The committee contemplating changes to North Carolina teachers' employment requirements declined to approve recommendations Thursday.
The Professional Educator Preparation and Standards Committee (PEPSC) will meet again Nov. 10 to discuss a handful of lingering concerns brought by committee members.
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The draft teacher licensure reform would tie the state’s 100,000 teachers’ employment to their ability to prove — via one of two to three methods — that they were effective teachers for three out of the past five years.
The proposal, which also pushes for $56,000 in starting pay for fully licensed teachers, also seeks to increase the number of teachers at the same time school systems are saying they’re having trouble hiring for the teaching positions they already have open. Leaders want to increase and improve the educator pipeline as the state produces far fewer teachers than leave the teaching profession here each year.
North Carolina’s proposed licensure model would be unique, and just the third nationwide to require teachers to prove they are effective to obtain a full teaching license.
The committee has now declined to approve the recommendations two meetings in a row, though leaders continue to set their sights on having recommendations before the North Carolina General Assembly by this winter, for the Legislature’s long session.
The committee must send recommendations to the State Board of Education, which would then send recommendations to lawmakers.
Committee Chairman Van Dempsey, who is also dean of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington’s Watson College of Education, said the committee needs to clarify some language around requirements for new teachers and to outline the financial investments required to make the recommendations work.
The committee doesn’t intend to make fundamental changes to the draft or provide more details on how teachers may be evaluated for effectiveness. Those details would be worked on later, when lawmakers either draft a licensure reform law or pass a licensure reform law that directs state education leaders to come up with those evaluation methods.
That concerns Anthony Graham, Winston-Salem State University provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, who cautioned that not paying attention to the details now. He said that could lead to the State Board of Education or lawmakers taking “bits and pieces of what we’re presenting” and drafting a reform law that would look different from what the committee intended.
“I am worried about what it could lead to downrange,” Graham said.
Superintendent Catherine Truitt said the committee didn’t have much time to continue working on the proposal, if the state education board must approve of the committee’s recommendations before the legislative long session. Lawmakers will start filing bills for that session in December, she said.
“What we need to advocate for is the legislature drafting staff (to) work with PEPSC and other stakeholders,” Truitt said, to create the law or to direct the state education board to work with the committee on the details of how the law would be implemented.
Dempsey said he understood Graham’s concern but believed lawmakers and the State Board of Education — based on previous interactions with the committee on other work — to listen to committee recommendations.
Recently, lawmakers have approved waivers while the committee has worked on making smaller tweaks to principal licensure.
Dempsey said, however, the committee needed to do what it could in the time it had left to ensure its intentions are clear.
“Ultimately, the General Assembly can be more of an autonomous actor than any of us can be,” Dempsey said.
State lawmakers formed the committee in 2017 to study overhauling licensure for all of the state’s educators. The committee is starting with teachers, building on a model drafted in private meetings between various state education leaders and the Southern Regional Education Board, which facilitated the work using a Gates Foundation grant.
Thursday’s committee meeting lasted three hours and consisted of members asking clarifying questions about what they had already drafted and suggesting additional refinements.
That includes clarifying that early-career teachers who do not have a degree in education need only to prove they “meet expectations” for effectiveness, rectifying a mistake in the draft that suggested they needed to exceed them.
Superintendent Catherine Truitt also suggested giving those same teacher the opportunity to apprentice as teachers, if they were unable to meet expectations. That would keep them on the path to becoming a teacher rather than kicking them off, though they would no longer have a classroom of their own.
The committee will also detail the funds that would be required to make the recommendations work.
Maureen Stover, a committee member, said advanced-level teachers would be an additional state investment.
Those teachers would have the highest effectiveness scores and would fill a limited number of spots in each school system. Some of those teachers would have a limited number of students of their own, while helping guide their school’s instruction. Others would not have any students of their own but would observe teachers daily, provide feedback, serve as a co-teacher for some of the least experienced teachers and help work with students in smaller groups.
The committee has not determined how those teachers’ effectiveness would be measured. How many a school would need would be determined by how many of the earliest career teachers they have — primarily those who do not have education degrees and are entering the profession from another career.
Stover said many schools can’t afford those types of teachers as it stands now, and they aren’t funded by the state.
But Connie Locklear, Indian Resource Center Director for the Public Schools of Robeson County, said she was concerned some districts could hire enough advanced-level teachers if they’re already struggling to hire teachers, period. She noted some schools systems hire more of those teachers without education degrees than others.
“The intent of this whole model was great, but sometimes when we look at theory versus reality” it raises concerns, Locklear said. “I think it’s important if we have them to address them now before we move forward.”