After years of unprecedented shortages, are teachers prepared for North Carolina's ambitious education goals?

Jackie Dickens had to take a breather. Two of her students had just gotten into a bad fight. One was bleeding from a busted nose.

Dickens knew, on a surface level, the fight wasn’t her fault. But she felt some responsibility. After all, she had spent months trying to impart lessons on controlling emotions.

“I told them I was very disappointed because I taught them better than that,” said Dickens, a first-year educator who teaches third-grade math at Martin Millennium Academy in Edgecombe County.

Dickens and her fellow first-year teachers say they are learning the harsh reality that no amount of preparation is sufficient for being the sole leader of a public school classroom.

“It’s really been challenging, if I’m being honest,” Dickens said.

She added: “My teacher toolbox is limited right now.” She longs for more tools to be an effective teacher.

First-year teachers such as Dickens describe working long hours — as many as 65 hours or more per week — surrounded by overworked co-workers and mentors who have limited capacity to help them. They’ve all taken on big responsibilities, teaching classes in which their students will take the state’s end-of-course standardized tests that their schools are judged on. They earn just $37,000, although they say teaching children and seeing children learn is rewarding.

North Carolina education leaders have set their sights on improving education, yet their most essential resources for success — teachers — are hurting. For most of the past five years, the state has projected a shortage of nearly every type of teacher.

At the same time, North Carolina education leaders want to enhance educator effectiveness and quality, increase students’ test scores and boost high school graduates’ readiness for careers and college.

For years, Edgecombe County Schools has had one of the worst attrition rates of teachers in the state, hovering around 20%.

The eastern North Carolina district has often been rated a “low-performing district” — a stigmatic distinction reflecting standardized test performance that exerts pressure on schools to turn things around. More than two-thirds of the district's schools were considered low-performing in the spring. With just a few exceptions, less than one-third of students tested were not grade-level proficient in any subject.

Edgecombe is the type of system the Leandro lawsuit seeks to turn around. But it and other school systems across the state are facing logistical challenges.

“Smaller, rural, particularly high-poverty communities lose their teacher workforce, and it's very difficult to replace them,” said Matthew Bristow-Smith, principal of Edgecombe Early College High School. “Is it teacher working conditions? Perhaps. Is it lack of opportunity to advance professionally? Maybe. Is it low teacher pay? In many cases, yes. Is it low supplements, low local teacher pay supplements in local areas? Probably.

“Every great teacher I know wants to make a difference in the lives of children. And I think there are a lot of people who leave the profession for reasons other than their heart for children and other than their desire to stay in the classroom.”

North Carolina needs to make significant changes to get closer to the goals of Leandro and even the stated goals of lawmakers who oppose some of the findings in the lawsuit, said North Carolina state Rep. Ashton Clemmons, D-Guilford. Clemmons, a former teacher and education administrator, has been an active member of various education committees in the state legislature.

“The people who are in front of our children, and the school administrators who set the culture of the buildings that our children are going into, are fundamentally tied to this aspirational goal that we're trying to get to,” Clemmons said. “We have seen some significant changes to how we are valuing or devaluing public education as a profession and our state in the past several years.”

In his 2002 ruling in Leandro, Superior Court Judge Howard Manning said each classroom needed “a competent, certified, well-trained teacher who is teaching the standard course of study by implementing effective educational method(s) that provide differentiated, individualized instruction, assessment and remediation to the students in that classroom.”

In his 2018 order in Leandro, late Superior Court Judge W. David Lee said a high-quality teacher “is supported with early and ongoing professional learning and provided competitive pay.”

In other instances, North Carolina policies or federal laws have defined a quality education, an effective teacher or a highly qualified teacher. Those can include measurements of test scores. In North Carolina, a “highly qualified” teacher is a new graduate of an education preparation program who had at least a 3.75 grade-point average and scored high enough on tests.

