Over 10,000 Teachers Leave NC Classrooms

By Cash Michaels –

According to a recently released state report, more than 10,000 North Carolina teachers left the classroom in 2023, the highest number for an annual period in the last twenty years.

Purportedly, the resignations were mostly from first-year teachers, as well as educators who had just become eligible for full retirement benefits.

That’s 11.5% of North Carolina’s rank-and-file 90,000 teaching force—1 in 9—who have left between March 2022 and March 2023, and at least 42% more than those who left in 2022.

The concerning news was part of the State of the Teaching Profession report presented to the State Board of Education April 3.

Officials say the reasons for the massive teacher exits are not specifically clear, though traditionally, low salaries and difficult working conditions are considered the likely causes. North Carolina is 46th nationally in first-year teacher pay, and 34th out of fifty states in average teacher pay.

Raising teacher pay is one of the issues state Attorney General Josh Stein raised during a candidates interview with the NC Black Publishers’ Association.

“It is a disgrace how the General Assembly has defunded public education in the state. North Carolina ranks 49th in the country in the share of our state’s economy that we spend on K-12 education,” Stein, a Democrat, said.

“We don’t pay our teachers enough, there are not enough support personnel in our schools, or school counselors or school nurses.  And we don’t have enough affordable early childhood education slots in North Carolina. We can do better; we must do better.”

Stein’s Republican gubernatorial opponent, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, is on record as saying that if elected governor, he would cut money from the state’s education system. Robinson told the East Wake Republican Club last December, “It has already been proven that school systems get better results on less money,” and that “cutting the fat” would be “essential.”

Later on in a newspaper questionnaire, Robinson added, “We also need to ensure teachers are treated as the professionals they are by paying them more and holding them to high standards of excellence.”

There was also a feeling on the part of departing teachers of a lack of support from their school administrations, in addition to an ever-increasing workload.

All of this, while a separate report shows that fewer people are actually joining the profession to become teachers, reflecting a declining enrollment in teacher preparation programs, with just over 15,860 last year, a ten-percent drop from 2021 to 2023.

In hopes of stemming the significant loss of teaching talent across the state, schools are hoping to lure people from other professions to the classroom. That means those who stay must work towards a NC teaching license if they intend to stay on the job longer than three years.

Per the report, approximately 6,000 teaching positions across the state were not filled by a qualified educator at the beginning of the 2023-24 school year. Substitute teachers have been filling the void.

Tom Tomberlin, senior director of the State Department of Public Instruction’s Office of Education Preparation and Teacher Licensure, told the state board that despite the eye-opening news, school systems were pushing forward to replenish the teaching ranks.

“The silver lining of this cloud is the extraordinary work that our [school districts] do in finding teachers, specifically the HR directors and their recruitment staffs,” Tomberlin told board members. “It is extraordinary what they do to replenish our supplies every year.”