Louis B. Gallien Jr. was less than a month into his job as education dean at Appalachian State University this past summer when North Carolina’s governor signed a budget bill that will end the state’s tradition of giving a 10-percent pay raise to teachers who complete a master’s degree. For education colleges across the state, it was a costly stroke of the pen.
Appalachian’s Reich College of Education will be down 100 students in the spring as a result of the change, said Mr. Gallien, who assumed his new role on July 1. That will cost the college about $700,000 in lost tuition dollars, he estimated.
“It’s not fatal,” Mr. Gallien said. “It’s a bleed.”
Among the myriad ways that state governments are cutting money for higher education, the end of the pay bump for teachers who earn a master’s degrees is one of the latest but probably not the last. North Carolina has been the only state to explicitly eliminate the automatic salary increases, a move that sent education colleges scrambling to get their students through the master’s pipeline in time to collect the pay benefit.
Wisconsin and Indiana put similar changes in motion two years ago when they rolled back collective-bargaining agreements to allow local school districts to de-emphasize teaching experience and degree level when deciding on raises. Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, Tennessee, Utah, and school districts in Colorado and New Jersey have also tightened the requirements for pay increases.
Fiscal conservatives and education reformers alike have attacked the automatic salary increases, calling instead for a system that rewards teachers for performance. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan addressed the issue three years ago in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, saying, “Doing more with less will likely require reshaping teacher compensation to do more to develop, support, and reward excellence and effectiveness, and less to pay people based on paper credentials.”
A report released last year by the Center for American Progress estimated that taxpayers spent $14.8-billion on the pay increases during the 2007-8 school year, a 72-percent increase from four years earlier.
Fast-Tracking Students
Rep. D. Craig Horn, a Republican and a co-chair of the North Carolina House of Representatives appropriations subcommittee on education, voted to end the pay bump. “My approach to every line item was, ‘What are we getting for what we’re paying?’” said Mr. Horn.
After North Carolina changed the law, first-time enrollments in East Carolina University’s master’s program for elementary- and middle-school teachers dropped from 411 students in the fall of 2012 to 340 students this fall. That amounts to 960 credit hours, or three faculty positions, said Linda A. Patriarca, dean of East Carolina’s College of Education. When professors retire or leave, she said, it will be difficult to justify replacing them.
The abruptness of the change forced Ms. Patriarca and other education deans to balance a desire to accommodate students with the need to maintain standards. “We’ve had to add a section because those who might have taken it in the summer now need to take it in the spring,” she said. “But we wouldn’t fast-track students who needed 18 or 20 hours.”
In retrospect, even Mr. Horn acknowledged that he and his colleagues had acted too hastily in voting to end the pay bump. Teachers who were already in the postgraduate pipeline should be given time to get their degrees before the pay-raise deadline arrives, he said.
“We pulled the rug out from under people who had made the financial and time commitment to get their master’s,” he said. The State Board of Education extended from April 1 to May 7 the date by which teachers must show they have completed their master’s degrees in order to get the pay bump. Mr. Horn said he was working with his colleagues to extend the master’s degree pay raise to any teacher who begins collecting it by the end of the 2014-15 academic year.
That possibility may do little to assuage the concerns of deans like Ms. Patriarca, who said retooling a program to respond to the demands of the market and legislators’ whims can take as long as three years by the time the request makes its way through the various layers of the bureaucracy. “Policy decisions, whether right or wrong, have a lot of unanticipated consequences,” she said. “I know that we move too slow, but sometimes they move too fast.”
A Boon for Ball State
Among the changes Indiana imposed two years ago was a new salary model that gives more weight to factors like teacher evaluations, leadership, and the academic needs of students. The teacher’s experience and level of education—including newly acquired master’s degrees—would count for no more than 33 percent of any raise.
When John Jacobson, dean of Ball State University’s Teachers College, got wind of the looming change, the date by which prospective master’s students would have to begin their programs in order to receive the full pay increase was scarcely more than a month away.
But where others saw storm clouds, Mr. Jacobson saw opportunity. Most of Ball State’s master’s-level education courses are offered online, meaning students would not have to travel. Administrators quickly got a plan together: Adjuncts who taught one course would teach two. Full-time faculty members would teach overtime. Postcards would be sent to all Indiana teachers notifying them of the coming change. Emails containing application links would go out to principals and superintendents around the state. Anyone who applied by June 6 would hear back by June 21 about whether they had been admitted.
“Our university stepped up to the plate and put together a nice package,” Mr. Jacobson said. “We were able to admit over 400 more students to a master’s program than we typically admit during that same period of time.”
At about $10,000 in tuition and fees for a master’s degree, he said, the university grossed $4-million that it wouldn’t have otherwise had.
Mr. Jacobson acknowledges that such opportunities are rare. By last year, new master’s enrollments at Teachers College had dropped substantially, but the trend line was still angled up, something Mr. Jacobson attributed at least partially to professional commitment. The loss of the pay incentive notwithstanding, he said, serious educators will continue to aspire to the master’s degree because it is a career goal that makes them better teachers.
Jonathan Plucker, an education professor at the University of Connecticut, applauded Ball State’s success, saying that public schools of education are “huge ships to turn.” But the gain will be short-lived if Ball State doesn’t continue to change with the times, he said. Some weak programs will suffer or even be eliminated, Mr. Plucker predicted, but the quality ones will survive by adapting to changing pay models and market demands. “If you are producing value,” he said, “people will vote with their feet.”
