, we use a salary estimate produced by analysts at the N.C. General Assembly’s Fiscal Research Division.  The Social…

Last year, North Carolina public schools employed over 100,000 full-time teachers.  As a point of comparison, the largest single employer in the state, the University of North Carolina system, has just over 74,000 employees. The most common methods for raising teacher pay are embedding experience-based increases in the state salary…

According to the Statesville Free News, Iredell-Statesville Schools approved $1 million to build a facility that would wash their fleet of buses. One taxpayer thinks that it’s not money well spent.    …

Read: NC Democrat blames Republicans for low teacher pay. Why his claim is misleading Unfortunately, the article does not say a word about increases in total compensation.  After all, employee benefits were a $2.8 billion expenditure in 2017 and have increased susbstantially since the Great Recession.  Moreover, there is…

According to ACT scores released today, only 18 percent of North Carolina high school students met college readiness benchmarks in English, reading, math, and science.  And since 2014, North Carolina’s composite ACT score has barely budged and remains below the national average. According to Education Week, the national average…

In Reason magazine’s “Everything You Know About State Education Rankings Is Wrong,” Stan Liebowitz and Matthew L. Kelly rethink the ranking of state education systems.  They write, To better capture the real state of play, we recently conducted a detailed investigation of state education rankings. We built a new set of rankings…

Joel Kaplan, a senior executive at Facebook, attended a recent congressional hearing to support his friend, Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Cue the freakout! Following the appearance, many employees felt that Kaplan’s presence at the hearing signaled that Facebook as a company had endorsed Judge Kavanaugh. They expressed their discontent in…