A Hand Up for the Helpers

As kindergarten teacher Kassidy Murtagh began a math lesson on a recent Wednesday afternoon, her instructional assistant, Meaghan Goldberg, scanned the classroom, looking for ways to help.

“Heavy and light,” said Murtagh, who teaches at Cary’s Penny Road Elementary School, reviewing a concept she introduced the day before. “Show me that something is really heavy.” 

Students pretended to hoist weighty objects over their heads. A few grunted in simulated effort. When one managed to wriggle through the back of his chair and wedge himself facedown, Goldberg sprang into action. She extricated the boy and fetched a bin of fidget toys, allowing him to choose one to keep his hands busy while he listened.

Instructional assistants like Goldberg provide critical aid to classroom teachers, who often have one or more students requiring significant extra support. For a salary starting under $34,000, assistants do the unglamorous work of anticipating and minimizing disruptions and sometimes work with students in small groups.

Wake County administrators now have another role in mind for Goldberg and her peers: lead teacher. As school districts across the state and country face alarming teacher shortages, more are seeing instructional assistants as promising future teachers. 

The Wake County Public School System, in partnership with NC State University, is testing an apprenticeship model to break down some of the obstacles that have historically stood in the way. Many are financial. The low pay for aides can make it difficult for them to afford the training required to get a teaching license.

Several participants in WolfTRAC, as the new program is called, were also accepted into the N.C. Teaching Fellows program, which will provide up to $10,000 per year in forgivable loans toward about $16,000 in tuition and fees.

Apprentices, who must already have a bachelor’s degree, continue working as instructional assistants as they advance through the program, which is expected to take about 18 months.

Completion will net them both a teaching license and a master’s degree, which Wake County rewards with higher pay. Graduates will make more than $61,000 as beginning teachers.

The math penciled out for Goldberg, who had been waffling on her next career move despite a deep love for working with children with disabilities. After investigating the details, she signed up and began this past June.

A Broken Pipeline

Over the past decade and a half, the pipeline sending teachers into North Carolina classrooms has been broken.

More than 7% of classrooms across the state lacked a fully licensed teacher in the 2025-26 school year, the N.C. Department of Public Instruction reported.

Pay, set in large part by the General Assembly, has lagged neighboring states and is now among the lowest in the country. That’s a far cry from the early 2000s, when North Carolina’s average teacher pay ranked in the top half of states. 

At least in part due to the tumble down the rankings, the university programs that used to train most new teachers have seen interest wilt. The share of beginning teachers trained through those educator preparation programs fell from nearly 60% in 2021 to about 35% in 2025, according to a report reviewed this summer by the state’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Public Education. 

New teachers are now more likely to be switching from another profession. There are three types of licenses available to them.

Some choose a residency license, which allows them to begin teaching while enrolled in an alternative educator preparation program that they have three years to complete. Those alternative programs, created in the wake of a 2017 law responding to traditional programs’ flagging enrollment, may be offered by school districts, charter schools, community colleges, even private companies. 

Some aspiring teachers, however, cannot meet those programs’ entry requirements, including a bachelor’s degree with at least a 2.7 GPA, or may not be able to afford tuition. They can still begin teaching under an emergency license or a permit to teach. These one-year licenses do not require the holder to be enrolled in any kind of educator preparation program.

In the 2024-25 school year, teachers on these temporary licenses—with no pedagogical training—comprised 44% of first-year teachers, BEST NC, a nonprofit that compiles and visualizes education data, has reported. That’s double the share 10 years before.

BEST NC’s analysis of student growth data from the N.C. Department of Public Instruction indicates that the career-switching teachers are less effective—and not just in their first year. 

About 80% of teachers who attended a traditional educator preparation program met standards in their first year, compared with 70% who used an alternative pathway, BEST NC calculated. A 5-percentage-point gap remained between the two groups six years into their careers.

Students bear the consequences. Research links unprepared teachers to less academic proficiency, diminished lifetime earnings, even long-term health outcomes. And teacher turnover, researchers have found, exacts an additional price. 

Teachers working on emergency licenses leave at particularly high rates. Their annual attrition is between 21% and 27%, depending on whether they were enrolled in a beginning teacher support program, according to the data received by the blue ribbon commission. Commission members were so alarmed by the information they received in June that they began discussing a proposal to end emergency licenses altogether. The overall teacher attrition rate now tops 10%. 

That churn means first-year teachers comprise a growing share of the workforce. Not only do they tend to be less prepared than in the past, they arguably face a more difficult teaching environment. 

Pandemic-fueled academic and behavioral deficits continue to haunt schools. More students with disabilities are in general-education classrooms, for reasons including resource constraints and parental preference, and there is no longer a teacher assistant in each of the state’s elementary classrooms. The General Assembly slashed funding for them more than a decade ago, though local districts have tried to make up the difference. 

Many North Carolina districts now face budget shortfalls due in part to how the General Assembly funds special education. The state pays districts a flat amount per special-needs child up to 13% of a district’s student population. However, the share of students with disabilities is higher in the vast majority of districts, and the cost of providing those students adequate services has climbed.

Amid the most recent budget crunch in Wake County, administrators canceled the Cross Categorical Kindergarten program, which served many children with autism. As a result, more high-need students are in kindergarten classrooms like Murtagh and Goldberg’s.

