NC public schools 'having real trouble finding elementary teachers'
North Carolina public school teachers are not leaving their jobs in droves, but when they do leave, elementary schools are struggling the most to fill the empty teaching positions, according to a report shared with the State Board of Education on Wednesday.
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"There’s no evidence that teachers are fleeing the profession. The outgoing percentage is very, very stable, and it's not high. You would expect this in any industry," said Tom Tomberlin, director of educator recruitment and support for the state Department of Public Instruction. However, "we're having real trouble finding elementary teachers," he said, adding that school systems are "finding it's becoming increasingly problematic."
Besides elementary teachers who teach core subjects, schools are also struggling to find elementary teachers to help students with disabilities and middle school math teachers.
"The focus has to be on the front end. How do we increase the pipeline to make sure constant outflow doesn’t make us upside down? The focus has to be on the input, because the output is stable," Tomberlin said.
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The term "teacher turnover" was replaced with new words – "attrition," which tracks the loss of teachers at the state or school district level, and "mobility," which shows where teachers are moving within the state. In previous years, the state's turnover rate included teachers who transferred to other school systems or charter schools in the state or were promoted to principal or other non-teaching school positions.
The report details 23 reasons why teachers leave their jobs, such as "dissatisfied with teaching," "resigned to teach in another state," "retired with full benefits" and "deceased." Tomberlin said the data may be skewed because teachers must tell their schools why they are leaving. If the teachers could report their reasons anonymously to the state, that might produce better data, Tomberlin said.
"I'm very sensitive to the fact that you may not want to burn any bridges," he said. "Honest feedback may be hard for some teachers to do. If we could collect the data at the state, that would be great. I just don’t know how we enforce it or make sure people are responding."
The latest teacher loss report is more than 40 pages long and includes the following highlights:
- Beginning teachers – those with less than three years of experience – left at a much greater rate than experienced teachers – 12.34 percent to 7.25 percent.
- Most of the teachers who left – 54 percent – said they did so for personal reasons that included family moves, changing careers or taking a teaching job in another state. According to the report, just 1.6 percent of teachers left the field because they were “dissatisfied with teaching.”
- The attrition rate only includes teachers who left the field or left the state. Teachers who take a job in a different North Carolina school district are tallied in a figure the report calls “teacher mobility.” However, within each district, a teacher leaving is a teacher leaving whether she or he goes to another district or another state. So the average effect on districts when attrition and mobility are combined is 12.45 percent, the report says.
The state board will vote on whether to make the report final at its meeting Thursday in Raleigh.
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