Over 20% of CMS principals changed roles last year, whether in the district or elsewhere

Around 21% of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools principals moved to new roles last school year, state data show, whether shifting to a new school within the district, or leaving the district or state altogether.

Of the district’s 180 school leaders, 18 moved to new schools within CMS. Another 19 left the district, according to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s 2026 State of the Teaching Profession report released in March.

The report tracks the number of teachers and principals who left their districts and the state at-large between March 2024 and March 2025.

“Among principals, the most commonly reported reasons for leaving were retirement and resignation to pursue opportunities in another public school system,” a CMS spokesperson told The Charlotte Observer.

Keeping quality within the system

Brenda Berg, president and CEO of BEST NC, an education policy and advocacy organization, said it’s not just important to keep experienced principals within the same school system but also within the same school itself.

“Retaining principals within a specific school building is shown by research to improve student outcomes,” Berg told The Observer. “People sometimes conflate retention in the industry as a whole with retention in a physical school... But, overall experience doesn’t really correlate with student outcomes as much.”

Berg said that has to do with the stability and consistency a good principal can create within a school when they stay.

Keeping principals around also usually leads to more teachers staying, too: Berg said research shows that teacher retention often declines when principals leave.

“People like good bosses,” Berg said. “Retaining effective principals is an important strategy not just for retaining great teachers but attracting great teachers because people like to work for great leaders.”

Principal rates across NC

Of the state’s 2,482 school leaders, 360 left their positions in some way, whether to work in a different school, district or state or to retire. That’s 14.5%.

It’s difficult to say exactly how this compares to past years because the 2024-25 school year was the first time North Carolina formally looked at principal retention in the report.

However, data from the Education Policy Initiative at UNC-Chapel Hill suggests far fewer principals are leaving their jobs now than in the years immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic.

NC principal attrition rose from 10.4% to 17% between September 2020 and 2022, though that only includes principals who left the state or profession, not ones that moved to different schools or NC districts. Nationally, principal attrition rates dropped by half between 2022 and 2024, from 16% to 8%.

These are just averages, though. Berg said some schools see much higher rates of attrition than others.

“They’re not staying at high-poverty schools at the same rate as they’re staying at low-poverty schools,” Berg said.

In 2019, the North Carolina General Assembly created a program to address this: The Principal Recruitment Supplement Program. It offers an extra $30,000 a year for highly effective principals to stay at a high-need school for at three years.

There’s enough funding for 40 principals to participate a year, but not every eligible district has opted in. This school year, only 20 schools participated.

Overall, though, NC principals report liking their jobs.

Researchers at North Carolina State University and NCDPI piloted a survey of principals in 10 NC districts in 2025, asking about their working conditions. Over 90% responded, and around 97% of respondents said their districts were good places to work.

But, school leaders did report long work weeks and a long list of work-related duties outside of the typical workday. They also said their districts needed more professional learning opportunities related to things like behavior support and accommodating students with diverse needs.

Teacher data

This year’s data shows around 15% of CMS teachers left the district between March 2024 and March 2025.

During the 2023-24 school year, the district’s overall attrition rate, including teachers who left to teach in another NC school district was 14.1%. It’s not as high as the post-pandemic surge in 2022-23, when 18.2% of teachers left the district, but still higher than the pre-pandemic rate.

The main reasons CMS teachers said they left were retirement and career changes, a district spokesperson told The Charlotte Observer.

Of the teachers who cite career changes, “the main reason they report is inadequate compensation,” the district spokesperson said.

“Our public schools cannot be best in the nation if our teachers are not adequately compensated, trained and revered,” NC Superintendent of Public Instruction Mo Green said about this year’s report in a March press release. “It will take action from the North Carolina General Assembly, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and our schools to strengthen the education profession.”

North Carolina ranked 43rd in the nation for teacher pay in 2025, lagging behind neighboring states like South Carolina and Virginia, according to the National Education Association. The Education Law Center recently ranked North Carolina at the bottom nationally in state funding for schools. Teachers around the state, including in CMS, called out of work in protest Jan. 7, calling for higher state investment in public education.

The “Highlights of the North Carolina Public School Budget” report released this month by the state Department of Public Instruction shows average teacher compensation dropped 1% this school year.