NORTH CAROLINA - Should North Carolina focus more on raising pay for new teachers instead of veterans? Duke University professor Jacob Vigdor thinks so.

Vigdor, an associate professor of economics and public policy, recently published an article that argues the first few years of a teacher's career is the best time for a salary boost. He believes the current system of rewarding teachers for every year spent in the classroom or advanced degree is flawed.

"We know that teachers get a lot better at what they do on the first couple of years on the job, and then they kind of plateau a little bit," said Vigdor.

"And we also know from our research that teachers who get master's degrees are not necessarily better in the classroom than teachers who just have a bachelor's degree, so the entire objective here is to make the rewards for teachers commensurate with the actual impact they have in the classroom."

Currently North Carolina's teachers earn a pay raise for every year spent in the classroom, and every advanced degree.

"In North Carolina we give you an automatic 10 percent boost if you get a master's degree," Vigdor pointed out. "You get an automatic 12 percent if you get this national board certification."

He said his proposal would tweak that system.

"What the schedule I'm proposing does is that it puts a lot of rewards for those first five years, when a teacher gets a lot better, and then there's a little bit of a reward for years of experience after that, but it's reduced quite a bit reflecting the fact that a lot of those gains do come in the first years and not so much in the later years," Vigdor said.

Vigdor said "the evidence says we can't associate teachers with master's degrees with better student performance in the classroom.

"So why is it that we're paying a 10 percent premium for something we can't associate with any better student outcomes?" he wondered.

Critics of the plan said boosting pay for new teachers is a good idea, but they say that change should not come at the expense of the veterans in the field.

"We certainly need to do more for our beginning teachers, but our veteran teachers are still making a minimal salary for the number of years that they have put into the education profession and for the requirements of the job that they are doing," said Sheri Strickland, president of the N.C. Association of Educators.

"We would disagree with the study in the need to shift money from the veteran teachers. It's still a very minimal salary for teachers who are there for more than 30 years and may have during that time earned a master's degree and possibly national board certification, and yet still be looking at a salary that's probably no more than about $60,000. So we feel that there is a need to more appropriately compensate teachers at all levels of the profession."

She added, "It should not take 30-plus years for a teacher to reach a $60,000 salary level."

Strickland believes teachers who earn advanced degrees or national certification should be rewarded.

"We do believe that when teachers go back and they earn a master's degree, or they work on national board certification, that there should be compensation for that as well," Strickland said. "I can't think of another profession where someone who goes back and earns advanced degrees would not then expect for there to be some compensation for those advanced degrees in their professional lives."

Vigdor's study appears in the journal "Education Next," which is published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.