By the numbers: How North Carolina's classrooms have changed since Leandro

The North Carolina General Assembly eliminated state funding for professional development and teacher mentors during the Great Recession and has never restored it. That has left teachers — who must earn continuing education credits to renew their teaching license — and local school systems to spend their own money on professional development, find grants and scholarships or divert some of their state funding to professional development. Before the cuts, the state had spent more than $10 million annually on professional development and more than $3 million on mentors for early-career teachers, with every school system receiving funding.

For decades, in federal applications and other documents, education officials in this fast-growing state have referred to having a “teacher shortage” to some degree. Most commonly, they’ve reported shortages in math, science and special education teachers.

But today, and throughout most of the past five years, teacher shortages exist across nearly every subject area and grade level in the state, federal Teacher Shortage Area survey records show. The records, submitted by the state, show shortages exist among many more teaching subjects now than ever.

When the Leandro lawsuit was filed in 1994, the state considered just four types of teachers to be in short supply: High school chemistry teachers, two types of special education teachers and health-related career and technical education teachers.

In 2004, when the North Carolina Supreme Court said the state wasn’t meeting its obligation to provide access to a sound basic education to all North Carolina children, the state considered only middle and high school math and science teachers to be in short supply. This school year, the federal government lists 13 types of teachers: Core elementary school teachers; elementary, middle and high school special education teachers; Middle and high school math, social studies, science and language arts teachers; and high school career and technical education teachers.

That reality reflects years of problems for the teaching profession, said Rhonda Schuhler, superintendent of Franklin County Schools.

“The state needs to take a pretty significant step towards addressing the pipeline of teachers entering those education programs that are universities across the state,” Schuhler said.

Schuhler suggests a reversal of more recent legislative changes: Restoring longevity pay for teachers, expanding the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program for prospective educators, restoring certain health care benefits upon retirement, restoring higher pay for teachers who have master’s degrees and examining whether teachers earn enough money to support their families.

Lawmakers have provided higher pay increases for educators than for other state employees and have gradually expanded the Teaching Fellows program after cutting it a decade ago. Republican leaders argue master’s degrees don’t necessarily correlate with higher student test scores, while observers argue teachers pursued master’s degrees for the pay differential.

Academically, North Carolina students have experienced only slight upticks in reading and math proficiency in the past two decades, according to the National Assessment for Educational Progress. Proficiency rates were declining in some subjects even before the COVID-19 pandemic led to slowed learning. No reliable statewide testing data exist to compare academic progress since the Leandro lawsuit was filed. Consistent federal data that uses samples of students only goes back to 2002 and 2003 on fourth-grade and eighth-grade reading and math.

North Carolina’s school funding goes almost entirely toward employee pay and benefits, especially at the state level. There, about 94% of state funding is just going toward employees. Only about two-thirds of federal and local funding does, not including capital costs.

That’s about the same as 1994, when the lawsuit was filed, and in 2004, when the state Supreme Court ordered the state to provide a “sound basic education.”

Disinterest in teaching doesn’t come from a lack of respect for the profession among most people.

Ny’Asia Dickens-Jones’ journey to teaching in North Carolina feels both inevitable and serendipitous.

Growing up, she used to work on speech exercises from the school with her youngest sister, who had a speech impediment. She always played the teacher in games of Pretend.

“I would take those items and just teach my sister, like how to help sound words out, and try to get her to understand what the words were,” said Dickens-Jones, who isn’t related to Jackie Dickens. She probably couldn’t have articulated how she felt as a child, but as an adult she knows why she was drawn to teaching: “I just enjoyed helping my sister out. But now that I think about it, it was really rewarding.”

But a little bit of luck is how she found herself at the front of a classroom, alone, this August, teaching her own set of eighth-grade English language arts students.

One of the most ambitious efforts of any school system in North Carolina to develop and grow a pipeline of teachers happened to be in motion in her hometown, in Edgecombe County.

Dickens-Jones needed only to apply to Scholar Teachers in high school and gain entry to the system’s Early College High School. She’d learn some of the ins and outs of teaching before heading to college, where she’d earn a degree in education. If she returned home to Edgecombe County Schools and taught for three years, the school system would pay her $30,000 toward her student loans.

