'It's tough out there': NC recruiters scour the country for K-12 teachers
Angela Cogdill is always recruiting teachers — everywhere she goes.
At a high school football game: She meets an East Carolina University senior. Come west to start your teaching career, she tells the student. Start right after graduation in May, filling one of the elementary school vacancies for the last weeks of the year, says Cogdill, Granville County Schools’ beginning teacher coordinator.
The student is sold.
In a middle school classroom: Cogdill meets a parent who is setting up for a science class that will be taught by a virtual teacher who doesn’t even have to live in North Carolina.“Have you ever thought about being a teacher?” Cogdill asks the parent, who has substitute teaching experience.
The woman hesitates but doesn’t say no.
Cogdill hands her a business card and says she’ll reach out later.
These are just the local examples. Cogdill — and other recruiters like her across the state — have been traveling far and wide to fill K-12 teaching vacancies in North Carolina’s public schools.
Concerns over teacher morale and pay and waning interest in the profession among young people have morphed into a rise in attrition and a dearth of people prepared to take those teachers’ places.
That has caused recruiters to spend hundreds of hours and travel thousands of miles — outside the state and sometimes even look abroad — to find the state’s next mind-molders.
Trips to Pittsburgh and Buffalo. Trips across Ohio, Kentucky, South Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey are increasingly common. Anywhere there’s a job fair, there’s a North Carolina school system that’s ready to make the pitch to prospective teachers: Your dreams await in the Tar Heel State.
“We've been trying to hit a lot of the upstate New York and Pennsylvania, as well, trying to hit areas that traditionally in the past, they've had more teacher candidates from their schools than they had jobs,” Cogdill said.
And they’re not just expanding their geographic search. Cogdill also has started looking outside the teaching profession. She started frequenting job fairs for non-education majors, like North Carolina State University’s Sciences Fair, hoping that some psychology majors haven’t decided what to do next.
“We are trying a little bit of everything, because it’s tough out there,” Cogdill said.
Turnover boom
The search high and low for teachers has implications for the current teacher workforce, who often must work extra duties to cover for classrooms.
Higher teacher turnover and fewer qualified teachers can leave some children without a trained teacher or a permanent teacher at all. Meanwhile, school systems are attempting to do more than ever before to educate children, as test scores indicate students are still behind where they usually are due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The solutions so far are often temporary efforts: One-time bonuses, slight pay raises, hiring substitute teachers to serve at a single school, contracting with companies to provide virtual teachers for in-person students.
Frustrations are systemic: Pay that doesn’t rise with inflation or at all, working well more than 40 hours per week, increased paperwork and requirements, little upward mobility, fewer teaching assistants, rising student behavior issues, sometimes unsupportive administration, and an increasingly politicized environment.
“Teachers are the most important school factor in explaining how students develop, and that's social-emotionally, that's academically,” said Kevin Bastian, research director of the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina, housed at UNC-Chapel Hill. “Work certainly shows that when teachers leave, that can have an adverse impact on student achievement. And it certainly has financial implications for districts and schools, who then have to spend a significant amount of money to refill that position and retrain individuals and everything else.”
The landscape has also changed drastically in just the last two years. The growing number of international teachers are turning over every few years, some teachers have shifted into academic coaching positions, and fewer substitute teachers are filling vacancies.
From September 2021 to September 2022, 15.6% of North Carolina public school teachers left their teaching jobs in the state’s public schools, according to UNC researchers. That’s a significant rise from prior years, when attrition didn’t vary much.
Attrition among principals — crucial to teacher satisfaction and success — was even worse, hitting 17.5% during the same period.
About four in 10 of the teachers who left — a higher share than the usual three in 10 — left during the school year, rather than after it.
The uptick came from early-career teachers, teachers of color and retirement-eligible teachers.
Until 2022, the number of teachers entering the profession once more closely mirrored the number of teachers leaving it. Last year, nearly 2,000 more people left North Carolina public school teaching jobs than entered them.
“Teaching right now is particularly hard, so that makes sense,” Bastian said.
Early-career teachers often learn on the job, he said, and post-pandemic learning conditions and pressures have been more than what early-career teachers typically contend with.
Teachers are trying to accelerate students’ learning to keep them on grade level, said Sarah Crittenden Fuller, a research associate professor at the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina who is researching the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students, teachers and schools in the state.
“You also see increases in school discipline problems,” Fuller said. “Kids are having mental health issues. All these are things that make it more difficult to teach them.”
