A version of this story first appeared in WFAE Education Reporter James Farrell's weekly newsletter. Sign up here to get newsletters from WFAE straight to your inbox.
Last week, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction released its annual report on teacher attrition, vacancies and employment trends, giving us our latest window into schools’ efforts to recruit and retain educators.
Teacher attrition — a measurement of teachers who leave North Carolina public schools entirely — ticked up from 9.88% to 10.11%, but state officials said this fraction-of-a-percentage-point increase was not large enough to be meaningful.
“It probably represents the kind of wobble, changes in the data from year-to-year. We don’t think anything positive or negative is happening in regard to attrition from the previous year,” said DPI’s Thomas Tomberlin at last week’s state Board of Education meeting.
As this chart shows, North Carolina saw a sizable increase in attrition in 2022-2023. So the attrition rate is still elevated compared to where it was before then — and it still represents the fact that roughly 1 in 10 teachers left the profession last year.
Vacancies — defined as a teaching position not filled by an educator with a qualifying license — can be a bit of a more complicated picture to nail down, but that perhaps highlights why this is a problem in North Carolina. That’s because vacancies are a fluid issue that schools are battling all year long. For some districts, every day it’s a different number, influenced by enrollment and recruitment efforts.
“What I hear from the districts is that this is an ongoing issue throughout the entire school year, all the way up to the end, of filling vacancies,” Tomberlin said.
While the attrition data covers from March 2024 to March 2025, vacancy data is based on the 40th day of the current school year. This year’s statewide vacancy rate was 7.4%, down from about 7.6% last year, with state officials again considering that stable.
There were around 6,721 vacant positions across the state. About 1,000 of those are completely unfilled. Another 4,500 or so are filled by teachers with temporary or provisional licenses. Another 900 are being filled by long-term subs. The remainder are being filled by rehired retirees.
What does this tell us about who is leaving the teaching profession?
So, about that 10.11% attrition rate. That number alone doesn’t tell the whole story.
First, that number’s a statewide average — and it masks a lot of variability.
“Individual districts’ experience with this measure will vary greatly. Many of our districts have very low attrition, many have very high attrition,” Tomberlin said.
If you look at the workbook for this data, you can see that school districts' attrition rates vary from 4.3% to 26.5%. That range is even greater when you include teachers who leave one school district to go to another North Carolina school district — a measure that doesn’t say much about teachers leaving the profession, but that highlights the challenges individual school districts might be facing in terms of retaining teachers. By that measure, attrition rates vary from 6.5% to 40.8%.
School districts in our region were generally pretty stable from last year and only slightly differed from state numbers. Here’s a breakdown of a few:
- Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools had an attrition rate of 11.2% — so, slightly above the state attrition rate, and up a bit from last year’s rate of 10.8%. The attrition rate was 14.9% when accounting for teachers who left for other North Carolina districts — right around the state average of 14.6% and up slightly from last year’s number of 14.1%. The vacancy rate was around 8% — down from last year’s rate of 10.5%, but that also accounts for the fact that CMS had around 500 fewer positions to fill this year.
- Gaston County Schools saw a bit of an uptick in its attrition rate of 11.4%. That was 10.3% last year. It was a more modest increase when accounting for teachers who left for other districts: 15.7% compared to 15.5%, but that number is also a little farther off the state average. The vacancy rate was 5.4%, down from 9.4% last year, which accounts for around 200 fewer positions.
- Cabarrus County Schools had an attrition rate of 10.2% and 16%, with teachers leaving for other districts. Both of those numbers were virtually identical last year (10.3% and 15.9%). The vacancy rate dropped slightly from 10.2% to 9.7%, with 85 fewer positions.
- Union County Schools saw roughly 1-percentage-point increases in both numbers this year: 10.2% attrition compared to 8.9% attrition last year, and 14.7% compared to 13.4% attrition with teachers leaving for other districts. The vacancy rate was among the lowest in the region at 1.5%, down from 2.9% last year, with the number of positions generally holding steady.
Second, not all types of teachers are leaving the profession at the same rates.
This chart shows that teachers with more than 30 years of experience are leaving the profession at the highest rate. That’s not surprising — it mostly accounts for retirement.
But on the other end of the chart, we see that teachers in their first five years of teaching are also more likely to leave the profession, with attrition rates varying from 14% to 18%.
“This is a critical stage,” Tomberlin said, and it raises questions about “how do we best support these teachers, and help them mesh with our public school systems and make those durable matches between teachers and our students in the classroom.”
Leaks in the pipeline
North Carolina has a growing pipeline problem.
Its Educator Preparation Programs, which are supposed to help create qualified, licensed teachers in classrooms, are yielding fewer teachers. That comes even as enrollment has increased by 25% over the last 10 years.
When I wrote about this presentation last year, 40% of all first-year teachers had received training and qualifying licenses through a state EPP. That number is down to 35% this year. A growing number of first-year North Carolina teachers are entering on emergency licenses or permits to teach (29%), are teachers who are coming in from out-of-state (20%) or who are international teachers (13%).
“It hasn’t always been this way,” said Andy Baxter, EPP data analyst at last week’s state board meeting. “It’s changed dramatically.”
In fact, as recently as 2021, around 60% of first-year teachers were coming from EPPs.
“The question is, is our North Carolina Educator Pipeline, is it providing enough freshly minted brand new teachers to replace those who are leaving?” Baxter said. “And the answer is no.”
Baxter put it this way: For every five teachers who enter a North Carolina EPP, two will complete the program and teach effectively within a year. But at the same time, eight current teachers will leave the profession.
Baxter said we don’t know why these enrollees end up not teaching in North Carolina or where they are going. But we do have an idea of where in the process they’re falling off.
This image demonstrates that many don’t complete the EPP. More fall off after completing the program, and don’t end up teaching at all. And more still are not considered to be teaching “effectively” within a year of finishing the program.
Meanwhile, the North Carolina Association of Educators expressed disappointment in the overall attrition numbers, blaming the North Carolina General Assembly for failing “to invest in educators in ways that retain educators or attract new ones to the profession.”
State Board of Education Chair Eric Davis spoke of the importance of improving support for teachers and principals.
“I think it’s a whole mindset change, from just looking at information and how can we tweak it a bit, to how can we create the best teacher and principal support program in the nation,” Davis said. “That’s the challenge we’ve got to step it up to meet.”
