By Art Padilla

WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH (December 10, 2025) – When the Ida and William Friday Building at UNC–Charlotte was dedicated in 1982, Wilma Thornburg—Bill Friday’s elementary school teacher—sat on the platform between the Fridays as their proud guest. She had taught Bill in nearby Dallas, North Carolina, long before he became UNC’s iconic president.

But if Bill Friday were a child in Dallas today, there’s a good chance he wouldn’t be taught by a Wilma Thornburg. This isn’t because inspiring and life-changing teachers no longer exist—but because more of them have superior career choices and fewer of them are choosing teaching.

Like Mr. Friday, many of us hold grateful memories of teachers who shaped and challenged us or who simply believed in us. Years later, Mr. Friday would reflecton Ms. Thornburg’s influence:

 “Her message awakened me. She would say we all had the ability to make something of ourselves and that we should make ourselves useful to our fellow citizens. She was a tremendous motivator. You would want to please her by doing your lessons well and on time.”

Lowest level of interest in 50 years

While the number of school-age children grows, interest in teaching has plunged to a 50-year low. National data show steep declines: 

• Teacher preparation program enrollments are down 42% over the last ten years, from roughly 700,000 to 400,000 students.
• Education degrees awarded have dropped nearly 40% over the last decade.

The teaching profession historically has experienced high turnover. But teachers today aren’t leaving in droves because they’re retiring; they’re leaving for better pay or due to growing dissatisfaction. 

As with the nurse shortage, the response has been to crank out more graduates, not to retain the experienced teachers we already have. That isn’t working, in either teaching or in nursing.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina

UNC system numbers mirror national patterns. Since 2010, bachelor’s degrees awarded in teacher preparation programs across the UNC campuses have fallen 45%. 

Below are the 2024–25 bachelor’s graduates and the percent change in bachelor’s degrees awarded since 2010 for some UNC campuses:

These trends suggest that relying solely on new graduates to solve shortages is both costly and ineffective.

Shortages and alternatives

In any labor market, shortages drive up wages and push buyers toward alternatives. In teaching, wages are legislatively constrained, which makes shortages worse. Perforce, schools have turned to alternatives.

In addition to supplementing the low pay levels of North Carolina teachers, three principal workarounds are used by schools to staff classrooms:

1. Employing lateral-entry teachers, who bypass traditional teacher ed programs, but complete basic state-approved requirements through for-profit, online providers like Teachers of Tomorrow.
2. Hiring international teachers on temporary visas to fill long-standing vacancies.
3. Contracting teachers through “residency” licensure–teachers employed without state-approved preparation who agree to complete requirements within three years.

Rural districts lean heavily on these imperfect stopgaps. Nearly 500,000 North Carolina students—one-third of all school children—attend schools in one of the state’s 78 rural counties, where shortages are chronic.

Over the last two or three years, the largest number of new teachers are people without any state-approved preparation, hired to teach on the 3-year residency licenses while they go to an institution to complete teaching requirements. Schools will frequently replace one residency-licensed teacher with another as the 3-year periods expire.

Residency licensure may be passable for a math or chemistry university graduate who is hired to teach in those subjects, but probably not for someone teaching physics or special education with a degree in sociology.

The situation at one rural North Carolina county described in a recent Hechinger Report is astonishing:

•Two-thirds of Halifax County’s teachers are international hires, principally from the Philippines, the Caribbean, and Central and South America.

•At one Halifax elementary school, just over an hour northeast of Raleigh, nearly 90% of teachers are international.

A White House executive order recently mandated employers pay new visa fees—$100,000 per H-1B worker, and further restrictions on shorter-term J-1 visas—for foreign workers. If teachers aren’t exempted, these edicts will squash the hiring of foreign instructors.  

Math and science: A persistent crisis

The nation’s math and science teacher shortages are decades old. Recent federal cuts to science funding will make preparation of future STEM educators harder.

In the early 1980s North Carolina legislators wanted students to be “computer literate,” even if they couldn’t define what that was. Today’s lawmakers insist students learn “artificial intelligence,” whatever that may mean. Good luck finding teachers capable of teaching it.

Countless opinions, fewer solutions

We’re swamped with opinions on how to fix schools—abolish teacher education departments in universities, jettison the N.C. Department of Public Instruction, expand charter schools, decide who goes in which bathroom, raise pay, engage with parents, add armed guards.

Some ideas are well-intended, others political theater. Most miss the point.

The teacher pipeline isn’t cracked—it’s collapsed.

We don’t have enough people willing to teach, and we’re losing the ones who still should. Every superintendent in America can confirm it and every family sees, perhaps without comprehending, the revolving doors at their children’s schools.

Our schools are one of the few civic institutions left that could bind a divided society. But what we all know—or should know—is that they’re in trouble, running on bad ideas, visa bandaids, and breathtakingly low remuneration.

If we dream of a future filled with young Bill Fridays—leaders nurtured by remarkable teachers—we need to rebuild the teaching profession into a vocation worth choosing and worth staying in.

Dr. Art Padilla served as a senior administrator at the University of North Carolina System headquarters and later at NC State, where he was chairman of the Department of Management. He has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, and the University of Arizona, winning several teaching awards and recognitions, including the Holladay Medal, the highest faculty honor at NC State. He recently completed the 2nd edition of his book Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments.