A draft of the attrition report used by the NC Department of Public Instruction (NC DPI) that tracks teacher turnover was released at the last State Board of Education meeting.
The news is good. Turnover is down again this year.
Based on the draft report, there were 94, 792 teachers in 2016-17 with 8,021 (8.65%) leaving the profession. The drop from last years total is 435 teachers or .39%.
Breakdown of those 8,021 teachers by reason/category is below.
Personal |
Initiated by LEA |
Beyond Control |
Other Reasons |
Left for Diff State |
| 4,393 (56%) |
638 (7.78%) |
1,916 (23.36%) |
1,254 (15.29%) |
767 (9.35%) |
The number of teachers who changed from one LEA to another within the state used to be counted in the attrition report total. Including that total skewed the numbers significantly over the years. Those statistics are now their own stand-alone category called Teacher Mobility.
According to the draft, the Teacher Mobility number for 2016-17 is 4,549. That is up from last year’s total of 4,163.
The top five reasons in the draft report are as follows:
- Retired with full benefits (1,533)
- Family relocation (1,006)
- Reasons unknown (949)
- Career change (865)
- Teach in another state (767)
I’m waiting on licensure information from NC DPI on how many teachers were granted new licenses during 2016-17 and how many were granted to out of state teachers.
For 2015-16, 3,053 new licenses were granted. The actual attrition that year was 4,473 teachers. Also in 2015-16, of the 3,053 licenses issued, 1,156 were to out of state applicants. Subtracting the 828 that left NC to teach out of state shows a net gain of 728 teachers.
LL1885 