NC teacher turnover is down, but the profession has changed, new data shows

One in 10 North Carolina teachers quit from 2023 to 2024 - 9.9% - according to the State of the Teaching Profession report released Wednesday afternoon.

It's a slight improvement from the previous report and continues to reflect a change in the state's teacher workforce, with more international teachers, fewer teachers from out-of-state and more teachers with no prior teaching experience or education degree.

Last year's report from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction showed the highest teacher turnover rate in at least two decades of reports reviewed by WRAL News, with more than 10,000 teachers leaving the profession. About one in every nine teachers quit between March 2022 and March 2023, or 11.5%.

The data reflects the about 90,000 teachers employed by North Carolina's traditional public schools. It doesn't include public charter schools or the handful of public laboratory schools.

The data shows an improvement, but it's still not good enough, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Mo Green said in a news release on the data Wednesday. Green wants significant raises to attract and maintain teachers, more opportunities for teachers to take on leadership and new skills, and for dialogue around the teaching profession to be more positive.

Tom Tomberlin, the department's senior director of the Office of Education Preparation and Teacher Licensure, said the state used to have an even split of where new teachers came from. A third came from a traditional teacher college, a third from out-of-state and a third came from an alternative pathway -- essentially, someone making a career change.

"This has shifted dramatically," Tomberlin told the State Board of Education on Wednesday.

Now, just a quarter of new teachers come from a teacher college, only about 20% come from out-of-state and more than 40% come from an alternative pathway.

Insufficient pay tends to be the primary gripe of teachers and former teachers about why they are considering leaving or did leave.

North Carolina ranks low in the Southeast in both average starting teacher pay and average overall teacher pay, according to the National Education Association's 2024 50-state report on the topic. The association's next report will come out later this spring and would reflect more recent budgetary changes in all states.

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction's annual State of the Teaching Profession report surveys teachers on why they left, but doesn't allow them cite pay as the reason why.

Of the about 8,900 teachers who quit, about 4,600 cited "personal reasons," largely for a career change or family reasons.

About 1,400 teachers said they retired with full benefits.

Schools are now hiring thousands of people to be teachers who don't have an education degree and are switching careers. That's the fastest-growing sector of new teachers, rather than graduates of teachers' colleges. Those alternative-licensed teachers get training and have to take some classes but many of them come in without experience and don't end up staying beyond their initial three-year license, which cannot be renewed. They can obtain a renewable license only if they take several college classes and pass certain tests.

More than a third of teachers with one-year emergency licenses or teaching permits don't ever seek a higher permit and leave the classroom after their one year.

"That is a very high attrition rate," Tomberlin said.

Partnerships at the high school and college level are trying to recruit more people into teacher education programs by making it cheaper to become a teacher and to provide some more training, and some officials say they're working. But they also say low pay is discouraging young people from becoming teachers, and prompting parents to discourage their children from majoring in education.

This fall, survey numbers from the North Carolina School Superintendents Association showed nearly all school districts had at least some teacher vacancies to start the year, and several had at least 50 teacher vacancies. The Association found that teacher vacancies weren't getting worse, but they weren't getting much better.

Last summer, groups of students told lawmakers that the teacher shortage hurt them, because they don't learn as well from substitute teachers or people who aren't trained in their subject area. Some complained about having to take online classes when their class doesn't have a teacher.

Parents of special education students have also filed formal state complaints when their children's classes are taught by noncertified teachers. That's also posed a problem for schools that can't find a qualified teacher but who are subject to stringent rules that essentially require them to have a qualified teacher.

Teaching positions that were vacant or filled by an unqualified person totaled 7,100 at the start if the current school year, the report shows, and dropped to just more than 6,200 by the 40th school day, about 7.6% of teaching positions of the 94,000 total positions. That's slightly worse than in the fall of 2023, when the state was short 6,000 qualified teachers on the first day of school and by just less than 6,200 by the 40th school day, about 6.4%. In Wake County, those numbers topped 400 this fall, an improvement from nearly 700 in the fall of 2023.

The report lists 1,543 special education teaching positions that were vacant or filled by an unqualified person in the fall of 2024. That's about the same as last year, when the number was 1,544.