A New Model

A central goal of WolfTRAC is to ensure that more aspiring teachers get a solid foundation before taking the helm of a classroom, said Crystal Gregory, Wake’s director of recruitment and talent acquisition. “This program is really for people who want that mentorship,” she said, “so that when the classroom becomes theirs, they already have received the training and the qualifications that they need to be effective.”

That pitch appealed to Goldberg, who hopes to work as a special education teacher. While she feels confident working directly with students with disabilities, based on her nearly two decades of experience in schools and hospitals, she wanted a firm grounding in some of teaching’s more administrative duties. 

Special education involves legally binding documents that lay out the goals, services, and modifications for students. Depending on their disabilities, a student may have an individualized education plan or a 504 plan.

Goldberg wants to avoid “going into IEP meetings blindly and writing up 504s feeling like I have no idea what’s happening.” She has witnessed differences of opinion between teachers and principals and hopes the coursework can help her navigate decisions. “I really just want to feel like when I graduate I have a deeper understanding of the process so that I can support my special education students to the best of my ability,” she said.

The most recent state data shows that about 2% of Wake County’s traditional public school classrooms lacked a fully licensed teacher in 2025-26. That’s well under last year’s state average of more than 7%, but still affects thousands of students in North Carolina’s largest school district.

Wake has been especially short on fully licensed special education teachers. WolfTRAC aims to address that gap by asking participants to choose among hard-to-staff specialties, which also include elementary and multilingual education.

The program’s coursework is modified from NC State’s Master of Arts in Teaching degree. Because WolfTRAC is a registered apprenticeship, it has to comply with federal rules that require training to be built around “competencies”—particular skills necessary to meet industry standards.

Lesson planning, for example, is one competency. Apprentices must draw up lesson plans, get feedback from their instructor and mentor, and try their plans out in the classroom, Gregory said. Then the lesson plans go in their portfolios. 

“When you are the licensed classroom teacher, you’ve had some practice with that already,” Gregory said. “That’s a very different model than being lateral entry and going into the classroom as the teacher of record without many of those supports.”

Goldberg doubts she would have pursued training if she hadn’t heard about WolfTRAC.

For one thing, at 41, with a family, she didn’t want to go into debt. Her husband, who works in finance, has provided most of the family’s income since she took a break from working in a hospital as a certified child life specialist about three years ago. Helping children understand their medical procedures had become too emotionally draining. 

“I wanted to be in an environment where children are playing and having fun and thriving,” Goldberg said. So she took a job at Penny Road Elementary, where her son went to school. 

She assumed, partly because of the pay, that it would be a short stint. It was half what she had made at WakeMed. But an email about WolfTRAC arrived just as she began to feel it was time to make her next professional move. 

“It’s very serendipitous, very kismet that I got the email when I did because I was starting to feel like I need to use my brain more,” Goldberg said. WolfTRAC seemed to offer the right amount of structure and support to venture into teaching, at a reasonable cost.

She liked that she could take courses online while continuing to work at the school. “I don’t have to leave my teachers stranded for weeks or months or even a day,” Goldberg said. “Just for NC State to say, ‘We see you, we know you’re working with children, we know you’re capable,’ really makes a big difference for me.”

Era of Experimentation

Apprenticeships have long been used to train qualified workers and reduce turnover in other professions, but they’re new to K-12 education.

Tennessee was the first state to establish a federally registered apprenticeship program for teachers in 2022. Since then, experiments have proliferated. 

NC State sought to position itself as a leader in North Carolina. “As we started seeing these opportunities emerge across the nation, we tried to move as fast as we could,” College of Education Dean Paola Sztajn said. 

NC State applied to be designated a sponsor with ApprenticeshipNC, which administers the federal program. It’s the first university to get approved. Other efforts in North Carolina right now are sponsored by school districts. Most are small, with only one or two participants. 

WolfTRAC started this year with a cohort of 11, Sztajn said. The size of the group and their concentration in Wake County has allowed for a hybrid program, with both online instruction and in-person activities, she said. 

NC State isn’t bound to that model, though. Sztajn said the university is in talks with other districts and organizations about program designs. In some cases, NC State may be the sponsor; in others, it will serve only as the provider of instruction.

Meanwhile, the General Assembly has decided to invest in the idea. The most recent state budget, approved in July, put $1 million in recurring funding toward supporting registered apprenticeships through a new program called TeachReadyNC.

Because these apprenticeships are new, the research on how best to design them is thin. Still, the outcomes tracked thus far have been mostly positive.

One study on Arkansas’ initiative found that instructional assistants-turned-teachers were as effective as teachers who entered the workforce through a more traditional path, and they were more likely to stick with the job. 

That paper, however, threw cold water on the idea that it would significantly change the racial makeup of the workforce, which is overwhelmingly white. Researchers found that while instructional assistants as a whole were more racially diverse than Arkansas’ teachers, white assistants were twice as likely to become teachers as their Black or Hispanic peers. 

Other research, focused on Washington state, raised concerns that converting instructional assistants to teachers could end up causing other staffing gaps; aides “are themselves in short supply.”

At Penny Road, Murtagh said it was hard to imagine what she would do without Goldberg, who was assigned to her class a few days into this school year when it became clear that two of her students need intensive support. One frequently runs for the exit. A major part of Goldberg’s job is keeping her safe.

During Murtagh’s recent lesson, the girl sat on a desk, wailing “no” and tipping a chair with her foot. “Safe body, please,” Goldberg reminded, helping her down. 

Over the next hour, she would repeat that five more times.