“Younger people have other options”: Teaching in NC is not worth it right now

There are nearly 800 open teacher positions in Wake County’s school system, according to their hiring website. That’s twice the number of vacancies the school system claimed to have earlier this week in an interview with The News & Observer. System spokesperson Lisa Luten says the district’s site has not updated to reflect the most recent hires, but the administration seems to forget something important: 800 vacancies are a crisis, but 400 vacancies is still cause for concern — especially when classes return in a month.

Little is attracting young people to the profession, and little is encouraging veteran teachers to stay. Wake County is an indicator of the massive staffing crisis across the state. We need to treat it like one.

Cinnamon Frame is going into her 23rd year of teaching this August. She’s taught in Johnston County, at charter schools, and returned to Wake County Schools last year. She has eight years left before she can retire, so she says she’s sticking it out.

“There are very few careers I could switch to where I’d make more money initially, but after a few years, I probably would,” Frame says. “My daughter has been working for five years, since graduation. She’s making way more money than me.”

Frame’s daughter, of course, isn’t in teaching; for folks her age, there’s no incentive to get into the profession. In 2021, the state decided new teachers and other new state employees would no longer be able to retire with full health coverage. Younger people have seen the way veteran teachers are treated, and how their wages have stagnated in the last few years. Frame says that the high school she works at lost two science teachers, both young men, over the summer. There’s also no incentive for older, mid-career professionals to transition into teaching.

“All the old ladies are hanging in there,” she jokes. “Younger people have other options.”

For the last few years, millennials have been branded “job hoppers” by different polling groups and journalists analyzing those polls. The handful of working-age Gen Zers have joined those ranks since they began entering the job market around 2019. LinkedIn data shows that 75 percent of Gen Z workers are willing to switch career paths entirely. Nearly half of Gen Zers polled by the Associated Press in 2021 said that going through COVID-19 over the last few years has made it harder to pursue their career and educational goals.

If this is already a trend, it makes sense that teaching, a profession that is notoriously exhausting with little to show for it, is no longer popular among young people. The state used to have a robust teaching fellows program, which was killed off in 2015 and brought back in 2017 in a much smaller capacity. In April of this year, 119 teaching fellows were announced under the newer program; the last years of the previous iteration gave out 500 scholarships.

Aside from a lack of pay and benefits, Frame says that the political fraughtness surrounding teaching — from the CRT controversy to North Carolina’s iteration of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — is deterring people from staying in the profession. Again, this could particularly deter young people: Gen Z is the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in United States history. Other Gallup data shows that they’re much more likely to identify as LGBTQ than other generations. Those pieces of one’s identity don’t disappear when you walk to the front of a classroom.

Frame sees the state as more responsible for fixing the issues that are keeping people out of teaching. She says charter schools, a favorite talking point for Republicans in North Carolina, are having the same problems with recruitment and retention that traditional schools are — they just have even fewer benefits they are required to provide.

Teachers know what will help quell the staffing crisis in our public schools, and the rest of us probably have an idea of what it is. We should listen to them, and work harder to recruit and retain the people that educate the next generation.