So she took them up on it.

“I would have tried my hardest to be a teacher, but [that] more than likely wouldn't have worked out for me,” Dickens-Jones said. “I wasn't in a predicament when my parents could really afford to send me to college.”

She graduated from Barton College in the spring and started teaching at West Edgecombe Middle School in August. Without Scholar Teachers, she said she probably would have kept working in retail like she was in high school.

“Our thinking was, ‘Let's look inward and see if we can tap our own talent pipeline that we have right here in our own backyard,’” said Bristow-Smith, who pitched the program to district officials. Turnover, averaging about 20%, is too high, he said. “It's not just about trying to help you to become a teacher. It's about helping you to do that, but also to return to this community.”

Leigh Ann Webb, who teaches the Scholar Teachers, estimates about half of the Scholar Teachers she’s had in the past several years would have pursued other professions.

“There are so many things that can catch their eye when they go to college,” Webb said.

Now, the program is funded by donations from companies and organizations in the community. Dickens, Dickens-Jones and Ateonya Whitaker are the first cohort of Scholar Teachers to begin their teaching careers, all this year.

“It is incredibly difficult to find anybody that wants to teach, certainly, anyone that meets the qualifications to be eligible to teach,” said Kelsey Ballard, the principal of West Edgecombe Middle School. “And so one of the things that I like about the Scholar Teacher program is we are using our folks locally.”

Some experts have said negative perceptions of the teaching profession don’t match reality. Teachers earn more than most professions, though much less than those with similar education levels. Teachers also receive public benefits.

“Oftentimes, 22-year-olds aren't super focused on their retirement in 30 years,” Ballard said.

But sometimes young people’s perceptions are spot on, Ballard said, and indicate ways the teaching profession can be made more attractive, with some help.

“What you get paid definitely is impactful for encouraging or discouraging folks to enter the education field,” Ballard said. People can earn more starting out in other fields and find steeper, and more frequent, pay increases.

“Usually we will say that teachers are highly intrinsically motivated. You know, they find the job rewarding,” said Eric Houck, associate professor of education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He acknowledged that teachers may be less interested in salaries than people who pursue other careers. “I really chafe at the idea that teachers don't care about money. Everybody cares about money, right? Everybody deserves to have a good life and be able to afford a good life.”

Ballard herself started out as a teacher, lured in through the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program. She became an administrator for the money — something she thinks most, if not all, administrators would say.

But people are also right about the everyday challenges of teaching, beyond pay, Ballard said.

“The day-in and day-out work of being in education is tiring,” she said. Sure, teachers stand all day, get short lunch breaks and have few bathroom breaks. But the workload and the expectations also just don’t match the salary, she said.

“It seems like, ‘Well, there's probably a lot of other careers that I could pursue to do less work for the same or even greater amount of pay,’” Ballard said. “Because no doubt, teaching is hard work. I don't know of a teacher here that doesn't take work home with them in the evenings, while their work hours are 7:30 to 3:30. They're doing work far earlier than 7:30 and far later than 3:30 in the afternoon.”

Schuhler said the hiring pool is shrinking beyond just more rural school districts. She discussed the problems with other superintendents during a meeting this summer.

“We had an open conversation about the challenges that we're experiencing with recruitment. And whether… they're from eastern North Carolina, western North Carolina, central North Carolina, large district, small district, affluent, less affluent district — they are all dealing with the same challenge,” Schuhler said. “There's a limited pool of candidates for positions that are out there. Right now, when folks are leaving the profession, there's just not a pool of candidates to draw from.”

Ballard looks beyond applications.

“When it comes to hiring in general, most of the success that I have found has been through local connections, not through the online licensure or the online application portal,” Ballard said. She’ll talk with people she knows and find out if they or anyone they know is looking for a career change or recently graduated college but doesn’t have a career plan. “‘Hey, have you ever thought about teaching?’ Gone are the days where the universities around are pushing out a pipeline of teachers just ready to be hired.”