Schools can help teachers by improving student welfare, perhaps with counseling, and by boosting support and mentorship for early-career teachers, Fuller said.
In Granville County, where Cogdill is recruiting teachers, teacher attrition topped 30% from 2021 to 2022.
It’s a compounding problem.
When teaching positions aren’t filled and a substitute can’t be found, existing teachers must fill those empty classrooms. Some are paid extra, some are given compensatory time, some are given nothing, depending on the school system.
The extra work, as teachers report working well more than 40 hours per week, is extra stress for some teachers.
When teachers leave the profession, they often cite pay as a pain point. But their grievances are far more, according to interviews and abundant online posts and school board public comments. The stress of too many responsibilities, feeling unsupported toward tackling them and finding themselves less effective than they’d like to be, they say. They ask themselves if it’s worth it to keep going, knowing what they earn for a living.
Not what it used to be
Cogdill, years ago, once had a part-time teaching job and needed to look for a full-time job. Other teachers in North Carolina recall something similar: Having to settle for a part-time job in the county they wanted or a full-time job in their second-choice county.
“Now you can go to any district and almost any school you want and find openings,” said Nakeia McKiver, a former teacher and now a human resources specialist at Public Schools of Robeson County.
“I attended a job fair, where they bused us in from a parking lot to the site because there were so many people,” Jasmine Barcelona, an instructional coach at Wilburn Elementary School in Wake County, said of first applying for jobs in North Carolina. “It was the most amazing job fair. … I thought, ‘Wake County is so amazing. They have instructional assistants in classrooms, up-to-date buildings.’ It really looked like a shiny, sparkly object coming from Oregon.”
She got a job teaching first grade at Barwell Elementary, where she was happy.
“I had a full-time instructional assistant,” she said. “Class size was reasonable. And it was a brand new building, beautiful books in the library and clean hallways and a lot of support with professional development. And then the Recession came.”
Shortly after, a new General Assembly made drastic cuts to instructional assistants and eliminated recurring professional development funding. Republicans had just taken over the legislature and accused Democrats of over-spending. For a brief time, Democrats had furloughed school employees to cope with revenue losses.
Under Republicans, teacher pay was restricted several times during the Great Recession and ultimately landed on a structure — still in place today — that gives teachers more money earlier in their careers but holds their salaries flat after 15 years, regardless of inflation or years of service.
At the time, lawmakers believed research showed instructional assistants didn’t improve student outcomes. Since then, some research has shown they can make an impact, as well as simply reduce strained teachers’ workloads.
Lawmakers also shifted salary money toward the years they were most concerned about — the earlier years, in which teachers are more likely to leave the profession. Beginning teacher attrition from North Carolina public schools is about twice as high as it is for experienced teachers. Attrition for both types of teachers, however, hasn’t changed much since salary schedules were adjusted.
Schools have also fallen behind drastically in maintenance and capital expenses for school buildings. In 2021, North Carolina’s 115 public school systems reported having $12.8 billion in projected capital needs through 2025 that did not have a dedicated funding source.
‘Teacher tax’
Barcelona’s current school, Wilburn Elementary, had 13 teacher vacancies at the beginning of the school year and just a 52% substitute fill rate. Barcelona had to stop doing her current job – focused on improving teaching and curriculum school-wide — and start teaching kindergarten for an entire quarter last school year. She was the kindergarten class’s third teacher that year.
Some teachers here refer to a “teacher tax” — the difference between what a teacher actually has earned and what they would have earned if their original salary schedule had been adjusted for inflation.
For Kim Mackey, one of the creators of the Teacher Tax website, the difference is $84,148.
She thinks lawmakers take advantage of veteran teachers by not giving them raises and betting they’ll stick around.
“I should never have had to take out a home equity loan for home repairs,” she said.
Cogdill moved around some and even worked for a nonprofit before returning to Granville County Schools in 2003 as a teacher and recruiter.
“At that point in time, we were pretty good,” Cogdill said. “We didn't have to recruit.”
Around the time of the Great Recession, in 2009, however, it started to get harder. The district formed a recruitment and retention committee.
Thirteen years later, on the 40th day of this past school year, 16% of Granville County Schools’ teaching positions were not filled by a qualified educator. They may have had a teacher who was still working on their license, or they may have been filled by a substitute or another school employee.
That’s left Cogdill with about 60 positions to fill all year long. Often after she hires one person, another leaves.
The county has for a long-time been a training ground for early-career teachers who then depart for higher-paying jobs nearby.
