New report shows NC teacher turnover is rising. Is it a serious problem yet?
Teacher turnover rose in North Carolina’s public schools last year, but state education leaders are debating whether it shows that concerns about a mass exodus of educators are overstated.
The state’s new annual teacher turnover report shows that the percentage of educators who resigned or retired rose to 8.2% last school year — up from 7.5% the previous year. State Superintendent Catherine Truitt says the report tells a different story than the anecdotal one that suggested teachers were leaving their jobs in large numbers during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic.
“To be sure, attrition from the state’s teacher corps remains a concern and a challenge that we must address more aggressively, but the numbers for the 2020-21 school year show that the state didn’t see a big surge in teachers leaving the classroom, at least in the first 12 months of the pandemic,” Truitt said in a news release Wednesday.
“We’ll be assessing the impact of the second year of the pandemic when we’re able to analyze data from the 2021-22 school year.”
But State Board of Education chairman Eric Davis pointed to how school districts across the state are warning about seeing high numbers of resignations and vacancies this school year.
“While this data from last year may appear to be encouraging, current staffing shortages and a high likelihood of the Great Resignation hitting our schools at the end of this school year, should challenge us all to aggressively launch additional district and state level strategies to retain staff and fill vacancies before the next school year,” Davis said in the news release.
Teaching profession ‘stable’
Until last school year, the state had been seeing a decline in the number of teachers quitting and retiring.
In the 2015-16 school year, the attrition rate was 9%, with 8,636 teachers either quitting or retiring. By the 2019-20 school year, the attrition rate was down to 7.5%, with 7,111 teachers having quit or retired.
For the 2020-21 school year, 7,737 of the state’s 94,342 teachers quit or resigned. Tom Tomberlin, director of educator recruitment and support at the state Department of Public Instruction, said this year’s attrition rate of 8.2% is “well within what we think is average.”
“I’m happy to report to the State Board of Education that the state of the teaching profession is stable in light of the pandemic,” Tomberlin said at Wednesday’s state board meeting. “We do not see a dramatic increase in teacher attrition.”
Schools facing teacher vacancies
According to the report, there were 3,213 instructional vacancies into the second month of last school year.
This school year, schools are reporting thousands of vacancies for teachers and other school positions.
Teachers have spoken out publicly about feeling elevated levels of stress from being asked to pick up the workload for absent colleagues. Schools have had so many vacant positions that central office administrators are helping out in schools and state employees are being encouraged to serve as substitutes.
Tomberlin told the board that they don’t have real-time data on teacher turnover. The new report is based on data from March 2020 to March 2021.
“That’s one of the difficulties of the report,” Tomberln said. “It’s always looking back a year because it takes quite a bit of time and effort to collect all these data. And so we’re always running a year behind the reporting.”
This story was originally published March 3, 2022 at 7:00 AM with the headline "New report shows NC teacher turnover is rising. Is it a serious problem yet?."