Increasingly, North Carolina’s teachers are coming from non-traditional pathways, meaning they don’t have education degrees. Research shows many of those teachers can become effective with some experience, but data show they have higher turnover rates.

That recruiting strategy — approaching people without education degrees — can pose a retention problem later on. North Carolina requires those teachers to complete educator preparation programs and pass exams within three years or they can’t continue to teach.

The three Scholar Teachers decorated their classrooms, made lesson plans, got to know their new co-workers and took deep breaths in preparation for their first year of leading classrooms, all by themselves.

The summer sun blared through school windows, unyielding as they prepared for what they believed fall, winter and spring might have in store for them.

“I’m scared to death,” said Jackie Dickens, as she prepared to teach third-grade math at Martin Millennium Academy. She believed she was putting a lot of pressure on herself and tried to remember her preparation at Edgecombe Early College High School and East Carolina University. But in August, before classes had started, she knew little about her students, and they knew little about her. “I have no idea where they come from, how they think.”

She’s persevered before. Her internships as a high school student were hard, and her mom used to see her for lunch each day until falling severely ill from complications with lupus. Her father had died when she was 13 years old, and she leaned on her uncle, a retired educator. She promised her mom she would continue teaching.

Whitaker was puzzling over lesson plans.

“In general, I think I know how to be a good teacher,” she said. “But I think I'm a little bit worried about how to be a good English teacher.”

The 23-year-old who wore high heels and blazers in high school said she would lean on administration for help if she needed it but was stepping forward with some confidence.

The door to Ny’Asia Dickens-Jones’ middle school classroom this fall sported a poster reading: “All things are difficult before they are easy.”

She decorated her eighth-grade English language arts room at West Edgecombe Middle School with even more inspirational posters. Affirmations for her students, herself or really anyone.

The soft-spoken 23-year-old was getting ready for her first full-time teaching job, in a school system with one of the highest turnover rates in North Carolina, feeling nervous but excited.

“I'm taking it one day at a time,” Dickens-Jones said. “I'm asking all the necessary questions I have to ask.”

She was trying to form relationships with other teachers she could lean on if needed. “It's all about adapting and changing and finding out what goes wrong and what goes right. Trying to stick to what's going right.”

The Scholar Teachers program attempts to provide extra preparation for its teachers. By exposing them to teaching before college, they can get more out of their college experience and be even more ready than most to teach on the first day of their first full-time jobs.

While part of the story of the teacher shortage is a lack of applicants, the other part is the effort to keep teachers in the classroom.

Some turnover is inevitable. People retire, move away, resign for family obligations or make a career move. In North Carolina, in the past five years, teacher turnover has typically topped 12%, or nearly 12,000 teachers. About two-thirds of those teachers quit teaching in North Carolina and the other third quits one teaching job in the state for another. That leaves thousands of classrooms empty and administrators with just a few months to fill them.

This year, many parents and teachers have reported classrooms without a regular teacher, being covered by anyone available in a building or by a variety of substitutes. Many classes rely more heavily on worksheets or software programs to teach students. Some classes have been conducted using contracts with private providers for online learning. Gym classes have been turned into long recesses. Spanish classes are supervised by people who don’t know Spanish.

Helen Ladd, a professor emeritus at Duke University, said retention — and helping teachers be successful — often requires more than good pay.

Teachers are also drawn to resources, Ladd said. Many teachers with good effectiveness scores often go to work at lower-poverty schools.

Students have more needs than teachers can meet, Ladd said, so teachers want to be where schools have adequate psychologists, nurses, social workers and counselors.

“Kids are coming to school with all sorts of challenges,” especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Ladd said. “You can’t expect individual teachers to deal with all those student needs that may differ from student to student.”

Experienced teachers told WRAL News they felt they were underpaid compared to the amount of work they do. But, they stressed pay isn’t the only problem.

They’re exhausted from the daily demands and tasks of the job, from the pressure of test scores, from trying to compete with students’ cellphone use, from growing student behavior issues, from not feeling supported by their principals, from legislative cuts to educator benefits and training, from buying their own classroom supplies, from the culture wars and scrutiny over curriculum and accusations that they are “groomers.” During the pandemic, they rushed to learn and use new technology for remote learning and struggled to keep children engaged.