Attrition out of North Carolina public schools last year was the highest in the Sandhills and in the region surrounding Raleigh, including Cogdill’s district. More than 16% of Granville County Schools’ teachers left the district and North Carolina public schools entirely, one of the worst rates in the state.
International teachers, hired in record numbers, turn over in three to five years. It’s a group of teachers Cogdill relies upon in recruiting.
One of her top-performing teachers, Emmanuel Galos, will have to return to the Philippines at the end of the upcoming school year, when his visa expires and when he’ll also complete his doctoral degree. He teaches math to special education, gifted education and general education students.
“I'm so proud that I'm part of Granville County,” Galos, a 15-year teaching veteran, said. “This is the happiest part of my life as an educator.”
Filling classrooms
Cogdill and colleagues are optimistic about a new solution: Virtual teachers, beaming into Granville County Schools’ classrooms, where students are gathered in-person to learn. An adult, possibly a teaching assistant or a substitute teacher, helps the students with any questions they have.
Granville is one of at least 16 North Carolina public school systems, alongside at least three charter schools, to employ Elevate K-12 for virtual teaching, according to the company. Durham, Alamance-Burlington, Weldon City and Wayne are among the others. Granville just renewed its contract with the company for up to $1 million, a more than $300,000 increase from the fall.
It’s the type of solution that’s growing, made feasible by pandemic-era learning. Virtual learning, when students were alone at home, wasn’t ideal, but a virtual teacher while students are together in-person feels different to those in Granville. The alternative is a classroom with no qualified teacher at all.
“I think this is a much better option,“ said Ashley Craanen, the “classroom coach” for the virtual science class at Butner-Stem Middle School. She’ll help facilitate the new virtual instruction, after the previous science teacher resigned.
Craanen has been helping out as a substitute teacher, but she’s not a certified teacher. She started volunteering at the school because her son attends. She’s also coached the soccer teams.
That’s led to Cogdill trying to recruit her to the teaching ranks.
Cogdill wishes she could hire more retired teachers to fill open positions on temporary bases, but retired teachers lose their retirement benefits for working too many hours in North Carolina public school systems.
North Carolina teachers receive a guaranteed pension amount every year they are retired, rather than drawing retirement from a finite amount of accrued money. So when a retired teacher draws a salary and a retirement check, state lawmakers view that as “double-dipping.”
But the restriction is a headache across the state, where experienced teachers are in short supply.
A few states have temporarily lifted their rules to help schools hire. North Carolina did briefly, from 2019 through 2021, but only for the most high-need schools, particularly those with extremely low test scores. That temporary law wasn’t renewed.
Rodney White, a retired principal working temporarily in Johnston County Schools, said retired teachers want to help out, but they don’t want to lose their retirement benefits. His wife, who is also retired, was able to teach this spring, but she won’t be able to in the fall without officially coming out of retirement.
“There’s not a talent pool out there,” White said. “There’s a shortage, there’s a real-life shortage. They could solve some of this problem if they would let retired teachers work.”
Aspiring teachers
Those studying to become teachers don’t think so negatively of the profession.
On a recruiting trip this spring, North Carolina Teaching Fellows at North Carolina State University were inspired by positive leadership and the opportunities grant money can provide toward education. Welding. 3D printing. Entrepreneurship classes. Agricultural sciences, including greenhouses and rabbits and guinea pigs and goats to study and care for.
They’ve heard the concerns expressed by existing teachers, about time, paperwork, low pay, student behavior and not teaching up to the ideals they were taught in college. The fellows have decided they want to teach anyway. They’re thinking of the difference they can make in kids’ lives, what inspired so many teachers who have come, stayed and gone before them.
The fellows are watching out for signs of a bad work environment, one they’ll want to avoid when they’re looking for a job.
They’ll be keeping an eye on administration, which they’ve been told over and over again can make or break a school for a teacher.
Meredith Stroud, a first-year fellow this spring, said she visited her old middle school in December. It has a new principal.
“Literally all the teachers I had quit or moved somewhere else, because of the principal,” she said. Her comment doesn’t surprise anyone else in the room.
Still, principal turnover is rising, too. And recruiting teachers amid a widely discussed teacher shortage — and the reasons why it may be happening — is extra challenging.
To right the ship, more people need to become teachers and stay teachers. They need to be sold on it and to find that the goods match the price. If people hear bad things about the teaching profession, will they write it off? What if those people could be great teachers and they just don’t know it?
Teaching Fellow Marissa Hunter wants people to be open to the idea of teaching.
“The more negative talk about it, the more shortages we’re going to have,” she said.
