As NC schools open, GOP may see the cost of neglecting them

North Carolina’s teachers have tried to get the attention of the General Assembly’s Republican leaders by marching on the Legislative Building.

That didn’t work.

Now, teachers are marching out of the classroom.

Public school officials are worried that when students come back in August, not enough of the state’s 94,000 teachers will come back with them. Fed up with low pay and disrespect from the legislature’s Republican majority, more teachers are calling it quits.

Teachers retiring or quitting in growing numbers is a national trend, but it’s likely to be especially pronounced in North Carolina. WRAL-TV recently reported that the results of this year’s North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey indicate that the number of teachers quitting this summer will be twice the usual number.

Keith Sutton, a former Wake County Board of Education chairman who now serves as superintendent of schools in rural Warren County, doesn’t need an official count to tell him that school districts are struggling to find enough teachers. “I and my colleagues across the state are all complaining about the shortage, not just of teachers but bus drivers and everything else,” he told me last week.

The current state budget offers modest raises for teachers and helps most of the state’s school districts provide larger local pay supplements, but it’s too little, too late. After a decade of shortchanging teachers on pay, promoting alternatives to traditional public schools and now accusing teachers of indoctrinating students on sex and race issues, the General Assembly’s Republican leaders won’t be able to ignore the effects.

Bryan Proffitt, a veteran high school history teacher who now serves as vice president of the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE), told me that the a serious teacher shortage in the coming school year will be the culmination of policies hostile to teachers and public schools since Republicans took legislative control after the 2010 election.

“The ways in which people have been systematically pushed out (of teaching) for the last 12 years is coming home to roost,” he said.

A state report in March said teacher attrition was at 8.2 percent during the 2020-21 year, roughly in line with previous years. But Eric Davis, chairman of the State Board of Education, saw trouble ahead as teacher discontent combines with the pandemic-driven Great Resignation. He called on education officials “to aggressively launch additional district and state-level strategies to retain staff and fill vacancies before the next school year.”

Catherine Truitt, state superintendent of public instruction, isn’t convinced that an acute teacher shortage is about to emerge. When I asked her office about reports of more teachers leaving, she said in a statement: “Any level of attrition from the state’s teacher corps remains a concern and a challenge that we must address aggressively, but we need to continue to allow data – versus anecdotes – to help drive the policy and decision-making.”

Truitt thinks a proposal to base teacher pay on credentials and effectiveness rather than on seniority will slow attrition by boosting pay, but the NCAE is opposed to that change. If it’s imposed anyway, it could accelerate the exodus of teachers even more..

The state needs to aim higher, as it did under Gov. Jim Hunt. There should be a multi-year schedule of salary increases that would put North Carolina teacher pay well into the top half of the nation (it’s now 34th).

That’s not going to happen with this legislature. Its leaders want to promote alternatives to public schools instead of promoting public schools.

This school year, they will get a lesson about the consequences of that approach. It will be taught by all the teachers who are not there.

This story was originally published July 31, 2022 at 4:30 AM.