NC teacher turnover is rising. Why experts say pay alone isn't the solution

Bambie Lockhart has been a North Carolina teacher for 25 years, and things seem different now.

Schools didn’t used to have as many teacher openings, she says. This year, her school couldn’t fill a vacant fourth-grade teacher slot, so all of the fourth-graders were distributed to other fourth-grade classes, swelling class sizes to as many as 27 students.

“When you've got 27 fourth graders, in one class, and you're one person with no instructional assistant, you physically just cannot meet all the needs of children,” said Lockhart, who teaches in a Wake County public school. “Something is going to fall through the cracks.”

Teacher turnover is wreaking havoc in classrooms across the country — especially as school systems struggle to fill vacancies. Educators say they’re fed up with low pay, increasing workloads and political scrutiny.

Teacher turnover in North Carolina hit its highest point in at least two decades last year, with 11.5% of the state’s more than 90,000 traditional public school teachers leaving the profession in the state. That’s up from 7.8% the year before.

The state now declares a shortage in almost every subject area.

At the beginning of the current school year, more than 6% of all teaching positions in the state weren’t yet filled, or they were filled by a person who wasn’t qualified — the highest percentage in years.

The National Education Association released updated rankings last month showing North Carolina in the bottom half of U.S. states in terms of educator pay and public education spending.

Pay increases for North Carolina teachers — approved in the state budget for the current fiscal year — haven’t reversed the turnover.

The conundrum leaves educators and researchers wondering how leaders can reverse what appears to be structural damage to the teacher pipeline, and what changes other than pay might be needed to keep and attract more teachers.

“Pay increases alone are not enough,” said Elizabeth Steiner, an education policy analyst at California research organization Rand Corp. Steiner says improvements in working hours, administrative support, classroom resources or added support for students with disabilities are critical for retention — in addition to pay.

Teachers, who are required to have four-year degrees, have some of the lowest salaries among college-educated workers, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Steiner’s research at Rand suggests teachers need big pay raises to be satisfied — as much as $17,000 more each year. That’s more than officials are willing to offer.

During the short legislative session this year, North Carolina lawmakers are considering raises for teachers, though no proposal has been put forth.

Meanwhile, some local school boards are considering small pay bumps while others are offering nothing. Many boards are also cutting retention and recruitment bonuses that they funded using temporary federal pandemic relief dollars — money that will be gone by next school year. Some boards have found new funding sources to keep them.

When Lockhart, the Wake County teacher, thinks about how to make teaching a more attractive profession, class sizes come to mind. Along with more instructional assistants to help with classroom tasks. And, of course, there’s pay.

“We have many families who just can’t afford to support their families on our salary anymore,” Lockhart said, “and it’s just not worth it for them to follow their passion.”

What can be done

While raises can help slow the leak from the teacher pipeline, experts say it could take years and significant policy changes to fully restore it to the relative health of two decades ago.

That’s in part because — in addition to pay — teachers often point to a lack of support or being overworked when they talk about their job stress. Fewer young people are aspiring to become educators, and turnover is high among early-career teachers.

North Carolina Superintendent Catherine Truitt has pushed, without success, for changes that would provide more mentorship for beginning teachers, whom she says shouldn’t have the same responsibilities as experienced teachers.

“Previously, it was a discussion mainly about salary,” Horne said. “It was, ‘teachers don't get paid enough.’ Now, I think it has changed and shifted into a conversation about the respect for the profession … the lowering of the professionalism.”

Politics have also focused more on education than in the recent past, and in negative ways, Horne said. With this year being an election year, whoever gets elected to county or state offices can play a role in the future and how teachers feel about continuing to teach.

“A lot of it comes down to who are the folks winning those small races,” Horne said. “Because any kind of combination of folks, whether it be the state superintendent, lieutenant governor, the governor, or House of Representatives and Senate here at the state level, even all the way down to judges, have a huge impact on education in North Carolina.”

Modest raises could be a short-term solution, Steiner said.

“Small raises can make a difference in retention, so it seems to me that even small increases in salary are probably worthwhile,” she said. “I think it's also important to consider that schools are ecosystems. And if there are shortages of other staff, maybe substitute teachers, maybe paraprofessionals, or food service workers or bus drivers … those things also put pressure on teachers.”

A long-term solution could include more support training for people to become teachers before they’re even in college yet.

