Thinning the teacher ranks

In a couple of years, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will no longer offer  education. The university, repositioning itself for budget realities and changing demands, will not be turning out undergraduates who will spread out to staff the state’s elementary and middle schools.

We applaud officials for developing a new model, rather than just playing defense and shrinking with no strategic vision.

But it also is more than a little unsettling to think students at our flagship public university won’t be able to major in elementary education – when the state’s public schools face twin challenges in making sure there are teachers in every classroom.

Several factors are at play.

Political partisans disagree vehemently on whether the General Assembly this past session improved the lot of North Carolina’s teachers – or further undermined it. But teachers’ morale has undergone multiple blows in recent years.

The raises enacted by the General Assembly undoubtedly benefit newer teachers and probably help recruit young teachers and retain them during early-career years when raise stagnation drove many into other fields.

But the threat to career status, the ending of extra income for earning an advanced degree, the chaotic churn of curriculum design and testing fads – not to mention the drumbeat of criticism of school performance – had to discourage many teachers.

The demographics, too, of an aging teaching cadre, are thinning the ranks. All those factors may help explain the decreasing interest in education as a major – part of the impetus for UNC’s change to a model that channels fewer students into a more rigorous five-year program leading to a master’s degree.

The decline is system-wide. The result? “We don’t graduate enough people from our public and private teacher education programs in North Carolina to meet the need for the number of new teachers every year,” Dale Carpenter, dean Of the College of Education And Allied Professions at Western Carolina University, told the Citizen-Times in Asheville recently.

Bill McDiarmid, dean of UNC’s School of Education, acknowledges his plans are driven by necessity. “If everything in the world was perfect, I wouldn’t be going necessarily in the direction of closing down our undergraduate program for elementary,” he told The Herald-Sun’s Laura Oleniacz. “But … I’ve lost almost 40 percent of my budget since 2009 and we simply can’t do everything we’ve always done with such a dramatic reduction in our resources.”

We understand that imperative, and in many ways the new UNC plan will ensure better-trained, if fewer, teachers exiting the school.

But the challenges across the state suggest the need for an intense and urgent conversation on how to avoid a critical teacher shortage in just a few years.