I was having tea with a teacher-friend, and we got to talking about teacher salaries in our district. The Republican governor and his Tea Party pals are often blamed by the many liberal voices in Chapel Hill for the decline in teacher pay. And yet if anyone had listened to teachers in Chapel Hill last year (and for the last few years) they would know that the district had a chance to do right by us and significantly raise the across-the-board supplement… and they didn’t.

We got raises (I should say, “They” since these raises did not apply to the many part-time teachers in the district) but not as much as teachers in the neighboring county did. Instead, our school district leaders opted to institute a program in which teachers compete against each other for raises which are only awarded to a small percentage of teachers each year. In a rare