Continued expansion of the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program, for instance, would help entice aspiring educators to stick with that dream, said Erin Horne, an N.C. State University education professor. Teaching Fellows is a support-focused program that provides forgivable student loans. Education major enrollments have risen at N.C. State since the program was restarted at the university, Horne said.

“We're no longer in a state where [science, technology, engineering, mathematics] and special education are the shortage areas,” Horne said. Districts tell researchers they are seeing widespread shortages across most disciplines. “When you hear them talk about it, it's like, ‘We can't believe that we are struggling to find a teacher.’”

In the early 2000s, she said, administrators looking to hire teachers joked, “you could open a door, and they all kind of fall out.”

How much does a teacher need to earn?

In many North Carolina counties, teacher pay isn’t high enough to live comfortably, and the dollars aren’t going as far as they used to.

State teacher raises haven’t kept up with inflation. Someone who signed up to be a teacher in 2008 would have earned $30,430 in state base pay ($43,550 in today’s dollars) and would have expected to earn $41,760 in state base pay after 15 years ($59,765 in today’s dollars). But in the current school year, a first-year teacher is earning $39,000 in state base pay and a teacher with 15 years of experience is earning $53,600 in state base pay.

Nearly all counties provide a local supplement to most teachers, paid either as wages or as a bonus. In the past three years, the state has provided a salary supplement to teachers in all but five of the state’s largest counties, although it’s unclear how much teachers got.

The impact of the new money is also unclear. Legislation authorizing the supplements asked the state Department of Public Instruction to measure the effectiveness of the supplements, and the department did so by surveying school administrators’ opinions on the matter.

Anecdotally, a handful of unidentified school leaders told the department that the new state supplements reduced teacher turnover during the 2022-23 school year. However, turnover actually increased statewide during that time.

For a Wake County couple with two children, each partner should earn just under $61,000 per year to live comfortably, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage calculator. But a teacher in Wake County doesn’t earn that until their 15th year — when most teachers would be in their mid- to late-thirties. That’s even with a Wake County supplement of more than $6,000; state base pay never reaches that amount, no matter how long a teacher has worked, stopping at about $55,000 per year for people with 25 years of experience.

Some teachers say they have to live in one area that’s more affordable but teach in another area that’s not, driving as far as an hour away to get to work.

Competition can also play a role, especially when a teacher can live in one school system but work for another that pays more. Teachers in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools earn a couple thousand more dollars per year than teachers in the more suburban Orange County Schools. CHCCS reported 2.7% of its teaching positions were either unfilled or filled by an unqualified person this fall. Orange County Schools reported 8.2%. But for both school systems, teachers would have to work several years to earn what MIT called a livable wage — as many as 15 years if they had two children and their spouse earned the same amount.

But teacher attrition isn’t purely about the cost of living. In more rural counties, compensation can be on par with the cost of living, but vacancies may still be high. They can be even higher than in Wake County, where compensation is below the cost of living.

A loop of negativity

More public negativity toward the profession means many friends and family discourage people from becoming teachers. At a recent State Board of Education meeting, education majors told board members that reaction was negative when they told people they wanted to become a teacher. One said most of the discouragement he’s received has come from teachers themselves.

“They’re influencing so many people to not pursue education,” said Jackson Payne, a history education major.

Payne and his fellow education majors said they were inspired to teach because of the impact they can have on students, and they described positive experiences in classrooms and with other teachers.

But the prospects of the profession do weigh on them, including how they’ll pay off their student debt once they graduate.

One prospective teacher said she’d already changed her mind and was now enrolled in a graduate program for higher education administration, getting a concentration in data analysis to open up another professional pathway outside of education for herself.

Lily Seymour, a student adviser to the state board and new high school graduate, said she’s been wrestling with whether to become a librarian, a profession she said similarly suffers from outside negativity.

“Do I want my job to be my personal fulfillment, or do I want my job to fund my personal fulfillment? … It’s really hard to think about,” she said.

Board members thanked the students for speaking and said they were stumped but inspired to do more.

Donna Bledsoe, a board adviser and the state’s 2023 principal of the year, told the students she still believes education is “the best job on Earth.”

The Surry County principal is pursuing a doctoral degree on her own dime, one that won’t earn her higher compensation.

She has thought about working outside of education. But for now, she considers school her “happy place.”