Freedom, funds, faith. These are some reasons why educators leave public education in North Carolina to teach at independent schools, despite less-than-ideal benefits in private education and growing opposition to the state’s prioritization of private school vouchers.
Public school teacher attrition has been a point of focus for education advocates as retention rates have fluctuated in recent years. How much of that is due to educators who decide to seek out private school opportunities?
The State Board of Education tracks reasons for teacher attrition in its yearly report on the state of teaching. While its data on teachers who leave public school to teach in an NC private/non-public school has been collected sporadically, the most recently available numbers indicate an upwards trend.
Early data from 2008-2013 shows an average of 0.95% of public school teacher attrition was due to leaving to work at a private school, an average of 114 teachers annually between those years. That figure took a jump with 1.4% of teachers leaving for the same reason, 193 teachers total in the 2013-2014 school year and 211 in from 2014-2015.
In 2015-2016, while the total number of teachers who left teaching that year dropped drastically from more than 14,000 to just over 8,600, the percentage of those teachers who left to teach in an NC private school leaped to 2.2%. The report did not assess teachers who left to teach in private schools in its 2016-2017 or 2017-2018 reports.
In 2018-2019 and 2019-2020, the figure stayed consistent at 2.3% and 2.2%, respectively. The study hasn’t included numbers on teacher attrition in this category in its four most recent reports. The most common reason — around 13% — for resigning those years aside from retirement was due to teachers making a career change.
Lance Fusarelli, a professor of educational leadership and policy at NC State University, told Carolina Public Press that, despite popular belief, the landscape for teachers is not necessarily better in private schools.
While private schools aren’t necessarily quick to fire their teachers, Fusarelli said educators do have fewer protections, which can naturally result in weaker job security. He cited the lack of representation by an organization like the North Carolina Association of Educators as an example.
Smaller, newer schools also might not offer the same benefits as public or more established independent schools. The job market is far slimmer for teachers seeking private school jobs and the pay doesn’t always live up to expectations despite high tuition costs, he said.
Vouchers drive demand for teachers
Private schools have been in the limelight since legislators voted in 2023 to expand the state’s Opportunity Scholarship by eliminating the program’s income cap, despite North Carolina’s first iteration of the scholarship in 2013 focusing on supporting students from low-income families.
The General Assembly later approved $463.5 million in funds for private school vouchers as part of the mini-budget bill last fall.
But private school vouchers could drive an increase in the number of private school teaching positions.
“It’s all about supply and demand,” he said.
“So if private schools are needing to hire more teachers because their enrollment is growing because they’re having more students transfer from public schools to private schools, then obviously they're going to need more teachers.”
Greater autonomy, some say
While private school vouchers can be controversial, some teachers view private schools as freedom from bureaucracy. Private schools often give teachers more autonomy and the space to get back to the basics of their job, Fusarelli said.
“In general, private school teachers do have a lot more freedom to teach because they’re not encumbered by state guidelines or state testing requirements,” he said.
“You get into teaching because you really want to help kids, and a lot of teachers want to do what they think is best. And sometimes, when you’re in a traditional public school and you have pacing guidelines that are dictated by the district to stay on track, I think that makes it a little bit difficult sometimes to meet the needs of individual students.”
President of the North Carolina Association for Independent Schools Stephanie Keaney said teachers in private schools within NCAIS appreciate that they are trusted to make informed decisions about their classroom based on their professional training and depending on the needs of their students.
“They have gone to schools to be educators, so they appreciate being able to select the books or select the projects that they think will best teach the children in their classroom,” she said.
“They really appreciate being treated as professionals. That’s not to say that public schools aren’t doing that. It’s just when you have so many children and so many teachers, often it feels like a factory model. You’ve got to make sure everybody’s getting everything they need. And because our schools are smaller, they have the luxury of being able to be a little bit more nimble, a little bit more flexible.”
Compensation and out-of-pocket expenses
Keaney acknowledged the pay discrepancies that have existed between public and private schools. However, private schools often support their teachers in other ways.
A recent study showed NC teachers spend over $1,600 on average out of their own pockets to supply their classrooms, the second-highest in the nation.
Private schools in NCAIS tend to give teachers funds to spend on classrooms to avoid such out-of-pocket spending, Keaney said. There’s a long way to go on teacher pay across the board, she said, but efforts are being made in independent schools to close the gap.
“Our schools often give teachers a budget to buy the things that they need for their classrooms so they’re not having to dip into their own meager funds,” she said.
“We know no one goes into education to get rich. … Our schools historically have not been able to pay as much as public schools, but they’re working very hard on that. We have many schools that are now on par with public schools, but we have some schools that are even able to pay more than their local public schools.”
Private school special education
Not all resources come in monetary form.
Rosemary Adams teaches at Lionheart Academy of the Triad in Greensboro, a special education school that serves students with autism. After Adams taught elementary school in Virginia for five years, she decided to seek additional licensure to teach students with disabilities. She taught as a special education teacher in NC public schools for 25 years.
When familial matters prompted Adams to consider leaving her Swansboro home, she thought it might be time to leave public education too. While NC requires 30 years of teaching in the state to receive full retirement, Adams opted to take reduced benefits and seek a private school job instead.
When she started job hunting, she received a lot of interviews. Charter schools, private schools and even mental health facilities were interested in hiring Adams for her special education background. But when Lionheart came on the scene, Adams knew that was where she needed to be.
“It never occurred to me that there would be a private school just for kids with autism,” she said. “That’s a dream to many special ed teachers. It’s a dream job for me, having had so many different disabilities that I had to be aware of and conscious of all the time, and then just being able to focus on one subject matter that I get to teach all day, and then focus on the behaviors of autism and how they relate to students.”
Adams had a lot of variety in public school. She taught several different grade levels and just about every subject matter. Even when she wasn’t directly teaching, Adams was in an “inclusion teacher” role, meaning she accompanied her students to general education classrooms where they learned with their non-disabled peers. This exposed her to virtually every kind of classroom.
Now Adams solely teaches math, and never to more than 14 students at a time. She loves focusing on just one subject and getting to be the leader of the room. The lack of paperwork is an upside, too.
“They don’t have (Individualized Education Programs) here,” she said. “I’ve written probably over 5,000 IEPs in my career, and that was the most time-consuming thing I did.” Now, it’s lesson planning, which she loves to do.
Lionheart provides students with all the supplies they need, saving Adams from a spending spree at the beginning of the school year.
But the biggest saving grace is human resources. Adams has an assistant throughout the day. Lionheart has two behavioral therapists. With that support team, Adams is able to focus on teaching in a way that wasn’t always possible as a public school special education teacher.
“Before, I was that person. I had to help provide interventions to the students with disabilities, and if there was an issue with behavior, I also had to handle that. I’m pulled in three different directions,” she said. “Here, I feel like I can solely focus on bringing these kids up to being the best at math they can possibly be.”
But Adams’ experience may not be typical.
As a specialized private school that focuses on serving disabled students, Lionheart may be more of an exception than the rule. Private schools in general tend to have far fewer disabled students because they aren’t required to offer IEPs or other accommodations, Fusarelli said.
“In any classroom, you’re going to have differences in achievement levels, and you’re going to have differences in student motivation in private schools, but you’re not dealing with students with different needs or disabilities to nearly the extent that you are in public schools because public schools have to accommodate them. Private schools don’t.
“And a lot of times, private schools say when they’re applying, ‘Hey, we can’t accommodate your child’s needs, so perhaps you should look at other alternatives.’”
Adams is well aware of the contrast in job security as a private school teacher. You’d have to do something egregious to lose your public school job, she said, whereas during her first year at Lionheart she recalls a veteran teacher that started “slacking off” and was subsequently let go on the last day of school.
It’s a difference Adams had to get used to quickly, but it wasn’t near enough to turn her off of her new private school setting.
“That was so eye opening for me that it could happen to me too,” she said. “So I do have less job security than I did working for the public school, but it’s still worth it. None of that fear outweighs waking up every day and loving what you do.”
Adams also gets paid more than she did in public schools, beating the odds of the average private school teacher. She’s received a raise two years in a row after not getting one from the state for eight years.
Faith-based education
About 66% of NC’s private schools are religious, on par with the national figure. Faith is also a driving force for many private school educators. That was the case for Michael Noto, the head of school at Myrtle Grove Christian School in Wilmington.
Noto got his start in education as an ESL teacher at Wake Technical Community College, then began teaching fourth grade at A.B. Combs Magnet Elementary School after obtaining his master’s degree at Campbell University.
After one year at A.B. Combs, Noto got a job teaching fourth grade at what is now St. David’s School in Raleigh. He taught there for 16 years, during which he became the Lower School Principal. After spending some time as a principal in Florida, he moved back to North Carolina where he became the head of school at Myrtle Grove.
Noto didn’t find public schools to be a good fit for him, for several reasons, such as a seemingly systemic attitude toward teaching that made the job feel more about test prep than about providing a holistic education geared toward learning. He recalled an instance of a second-grader who proclaimed his goal for third grade as “to pass next year’s end-of-grade exam.”
But more than anything, it was the inability to share his faith that drove Noto to seek another environment.
“One thing that I was also realizing, though, as I went through that first year — and again, first-year teaching is always hard — but one thing I started to realize is I couldn’t really use my faith at all,” Noto said.
“I wasn’t really able to really talk about it. I had some students in my classroom that are different faith backgrounds, and some of the families had very strong beliefs. And I wasn’t going to be overtly talking about things, but it seemed I had to really just tamp it down.”
Myrtle Grove is not a covenant school, meaning families don’t have to be members of the church to send their children there. But once he transitioned to private Christian schools, Noto felt he could use his faith as a strength in the classroom to tackle challenging issues students were facing in a respectful but spiritual way.
“It also gave me a chance to just point them to the Lord and show them, ‘Hey, you can use prayer in this way, you can use that,’” he said. “The students are having a hard time, or with parents that might be having a hard time, or other situations — I could bring my faith into that scenario in a way that was really respectful and sensitive and use it as a strength, as opposed to having to keep it hidden.”
Another benefit Noto recognizes is higher parent involvement in private schools. His experience with parents of his private school students feels like more of a partnership in ensuring student success.
“I recognize that for some parents, they just don’t have the time to be involved,” he said. “There are parents who are working two and three jobs and just don’t have that time to be involved.”
“I have felt just generally — again, not every family — but broadly speaking, more support in private schools. Maybe that is because parents may have a little more time, but also since they are making that investment, they want to be good partners. And we want to be good partners with them as well.”
Politics of private and public education in NC
Education, publicly-funded or not, is far from insulated from politics. The legislature’s controversial “Parents’ Bill of Rights” passed in 2023 set guidelines around how parents could access and dictate what their children were exposed to in public school classrooms.
This includes the right to consent or withhold consent for participation in reproductive health and safety education programs, the right to review statewide standardized assessment results as part of the state report card and the right to inspect and purchase public school unit textbooks and other supplementary instructional materials.
This has likely put public school teachers on edge as far as what they’re allowed to say and teach, Fusarelli said. He thinks private schools have more direct guidelines that could ease those anxieties for teachers.
“For public school teachers, they kind of want to be careful about, ‘I can’t use the student’s preferred pronoun, because I’ll get hell if I do,’” he said.
“In a private school, those types of things are probably more clearly communicated as to, ‘Yes, you can do this. No, you can’t.’ And so I think — I don’t know how much, but to a degree — that those politics are pushing teachers from public schools to private schools.”
How a private school approaches such social issues will depend on the values of the individual school. At some socially conservative religious schools, there will likely be strong restrictions around how teachers approach those issues, Fusarelli said. Alternatively, some private schools are more open and will disagree with anti-DEI-in-education initiatives.
Private school teachers will likely want to be in a setting that matches their beliefs and values — politically, spiritually or both.
“I think it would be attractive if it were aligned in terms of values and morals,” Fusarelli said. “And on the other hand, I think it would be difficult if they were not aligned.”
Despite the ways public and private schools have been pitted against each other politically between private school vouchers and culture wars, Keaney said NCAIS believes it’s imperative both that the state have a thriving, well-funded public school system and that parents have options available for a school that fits their child’s needs.
“It’s been a challenge in North Carolina the last couple of years because it has felt, from a political standpoint, very us versus them,” Keaney said.
“Speaking on behalf of my schools, we all want every child to be in a school where they can thrive.”
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
