The other half of the problem

A seat needs a teacher standing in front of it

The statute says local boards shall offer advanced courses in mathematics when practicable. That phrase has to carry a lot of weight, because a district cannot enrol a student in a course it cannot staff. So it is worth asking what the mathematics teacher supply in North Carolina actually looks like.

Mathematics has been a federally designated teacher shortage area in North Carolina every year since 1998-99. That is twenty-nine consecutive designation years. For 2026‑27 the state's shortage list names Core Subjects and Elementary K-5, Special Education in three bands, Career and Technical Education, and then mathematics, English, science and social studies in grades 6-8, and mathematics in grades 9-12. Read that list again: mathematics is the only academic content area on it at the high school level. Everything else designated for grades 9-12 is special education or career and technical education.

Unfilled mathematics positions in North Carolina

Full-time equivalents, reported to the federal shortage-area programme

Source: US Department of Education Teacher Shortage Area designations for North Carolina, reported by NC DPI from its 40th instructional day collection. Years are labelled by the school year the count was taken, not the designation year, which runs one ahead. Note DPI's definition: a position covered by a long-term substitute, a retired teacher, or a provisionally licensed teacher is counted as vacant, so these figures mix genuinely empty classrooms with classrooms covered by someone who is not licensed for the subject. The state does not publish the split.

Middle grades mathematics is the worst affected band, and it is the band that matters most here, because 8th grade NC Math 1 is a high school course and needs a teacher licensed to teach one. Unfilled middle grades mathematics positions went from 67 in 2017‑18 to 312 in 2024‑25, easing slightly to 302 last year. High school mathematics peaked at 256 and came down to 216. The trend is up but it is not a straight line, and the most recent year improved in both bands.

And in the most recent report to the General Assembly, in a section inviting districts to say how implementation is going, this sentence appears:

“Smaller districts continue to express concerns regarding availability for mathematics teachers, thus making course access challenging.” Report to the North Carolina General Assembly on Advanced Courses in Mathematics, 2025‑26. That is the entire statement. No count of districts, no number of courses not offered, no follow-up. It does not appear in the previous year's report at all.

But we should not overclaim this, and here is why

It would be convenient to say the seats are empty because there is nobody to teach them. When the state actually asked, that is not what it heard.

Section 3 of the 2019 amendment required every district that had not offered NC Math 1 to 8th graders to file a plan explaining its staffing “including an indication of how adequate staffing will be accomplished and any anticipated shortages”. Sixteen districts filed. The Superintendent's March 2020 summary reports that many said they needed no additional staff at all, others expected to hire one to three teachers, and that every district found a way to do it. All but one were offering the course by 2020‑21.

What those districts described was not a supply shortage. It was a scale problem. Their eligible cohorts ran from three students to a hundred and fifty, and the worry they raised most often was that dedicating a whole teacher to a handful of qualified students would overload the ordinary 8th grade mathematics classes. Seven districts solved it by sharing: sending a certified teacher to the school that needed one, transporting the 8th graders to the teacher, or running the course through an online platform. The recruitment concern that did surface was specific to very rural and very small districts.

So the honest position is this. The teacher shortage in mathematics is real, long-running and worst in exactly the grades where this decision is made. It is a genuine constraint on what a small district can offer, and it deserves to be part of any serious conversation about access. But nobody has ever shown that it is the binding constraint, and the one time the state collected evidence, the districts said they could manage. The state asked the question once, in 2020, and has not asked since.

Two things nobody publishes at all: what share of North Carolina mathematics classes are taught by someone not licensed in mathematics, and the attrition rate for mathematics teachers specifically. DPI reports attrition for all teachers together, and it reports vacancies without separating the empty rooms from the covered ones. Both belong on the list of things a real report would show, because until they exist “we could not staff it” and “we did not prioritise it” look identical from the outside.