Here in North Carolina, we often hear that schools face a bad teacher shortage and that they have high attrition rates among those they’re able to hire. Hence, the apparently need for a “summit” last week, with all the bigwigs, including Governor McCrory. That summit is the topic of Jesse Saffron’s Pope Center piece today.

Predictably, one idea advanced was to pay teachers more. The dean of UNC-Charlotte’s ed school lamented that it isn’t possible to raise a family on a $33,000 salary. In response, Saffron notes that California, which has the nation’s highest salaries, also faces a teacher shortage.

One idea that might be somewhat useful is to create an “educator quality dashboard.” That would be a web based tool aggregating information from each ed school in the UNC system, with enrollment data, academic profiles of the students, and a breakdown of the places where graduates wind up teaching. Possibly the most useful thing about it would be that we could compare the academic backgrounds of education majors with other students.

Another idea discussed was to increase the selectivity of ed schools by no longer accepting students below the 50th percentile on national tests. That makes sense because the academic ability of many ed school students is distressingly low, but as Saffron observes, this works against the goal of getting more teachers into the system.

I have never heard that private schools in North Carolina have trouble finding good teachers to hire, but administrators of those schools are not required to hire teachers with ed school certification. Of course, the idea of letting the free market work was not raised.