They find teaching rewarding, and some don’t think they’ll quit but understand why others would.

“This crisis of filling classrooms and filling principals’ offices was simmering on a level five or six as we made these policy decisions in the past decade,” Clemmons said. “But COVID turned it up to an eight, nine or 10.”

Dickens, Dickens-Jones and Whitaker have heard the frustrations. Teaching still felt like the right thing for them to do. Their internships and student teaching positions were challenging but worth it.

A couple of weeks into the school year, Dickens-Jones described the job as being tougher than she imagined, but she still felt optimistic.

“It's a lot to wrap your head around,” she said. “But I'm getting better at it as the days go by, which is good. That's all I can hope for, really.”

Dickens-Jones speaks gently. In front of an 8th grade class, she doesn’t appear much older than her students. She doesn’t command them, and she can tell.

“It’s nothing similar to when I was student teaching,” Dickens-Jones said. “I was kind of shell-shocked. The first day I had to teach myself, because I really wanted somebody in the classroom with me. And I was like, I can't have that. That's just, it's just me now.“

Dickens-Jones missed two days of school in September with migraines. When she returned the following Monday, she said some of the students were excited to see her.

“And the reason was because they've lost a lot of teachers early on in the year that have just quit on them,” Dickens-Jones said. “So they were like, ‘Yeah, we're kind of traumatized with teachers just leaving us.’ And then they were like, ‘Well, we're really happy that you came back.’”

She was shocked.

“Up until that point, it just seemed like I was fighting to teach them, because they were just like a little resistant, that they don't want to learn, or they don't want to focus,” Dickens-Jones recalled. In that moment, she felt like her work wasn’t being taken for granted by everyone, which she sometimes felt it was. “It's hard not to feel that way sometimes, like just by the mood of the classroom and the way that they're participating. It's easy to think, ‘Oh, they're not listening, like I'm wasting my time,’ or something like that.”

Bristow-Smith, the proponent of the Scholar Teachers program, isn’t just concerned with recruiting teachers in the first place.

“I think if we solved the retention problem, then our recruitment and human capital pipeline issues would be greatly reduced,” Bristow-Smith said. “So there's no question that we have to find ways to make the quality of the teaching profession better for the folks that do the work on the ground, for the classroom teachers.”

The school system was an early adopter of the state’s Advanced Teaching Roles program for that reason, he said. Teachers in those roles help their fellow teachers and often have reduced teaching responsibilities to do so. Ideally, they’re paid more, but the state doesn’t fund that.

That change in responsibilities hopefully means “teachers can actually do what they've been hired to do,” Bristow-Smith said. It could also help keep teachers by reducing their workloads, all “so that we don't burn out our teachers and have really forced them towards the exits because we create unsustainable working environments.”

School funding in North Carolina and other states is often not based on the actual cost of doing certain things or achieving certain outcomes. Rather, it’s often based on a given amount of money the state is willing or able to set aside and a formula for how that money will be distributed to each school. Funding is further often relative to previous funding.

The comprehensive remedial plan that was formed out of the Leandro lawsuit calls for a study on competitive salaries and wages for school employees, but state lawmakers have not funded it.

While the plan remains in limbo, Republican lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper have agreed on raising educator pay and small expansions of the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program. That program provides financial assistance to high-achieving high school students planning to pursue education degrees in some teacher shortage areas. It’s much smaller than it used to be but has grown in recent years.

Base pay has decreased, when adjusted for inflation, since the Leandro lawsuit was filed in 1994. That’s true even when adjusted to 2019 dollars — before the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent record inflation.

Lawmakers have created a new fund for supplements to base pay. This year, it’s $175 million funding for county boards of education to use, but boards aren’t required to provide a portion of it to each teacher. The state has not completed its report on how the funding has been used.

Proponents argue the proposal would help teachers financially and with their teaching — ultimately benefiting students.

