Dakota Beacon

As I walked door-to-door distributing palm cards in Mandan for a local school board candidate, I encountered a former member of the Mandan school board.

The gentleman had served his community at a time when school board members were not paid… and had been assigned to lead the first “negotiations” with a newly formed Mandan Education Association.

He was very proud of how he handled the negotiations, recounting to me in detail concerning how he successfully completed the task. The following is a paraphrased version of what he shared with me.

“I added up all of the district’s expenses other than teachers salaries and then subtracted all those costs from the expected revenue, leaving the amount available for teacher salaries. I gave that dollar amount to the union and suggested they divide up the salaries as they wished. It took a day and my fellow board members were astounded that I had completed the negotiations so quickly. Of course teachers were only paid $4,500 to $5,000 a year then, very underpaid.”

When I suggested that his approach to “negotiations” may be the reason behind chronic low beginning teacher pay in North Dakota, He looked at me very quizzically, seeming not to understand what I had said.

Teacher Pay Issues on a Macro-economic Scale

There are many lessons to take from this revealing account of the first teacher pay negotiations in Mandan.

1. Teacher pay was low when teachers unions first arose in North Dakota.

But why was teacher pay so low? I remember that the number of students at UND seeking a teaching degree was astonishing; almost everyone wanted to be a teacher. Why? Could summers off and an 8:00-3:30 work day have anything to do with it? I also noticed that students in teaching had time to attend all kinds of extracurricular activities as I struggled to keep up with my school work as a civil engineering student.

2. Many teachers left the profession after a short time, taking higher paying jobs in private industry; for example, many of my fellow employees at a mining company in North Dakota had been teachers.

3. The concept of giving teachers the “scraps”, as the former Mandan school board member must have assumed that he was doing, was perhaps not as harmful to taxpayers until the advent of accelerating property values. As the federal government got seriously involved in education funding, and as property valuations increased significantly during the last decade, not only did teacher pay improve greatly, but the “On-the-Job Early Retirement Program” called K-12 Administration evolved due to increased state and federal regulation. The ratio of administrators to students has more than quadrupled since I was attending UND in the late 60s.

4. School Board members of today that think they must give teachers “all they can” are doing a disservice to taxpayers. While many teachers stay in the profession from a sense of duty, all teachers do not fall into that category. It is up to K-12 administration and school boards to identify teachers that excel and retain them; and identify those that give the profession a bad name and should be let go.

5. Leaving salary levels to the invention of education associations is a questionable approach to adequate teacher compensation.  The majority of teachers are long time employees that would naturally tend to favor overpaying experienced teachers at the expense of beginning teachers. School boards should develop their own salary schedules that fairly treat beginning teachers, leaving the total amount of compensation as the primary negotiating issue.

6. Lastly, the foolhardy action of the last legislative session to increase the burden of school boards by a factor of about two-thirds in funding the teacher retirement fund was a short sighted action that will have huge negative economic repercussions in the future. The session repeated the mistakes of California instead of learning from them.