“Teachers: want a $500 raise?”
That’s the message plastered on several billboards across North Carolina. The billboards direct viewers to a webpage titled “Top reasons why you should cancel your North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) membership.”
The billboard campaign is funded by the John Locke Foundation, a right-leaning think tank co-founded by North Carolina businessman and megadonor Art Pope. Dues for the NCAE are about $500 a year, and teachers are always asking for raises, so it makes sense, right?
Wrong. Too many conservatives don’t care enough about teachers getting a raise. If they did, North Carolina’s teacher pay might rank higher than 33rd in the nation. But what they do seem to care about is shrinking the state’s largest teacher’s group, which regularly advocates for things like increased school funding and pay raises for teachers.
These billboard campaigns have appeared along highways before. The Civitas Institute, another conservative group also tied to Art Pope, has put up similar billboards telling teachers to opt-out of their NCAE memberships in order to get a “raise.” (John Locke and Civitas joined forces at the start of the year.)
John Locke and Civitas, along with conservative lawmakers, love to characterize NCAE as a big, bad teachers’ union. But that’s disingenuous, and they know it. North Carolina is a right-to-work state, which significantly limits the power of labor unions, and state law prohibits collective bargaining for public employees. NCAE membership is optional, paying dues is optional, and the organization doesn’t engage in collective bargaining or really any kind of “negotiation” at all. A decade ago, Republicans even tried to end payroll deductions for NCAE dues — but that law was deemed unconstitutional because NCAE was the only organization it targeted.
Add it up and NCAE isn’t really a union, at least not in the way many Republicans want you to think it is. The North Carolina Nurses Association, for example, is similar to NCAE in that it advocates on behalf of the nursing profession. But no one is calling that organization a union or putting up billboards urging nurses to cancel their NCNA membership. So why is it that teachers are the ones that conservatives choose to demonize?
The billboards are an insulting gimmick, making light of teachers’ very real difficulties in order to take a cheap shot at NCAE. Most of all, they’re a distraction, painting NCAE as the enemy in hopes that it will divert your attention from the issue at hand: the fact that North Carolina continues to shortchange its teachers.
Being a teacher in North Carolina means earning 25% less per week than your similarly educated peers in other fields. It means waiting two years for a much-needed pay raise because the state hasn’t managed to pass a budget. It means spending an average of $526 each year of your own money on school supplies. It often means working additional jobs to make ends meet. That’s a grim reality, and it’s orchestrated primarily by Republicans, who apparently think teachers should be happy with insufficient pay increases that hardly keep up with inflation and still fall short of the national average.
Paltry teacher salaries are among the reasons why the state is facing a mounting teacher shortage. That doesn’t just hurt teachers — it hurts our children, too. North Carolina has a shortage of math and special education teachers in grades K-12, and a shortage of teachers in all core subjects in elementary school grades for the 2021-22 school year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education. That shortage, coupled with underfunded schools and a COVID-19 learning loss, puts students in a precarious position.
But whenever groups like NCAE try to call attention to these issues, those on the right try to discredit the organization. That’s sadly emblematic of the state of public education in North Carolina — an issue that, over the years, has become just as contentious as things like health care and gun rights.
NCAE isn’t the problem. The problem is that when we let important issues like education become a battleground for political warfare — not to mention cheap political stunts — we all lose.
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