Number of teachers quitting jumps

Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center issued a new report last week showing that teachers have much lower job satisfaction levels than people in other professions.

The State of the Teaching Profession in North Carolina report presented to the State Board of Education shows a state teacher attrition rate of 11.5% from March 2022 to March 2023, up from 7.8% the prior year, an increase of 47%. That means that 10,376 of the state’s 90,638 teachers left the profession in that period, 3,100 more than quit in the prior year.

For Randolph County School System, the attrition rate rose to 8.0% from 5.1% the previous year. Davidson County Schools saw its attrition rate rise to 6.6% from 4.8%. In Thomasville City Schools, the rate rose to 12.7% from 7.1%.

For Guilford County Schools, the 2023 attrition rate was 12.1%, up from 7.4% the previous year, an increase of more than 63%.

Yet as bad as that sounds, attrition rates also have risen nationally, and the national average was about 12%.

North Carolina’s schools also have been able to hire more teachers than they lost in recent years. In fall 2023, 11,023 were hired after the 10,376 left in the previous school year. The replenishment rate has averaged 122.8% over the past six school years.

That’s in part because of a jump in the number of teachers coming into the job from non-traditional routes. The number of new teachers entering classrooms under alternative licensure routes has increased by 23.3% since the 2017-18 school year and now makes up nearly half of all new educators in the state.

In the Pew report, only 33% of 2,531 U.S. public kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers who were surveyed said they were extremely or very satisfied with their job, compared to 51% of all U.S. workers.

Furthermore, 77% say their job is frequently stressful; 68% say it’s overwhelming; 70% say their school is understaffed; 49% say the behavior of most students at their school is fair or poor; and 52% say they would not advise a young person starting out today to become a teacher.

Want to see more? More about what teachers say about their jobs and about the challenges facing public education in the U.S. can be found on the website of the Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/, in the article “What’s It Like To Be a Teacher in America Today?”