NC teachers want more DEI in schools. What else a new report shows about educator morale.
Morale among North Carolina’s teachers is above the national average but could be even higher with more use of DEI in schools, according to a new national report on the state of teaching.
Education Week released Tuesday morning its first state-by-state look at teacher morale, giving North Carolina a rating of +22 compared to the national average of +18 on a scale of -100 to +100. The new survey found that North Carolina was among the states where the majority of teachers said embracing diversity would help improve their morale. DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion.
Education Week’s State of Teaching report comes at a time when the Trump administration is making major education changes and statewide there are concerns about teacher pay and staffing shortages. Additionally, Senate leader Phil Berger, a Republican, filed legislation on Monday that would prohibit DEI from being in the state’s K-12 public schools.
Teacher morale score up nationally
Respondents to Education Week’s 2024-25 State of Teaching survey were asked to rate their current morale, compare it to where their morale was a a year ago and to predict their morale for the future.
A score of -100, zero or +100 was assigned to answers for those three questions. The answers were averaged together to develop a Teacher Morale Index score, according to Sterling Lloyd, assistant director of the EdWeek Research Center.
The national Teacher Morale Index rose from -13 last year to +18 this school year, “suggesting that teachers overall view their jobs more positively than negatively,” according to Education Week.
The scores vary widely with Georgia having the highest score of +47 and New Hampshire the lowest score at -14.
Education Week says it set out to survey a representative sample of teachers in every state.
The full Education Week State of Teaching report can be found at edweek.org/state-of-teaching.
Teacher morale higher in NC’s neighboring states
While North Carolina’s +22 morale score was above the national average, it lagged behind most southeastern states. The teacher morale score was 47 in Georgia, 32 in Tennessee, 31 in Virginia and South Carolina and 25 in Florida,
Last year, the National Education Association ranked North Carolina 42nd in beginning teacher pay and projected the state at 41st in overall teacher pay.
The state’s 115 school district opened this school year with more than 3,000 teaching vacancies.
Now North Carolina teachers are worried about their insurance premiums going up due to a budget shortfall in the State Health Plan.
NC teachers want more DEI in schools
Education Week asked teachers in the survey to list steps that can be taken to improve teacher morale.
Teachers were asked how morale would be impacted if their schools increased or added to curriculum and pedagogy embracing diversity, equity and inclusion. Nationally, 43% of respondents said it would improve morale, 41% said it would have no impact and 16% said it would decrease their morale.
Education Week was able to get enough data for state-level responses about the diversity question in 38 states. North Carolina was among seven states where the majority of teachers said more DEI could improve their morale.
The survey question comes as the Trump administration is trying to remove DEI from all federally funded government programs. The state’s public schools have already lost tens of millions in dollars in federal teacher training grants after the U.S. Department of Education accused the recipients of promoting “divisive ideologies.”
State Superintendent Mo Green, a Democrat, has advised the state’s public schools to “avoid overreacting” to the Department of Education threat to withhold federal funding to schools that don’t eliminate their DEI policies and programs.
Teachers want more discipline in schools
Other areas that the nation’s teachers said could improve morale was higher pay, hiring more staff, school leaders providing more support for student discipline, limiting student cellphone use in school and providing educators with more mental wellness days.
Overall, student suspension rates are higher now than they were before the pandemic. But schools in general have been trying to find alternatives to removing students from school.
Education Week said nearly half the teachers nationally in the survey said their morale would improve if schools suspended and expelled more students.
“I struggle with the emphasis on ‘restorative justice’ as a discipline model because it seems to be implemented in such a way that consequences for serious student behavior (fighting, selling drugs, repeated skipping/disrepect/violent language) are reduced to ‘conferences’ and students return to class with no impact except on the teacher,” a North Carolina high school English teacher wrote in response to an open-ended survey question.
“There has to be a balance between helping students learn better ways of coping and seeming to be permissive as a school culture because the central office wants better suspension rates.”
This story was originally published March 4, 2025 at 8:00 AM.
