The big headline from the Annual Report on the State of the Teaching Profession is that teacher attrition in North Carolina has dropped from 8.7% in 2016 to 7.5% in 2018. It’s amazing what a little teacher pay raise can do!
Now for the bad news – the North Carolina teacher shortage continues to get worse. There were 96,894 teaching positions in North Carolina last year – across the state there were 3,107 teacher vacancies at the start of school. That is a lot of teacher job openings. By the 40th day of school, they had closed the gap a little – but there were still 1,698 openings then.
Here are the job openings at the beginning of this school year- so these are the subjects where you should earn your teacher certification
- 417 openings in Core K-5 (math, ELA, Science and Social studies K-5
- 168 in Exceptional Children (special education) K-5
- 87 in Math 6-8
- 65 in ELA (English Language Arts) 6-8
- 73 in Science 6-8
- 53 in Social Studies 6-8
- 115 in Exceptional Children 6-8
- 70 in Math 9-12
- 63 in ELA 9-12
- 43 in Science 9-12
- 43 in Social Studies 9-12
- 115 in Exceptional Children 9-12
- 78 in Career and Technical (CTE) 9-12
There has never been a better time to become a teacher than now in North Carolina. Teacher raises have kept more people in teaching – but there is still incredibly shortages.