North Carolina’s new teacher turnover report paints a detailed and sometimes confusing picture of the supply and demand for educators in tumultuous times.
The state’s public schools lost more than 10,000 teachers last year, for an attrition rate of 11.5%. That’s up from 7.8% the previous year.
The attrition rate rises to 16.8% when the state tallies teachers who left one North Carolina district but moved to another. And that rate is even higher for some districts in the Charlotte region: Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Cabarrus and Gaston County schools reported attrition close to 18%, or nearly one in five teachers. In CMS, that means 1,588 teachers who were working in March 2022 were gone by March 2023.
Tom Tomberlin of the Department of Public Instruction told the state Board of Education that immediately after the pandemic, North Carolina avoided the spike in teacher attrition that showed up in national data. But now the state seems to be catching up to national averages.
“When we saw this, we started thinking about how do we understand this? Like, is this the darkening of the skies and the thunderclaps? Or can we think about this in context?” he said.
Part of that context, he said, is that despite the rising attrition rate, North Carolina’s public schools have still hired more teachers than they lost for the last six years — although in 2023 that gap narrowed. Statewide, school districts hired 650 more teachers than they lost.
State Board Chair Eric Davis of Charlotte said that seems to run counter to what he hears from district leaders about the struggle to hire teachers and cover classrooms.
“This would imply that we’ve got plenty of teachers and we shouldn’t have any open positions and districts shouldn’t have any trouble hiring teachers,” Davis said.
Tomberlin said each data point is only a snapshot. For instance, jobs that just can’t be filled may not show up in attrition numbers, he said. And some districts have better luck recruiting teachers than others.
“It sounds like you’re encouraging us to not be quick to make conclusions from this data. It’s much more complex than the simple numbers you put on the screen,” Davis said.
“Oh, it’s extremely complex,” Tomberlin said.
Vacancy rates
For instance, Tomberlin said, the statewide teacher vacancy rate appears to have nearly doubled in the last two years, from 3.4% in 2020-21 to 5.9% in 2022 and 6.4% in 2023. But he said that’s because the state switched the way it counts vacancies.
Under the old system, a position wasn’t counted as vacant as long as someone was filling it, even if that person wasn’t a licensed teacher. Now a position without a licensed teacher is counted as a vacancy, Tomberlin said. And retirees who return to temporarily cover a class also don’t count, he said, even if they’re licensed. If the old system were still in use, the 2023 vacancy rate would be about 3.7%, Tomberlin said.
CMS and other Charlotte-area districts logged vacancy rates slightly below the 2023 state average, ranging from 3.7% in Lincoln County to 6.2% in Gaston County. CMS reported a 4.7% vacancy rate.
Hiring across county lines
A new “State of the Teaching Profession Dashboard” gives a detailed look at what’s happening in each district — including the shuffle that’s playing out as districts have rolled out pay hikes and bonuses to compete with neighboring districts.
CMS, for instance, lost a total of 114 teachers to Union, Cabarrus and Gaston County schools last year. But it recruited 141 from those same districts. CMS also lost 111 teachers to charter schools. There’s no data on how many teachers left charter schools to work for school districts because the state’s reporting requirements are different for charter schools.
Union County hired 51 teachers from CMS and just a handful from several other North Carolina districts, the dashboard shows. Meanwhile, it lost 55 teachers to CMS, 16 to charter schools and eight to Cabarrus County.
Trends to watch
Though the numbers may not indicate an immediate statewide crisis, Tomberlin highlighted several trends that could spell trouble.
The numbers of departures and new hires are converging, which could mean a net loss in the near future. Attrition is especially high among beginning teachers, with a rate of 15.1% for those in their first three years on the job.
State Superintendent Catherine Truitt said what public education has in common with other state agencies that are struggling to fill jobs is “very rigid pay structures … where people get paid for doing the same job whether they do it well or not. This is not what appeals to the Millennial Generation or Gen Z.”
Truitt added that “teachers do not leave simply because of money.” She suggested that the solution lies with the Pathways To Excellence program that she and other state leaders launched two years ago. It’s designed to revise pay and licensure to provide more support for beginning teachers and higher pay for high-performing educators with experience. But that plan has so far stalled for lack of legislative support.
Alan Duncan, vice chair of the Board of Education, said it’s important to support new teachers, but “the fundamental truth is we don’t have the base compensation right for the teachers in our state.” He said better pay would make “a lot of those other things fall into place.”
Tomberlin also noted that North Carolina is becoming increasingly reliant on teachers who don’t graduate from colleges of education, instead coming from other professions or other college majors and earning licensure through alternative paths. Some get temporary teaching permits or emergency licenses that are designed to lead to full licensure, but Tomberlin said many are not completing that path.