Opponents argue the proposal is half-baked because it’s unclear how most teachers would be evaluated for their performance. Further, the question whether lawmakers would be interested in supporting all of the proposals. They ask: Would lawmakers require more consequential performance evaluations but decline to fund higher salaries or teacher leadership roles?

But people on both sides of the argument are conscientious of one thing: The ongoing struggle to find and keep highly qualified teachers, as the state sets its sights high on a “sound basic education” for all North Carolina students.

“I've certainly heard many concerns from educators,” Clemmons said. “So I think we need to parse out some of those concerns. … I think the fundamental acknowledgment that we have to do something different is very important.

Most days, the future of Edgecombe County Schools’ teacher workforce can be found sitting in a windowless classroom in an old Edgecombe Community College building, used by the local school system’s most ambitious students, thumbing through three-inch binders full of plans for how they hope to change children’s lives.

The Scholar Teachers are 16-, 17-, 18- and 19-year-old Edgecombe Early College High School students. Many of them are there at the urging of their own teachers, who thought they had what it takes to lead a classroom one day. Many of them wouldn’t have pondered the possibility at all without the encouragement.

Dickens, Dickens-Jones and Whitaker — the experiment’s first cohort to take on the classroom — described feeling overwhelmed. They work Sundays, planning for the week ahead. They had mentors, whom they said were extremely busy, too. They all said their schools could benefit from extra help, such as more teachers or teaching assistants — people who can do some teaching work, helping with lessons, grading or students who need more attention. They said they appreciated their colleagues and looked to them for guidance, sometimes envious of their wisdom and experience.

None so far want to leave education, despite feeling challenged.

“I love my children,” said Dickens, reflecting on the year so far in December. “I think I prayed for these kids.”

She works 45 to 50 hours each week. Her school has a full-time multi-classroom leader who assists other teachers and provides extra help to students, rather than having a classroom of their own. That helps her.

“Yes, I want to go home and take a nap,” Dickens said, “but I’m happy where I’m at and I have support from my school.”

Whitaker estimates she works 65 or more hours per week. She struggles to find time to meet with her mentor teacher, who has their own classes and also works a lot of hours.

For her school, she said more staff or outside help would be “really, really impactful.”

Whitaker has more than 100 students. Grading and marking work is time-consuming, on top of lesson planning, staff meetings, beginning teacher meetings and planning for other things, like how to help students who are struggling more than others.

She’d love to have help grading papers, pulling students into small groups, pulling some students out to work on specific skills or just “co-teaching” duties.

“I didn’t realize the amount of responsibilities that come with teaching,” Whitaker said. “I knew it was a lot, but this — sometimes it feels overwhelming.”

Whitaker said higher pay — and being paid in two checks per month instead of one — would be helpful and would make her feel more appreciated.

“I don’t regret my decision to become a teacher,” Whitaker said. “I think it’s going to take some time to figure out what my grade level is. Right now, middle school doesn’t quite feel like it fits me.”

In September, Dickens-Jones described to WRAL News her struggles and optimism teaching eighth-grade English language arts at West Edgecombe Middle School. Days later, she visited with a human resources official in the school system and said she couldn’t do it anymore. She asked for another job, working with younger students.

“It was just a different ballgame than I was prepared for,“ she recalled afterward.

She felt like she was getting nowhere with her students. She struggled to keep them off of their cellphones, to manage the classroom. Fresh out of college, living away from her parents and with a partner for the first time, she was working as many as 15 hours each day.

She moved to Coker-Wimberly Elementary School — also in Edgecombe County — to work a temporary job as a teacher who pulls struggling readers out of class to provide interventions.

She says she loves it. She’s only working eight to 10 hours per day. She thinks she’s reaching her students more than she did as an eighth-grade teacher and she can see the results of her work.

“It’s wonderful to see how everything clicks for them,” Dickens-Jones said.

Dickens-Jones is still a teacher qualifying for her loan reimbursement, but she doesn't lead a classroom any longer.

Her position remains open at West Edgecombe Middle School.