North Carolina's Performance
Ungraded
Why does this matter?
Reimagining teaching roles and staffing structures to make the profession more sustainable requires innovative thinking about how states and districts leverage time and resources. While few barriers exist preventing districts from implementing innovative staffing approaches, states can play an important role in nurturing conditions that make strategic staffing possible, through strategies like grant funding, waivers from state policy, and strengthening pipelines into the educator workforce.
Why does North Carolina stand out?
North Carolina financially supports teacher leader roles beyond mentoring. The state provides districts with grants to innovate with strategic staffing models. North Carolina has provisions for “innovation zones” where districts can request waivers with a submitted action plan. Additionally, the state financially contributes to differentiated pay for residents, registered apprentices, and other not fully certified teachers.
North Carolina created the Advanced Teaching Roles initiative in 2016 to provide grant funding to support districts as they design and implement differentiated compensation structures and strategic staffing models for teacher leaders.
The initiative supports innovative staffing in several ways:
- It aims to provide teachers with professional growth opportunities that link their classroom performance with salary increases for taking on additional responsibilities or students.
- It permits principals with the authority to identify highly effective teachers to lead a small team of teachers. This allows teachers to develop into multi-classroom leaders who may be fully or partially released from traditional classroom duties to provide embedded professional development to their peers, provide targeted instruction to groups of students, and increase the capacity of their team by adjusting classroom structures to most effectively meet student needs.
- It empowers principals with the flexibility to adjust class sizes to expand the reach of highly effective teachers through a waiver from the state’s class size law.
- It introduces two new state-supported roles into schools: “Adult Leadership” teachers (up to 15% of teachers per district) and “Classroom Excellence” teachers (up to 5% of teachers per district). Individual school leaders are also empowered to adjust and craft these roles to meet the unique needs of their student and teacher populations.
What are the key actions North Carolina
should take?
See what these exemplars are doing in this policy area:
Key Resources
Reimagining the Teaching Role
Explore NCTQ’s detailed 2024 analysis of strategic staffing policies.
Reimagining the Teaching Role: Research Summary
Dive into the research leading states and districts to innovate with strategic staffing models.