Things are Dippy over at DPI

The new website didn’t help matters.

Ever since he took office in January 2017, relations between NC Superintendent of Schools Mark Johnson and advocates for the state’s teachers and public schools have grown ever more acrimonious. If Johnson had wanted to establish warmth and collegiality with teachers and the various groups that claim to speak for them, several missteps have placed obstacles in the path:

  • He commented, during a Q&A session at a statewide meeting of school boards, that a starting salary of $35,000 for new teachers was “a lot of money” for starting teachers, presumably in their 20s.

At the time (January 2018), the Raleigh News & Observer reported that Johnson himself was earning  $127,561.

  • He tweeted that teacher pay was “on the right track” a mere 8 days before the “Red4Ed” March for Students and Rally for Respect (May 16, 2018).

(That rally caused 40 NC school districts to close due to the large number of teachers who took personal days off. Various estimates pegged attendance at 20,000 people or more. Plus, teachers appear to feel a lack of respect, nationally. However, Johnson chose not to attend it. Nor did he attend the teachers’ rally on May 1, 2019. Both rallies took place  a few yards from the DPI offices.)

  • Johnson has not added his voice to the chorus of those who would like to see changes to School Performance Grades (SPGs) and how they are derived. Multiple experts have argued that each school’s “grade” is based on a flawed formula that places too much weight on test scores and not enough on student “growth,” an EVAAS measure that attempts to correct for external factors in a student’s life that might affect that student’s performance on a single test, on a single day.

At a press conference on the day that the SPGs for the 2017-18 school year were published, Johnson briefly acknowledged that they were less than stellar for the state as a whole. But he did not use the opportunity to mention the basic 80% achievement, 20% growth formula. He instead emphasized that although North Carolina’s teachers and principals were “working hard” to ensure student success, they were “confined” in a system that was “designed for the industrial age.” He went on to tout his initiatives to promote innovative school reform that would “let them try things differently, different for the 21st century.”

  • Johnson’s been largely silent on the subject of “class-size chaos,” the unfunded mandate from the NCGA to sharply reduce the number of students in K – 3 classrooms. We’ve expressed an opinion on this topic before. (Summary: It’s too expensive, and it hasn’t been funded.) Class-size reduction will be disastrous for many schools and districts. Has Johnson spoken publicly on this topic?
  • Advocates for public schools in NC are angry that in terms of per-pupil spending, NC ranks right near the bottom in the U.S. The website governing.com ranked NC sixth from the bottom in per-pupil spending in 2016 ($8,792). Using a different methodology, EdWeek says that the national average spending per pupil in 2018 was $12,526, and that NC spent only $9,217. Their per-pupil figures are “adjusted for regional cost differences across states” and do not include “construction or other capital spending.”

North Carolina ranked 45th in the nation that year for overall school finance, in EdWeek’s estimation. They also report that South Carolina spent $11,178 per student that year. If you were the state’s Superintendent of Schools, why would you not vocally and publicly lobby the state legislature for a level of per-pupil spending that at least matches the national average? Or for funding that at least matches SC’s spending?

For some, the new NC School Finances website—launched a day or so before Johnson’s pointed non-attendance at the teachers’ May 1 rally—was the final straw. Multiple commentators seized on the fact that the main page features a graphic that compares the average NC teacher’s salary for the 2018-2019 school year with the median household income in NC in 2017. If the data on median—or better yet, average—household incomes in 2018 wasn’t available for purposes of this comparison, surely the School Finances website should have instead compared the average teacher’s salary for the 2017-18 school year with that latest, preferably accurate, average household income data. Plus, according to Census data, the actual average household in NC has an annual income of $70,523, not $50,320, as the website claims. To read more about these inaccuracies, see this op-ed from WRAL.


As it stands, DPI appears to be cherry-picking data to spin teachers’ salaries in the best possible light, reflecting the modest raises that teachers received in the 2018 budget while dramatically lowballing household income. The site has a dual purpose: to recruit candidates for the state’s unfilled teacher positions, and to lead the public to believe that the General Assembly is doing a swell job of steering the educational ship in NC. Neither cause is particularly well served by these inaccuracies.

Johnson has called for additional raises for teachers. But his statements on the issue tend to give a lot of credit to state legislators for the recent spate of modest increases. (A 3% or 4% raise on a $51,000 salary amounts to under $1800 per year, raising the salary to only $52,785.)  In early March 2019, Johnson was quoted by Kelly Hinchcliffe of WRAL as saying, “North Carolina’s meteoric rise in just five years is a major accomplishment and shows our commitment to teachers and students. We must continue to be aggressive on teacher pay and also on treating teachers as professionals in other ways – providing advanced teacher roles for professional growth, better pay for assistant principals and principals, and 21st century tools and support for educators and students.”

The idea of starting to treat teachers as professionals is getting close to the point that teachers are trying to make when they leave their classrooms to attend rallies. But  he surely raised many hackles by using the phrase “meteoric rise” to describe raises that, adjusted for inflation and aggressively capped by the most recent salary schedules, still consign teachers to poverty-level wages.

Some contend that these are not missteps at all. Ever since he’s been at the helm of DPI, Johnson has appeared to curry favor with Republicans in the General Assembly, presumably with a view toward gaining a stronger negotiating position for North Carolina’s schools. However, the website fits well into a darker narrative in which Johnson continues to build support for charter schools and private-school vouchers at the expense of traditional public schools. The present state legislature seems to have a very favorable view of private-school vouchers, and big money is at stake. Is Johnson more closely aligned with educators and districts, or with deep-pocketed charter operators and private-school directors looking for revenue?

In mid-May 2019, one end result of Johnson’s missteps was a petition titled “North Carolina PTA should not have Mark Johnson as Keynote Speaker at the NCPTA conference” on change.org. Claiming to speak for members of the NCPTA, the petition accuses Johnson of being on the wrong side of the class-size reduction mandate, of advocating for “school choice” initiatives that undermine public education, and of supporting the proposal for a new school-supply app that tightly controls teachers’ purchases and reallocates existing, inadequate funds instead of fully funding school supplies. In seven days, the petition garnered 154 signatures, even though the NCPTA is a non-partisan organization, and its author did not circulate it widely.

Another result of his questionable choices has been a proliferation of opponents who’ve filed to unseat Johnson at DPI in the 2020 election. Four Democrats have already started campaigning. Perhaps the debates that will ensue will serve to refocus everyone’s agenda on the silent thousands who can’t vote: North Carolina’s children.