'Nothing's really changed': NC Teaching Fellows still enrolling mostly white female students

Of the students selected for the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program this year, 81 percent are white and 86 percent are women. Last year, 83 percent were white and 82 percent were women.

The Teaching Fellows Commission, a 14-member board that selects the students, uses GPA, standardized test scores, leadership, experience and written essays to narrow the pool of applicants. Most of those who apply, according to the data, are white women.

WRAL News shared the latest Teaching Fellows demographic data with Rep. Craig Horn, a Republican who chairs several education committees. He sighed when he heard the numbers.

"I was afraid that you were going to give me those numbers. I was hoping, but I knew better. I knew that nothing’s really changed," he said. "It’s more of the same insofar as we’re not reaching out, we’re not connecting. And there’s plenty of blame to go around."

A spokesman for the University of North Carolina System, which runs the Teaching Fellows program, says it remains committed to ensuring that the program "is available to all and any eligible students who wish to apply."

"The UNC Board of Governors has included expansion and diversity of the program as part of its legislative agenda," UNC System spokesman Jason Tyson told WRAL News in a statement.

But calling for more diversity is not enough, Horn says.

"That’s pablum. That's, 'We want peace in the world. We want sunny, warm days. We want increased diversity and all of us to live a nice life,'" he said. "Isn’t that wonderful? No, no. We need to be specific. We need to set goals and then commit ourselves to achieving goals."

What diversity goals would Horn like to see for the program?

"I'm almost hesitant to answer, because I haven’t thought through it sufficiently. And I need to have a conversation with a number of different people on that," he said.

Horn would like to get feedback from North Carolina Teacher of the Year winners James Ford, Lisa Godwin and Freebird McKinney and N.C. Principal of the Year Tabari Wallace, but whether any diversity goals make it into this year's bills or budget is unknown.

"I don’t know that there’s really time to do what I suggest, which is to bring people of the classroom together and set goals. But you know, it doesn’t have to be in the budget. It doesn’t even have to be in a bill. We can still set goals. This is an aspirational process," Horn said, noting that the UNC Board of Governors, State Board of Education, state superintendent and others can suggest specific goals. But writing diversity goals into law or the budget would carry more weight, he acknowledged.

The state-funded Teaching Fellows program – which was created in 1986, canceled by lawmakers in 2011 and rebooted in 2017 – has recruited more than 10,000 students to study teaching in the state. Throughout the years, it has struggled with diversity, failing to reach its own goals of attracting more men and students of color to the profession.

Lawmakers relaunched the program in 2017 and focused on recruiting students to teach special education and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), but they did not include any gender or diversity goals. The new program has also not partnered with any Historically Black Colleges and Universities, as it did in the past. Only one HBCU applied to be part of the new program, North Carolina A&T State University. It was not selected.

An HBCU may be added this year, Horn said, but he does not want to make it a mandate.

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"I am cautious about mandates. I met with several of the HBCU education folks, and I’ve encouraged them to kick up their programs. I think their programs need to be more challenging," he said. "And that’s why no HBCUs made the cut in the first round.… We don’t kick it up by just saying, ‘Well, we’ll put some HBCUs into it.’ Well, what has that done? How does that improve the program? Well, it’s added diversity. Has it added quality? Show me how it adds quality, and I’m all for it."

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The UNC Board of Governors has asked lawmakers to increase the number of colleges participating in Teaching Fellows from five to eight. The board has also asked lawmakers to grant the Teaching Fellows Commission "additional discretion to ensure institutional diversity."

The Public School Forum of North Carolina, which ran the previous Teaching Fellows program for nearly 25 years and had specific race and gender goals, wants lawmakers to put a renewed focus on diversity.

"We are hopeful the General Assembly will move forward on one of the several bills introduced to expand the program and increase representation for students of color," Keith Poston, president and executive director of the Public School Forum, said. "The General Assembly also should consider broadening the program beyond special education and STEM. By making the new Teaching Fellows Program so narrow, we’re fishing in a much smaller pond when it comes to potential applicants and with students of color under-represented in advanced math and science courses, we’re likely also creating unnecessary barriers when we need great teachers in every subject across the state."

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Gov. Roy Cooper has said expanding the Teaching Fellows program is one of his top education priorities this year, as well as encouraging more diversity in teaching.

“That means more men and it means more people of color in the profession,” Cooper told the Governor’s Teacher Advisory Committee earlier this year. “I strongly believe our state government, our law enforcement, our education system ought to look like the people that it serves and protects.... It is important for us to have a diversity of teachers to reflect the diversity of students we have at our public schools.”

In the meantime, UNC System leaders are working to increase awareness of the Teaching Fellows program "through targeted social media outreach as well as highlighting student success stories throughout the state," according to the system's spokesman.

Students selected to be Teaching Fellows receive up to $4,125 per semester in forgivable loans if they commit to teach in a STEM or a special education area. Any student with a high school, associate's or bachelor's degree is eligible. Students who wish to transfer or change their majors are also eligible.

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The program is specifically designed to attract high-quality teachers to low-performing schools by offering an accelerated loan forgiveness schedule. In order to qualify for loan forgiveness, Teaching Fellows are required to serve one year in a low-performing school or two years in another public school for every year they received a loan. Fellows who leave the profession have 10 years to repay the loan.

Those named as Fellows may attend any of the five partner colleges: