The state Board of Education is working to finalize a new rule that could make it easier for experienced out-of-state teachers to get their license in North Carolina, members heard at their meeting Wednesday.
Recent legislation removed a requirement for out-of-state teachers with more than three years of experience to provide data proving their effectiveness to get a license here in North Carolina.
Teachers who are unable to provide that data would previously only be eligible to receive an “Initial Professional License” that would have to be converted to a five-year “Continuing Professional License.” For elementary educators, that meant they were subject to additional testing to make that conversion.
But now, the state can issue them a CPL as long as they have a comparable renewable license from another state.
The board will vote on this next month, but members lauded the move for its potential impact on improving teacher recruitment.
“I can just hear joy breaking out across the state,” board member Olivia Oxendine said. “That’s a big move for the state board of education because we’ve talked about it relentlessly and so here it is. I’m just so happy that we’ve gotten to this point.”
The proposal came as state officials presented new data on the state’s Educator Preparation Programs, which found that fewer first-year teachers have been coming from these programs over the past three years.
In 2024, those teachers accounted for 40% of the state’s first-year teachers compared to 52% three years ago. Meanwhile, 19% came from out-of-state and 11% came from outside the United States. A growing number, or 28%, of teachers have been teaching on an emergency license, a one-year non-renewable license that allows for more flexibility. Many of those teachers might eventually be part of an EPP, but that data is not available yet, said Andy Baxter of the Department of Public Instruction.
State officials analyzed the pipeline from the state’s EPP to becoming an effective teacher in year one. They found out a hypothetical cohort of 1,000 enrollees in an EPP, only around 460 are typically teaching effectively within a year of finishing the program, with teachers dropping off at different parts of process — some don’t finish the class, some aren't teaching within year of finishing, and others are not meeting the “effective” benchmark.
“If we just improved each step of that process, by say 5 percentage points just from a process improvement, we would end up with a 15% increase at the end, so marginal changes at each step could yield big numbers of improvement for North Carolina as a whole,” Baxter said.
