Teacher Retention

What is Your Weakest Link?

India Podsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317919636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

This book is for you if you are: challenged by the number of teacher vacancies at the start of your school year, finding that your most promising teachers are resigning before they complete their first few years on the job, or no longer willing to accept that your veteran teachers are just marking time until their retirement. Best-selling author India Podsen shows you how to uncover and analyze retention risks at your school; implement induction programs to help novices master the realities of full-time teaching; engage your experienced teachers in the retention process; and apply the Professional Educator Career Framework, consisting of Four Career Stages: teacher inductee, teacher specialist, teacher leader, and teacher steward. This book provides school leaders with practical suggestions and easy-to-use tools such as checklists and action plans, sample meeting programs and agendas, evaluation templates, benchmarks and standards, and all designed to help you deal successfully with teacher shortages and related problems.

		I

Sizing Up the Situation

		1

Teacher Shortages:
A Profession at Risk

Are teacher shortages an area of concern or perhaps a serious problem in your school or school district? Does your school system Web page look like the one below that we pulled off the Internet for a large urban school system? Are you starting each school year with an increasing number of teacher vacancies? Are you losing your beginning teachers within the first 1 to 3 years of job entry? Do you feel your veteran teachers are marking time until retirement? Do you know why?

2001-2002 Teacher Shortages

The following certification areas have been found to be among the teaching shortages in our school district:

Shortages

all special education areas	speech clinicians
library science (media specialists)	science (all areas)
business education	industrial technology
mathematics	art
English/language arts	elementary education
family and consumer science (home economics)	foreign language (Spanish, French and Latin)
early childhood

Teaching-force demographics show that one-third of the nation's teachers have more than 20 years of experience and two-thirds are at least at mid-career (Promising Practices, 1998). Concurrently, K-12 enrollment is at its highest, and projected enrollments are stretching the capacity of many schools. Schools already struggling to recruit competent teachers face serious shortages, especially in critical needs areas such as math, science, and special education.

Over two million new K-12 teachers will be employed in the United States over the next decade as a result of increased student enrollments, reductions in class size, and accelerating retirements among an aging teacher population (Darling-Hammond, 1997). More than one-third of these teachers will be hired in urban and rural school districts, and the majority of inner-city public schools will contain minority enrollments. However, the gap between the diversity of students in schools and the racial and ethnic characteristics of the teaching force is another recruitment issue challenging the nation's schools. "About 86 percent of the teachers in public schools are non-Hispanic Caucasian, while more than 32 percent of the students in K-12 schools are minority. This gap is growing larger" (Promising Practices, 1998, p. 1). The emerging population of new teachers will be challenged to educate a growing number of diverse learners in an increasingly complex technological society. Santrock (2001) tells us that effective teachers need to be brokers "between the culture of the school and the culture of certain students, especially those who are unsuccessful academically" (p.13).

As a teacher educator, school administrator, and teacher leader, what steps have you taken to ensure the successful transition of the novice from pre-service experiences into the real-world job realities of full-time teaching? Furthermore, how do you involve your teaching staff in this endeavor and why is their participation critical? As a staff developer, school principal, and classroom teacher, what are you willing to do differently to make sure the next generation of teachers gets a far better start than you did?

If you are wrestling with these questions, you are not alone. The literature on teacher retention tells us that more than 20 percent of public school teachers leave their positions within three years of employment and almost 10 percent quit before finishing their first year (Recruiting New Teachers, Inc. 1999). Unfortunately, our first-year teachers are often left to figure it out on their own with a professional development approach that has outlived its usefulness and little systematic support from colleagues (Lieberman, 2000).

Furthermore, well-organized and implemented induction programs are the exception, rather than the trend, and hit-and-miss induction experiences have been associated with higher levels of teacher attrition as well as lower levels of teacher effectiveness (National Commission on Teaching America's Future, 1996). The questions that loom before us are these:

◆ Are we primed to do things differently to develop the talent and skills of those entering our profession? If yes, what is our primary motivation?

◆ Are we willing to critically examine induction approaches that manage to attract qualified candidates but fail to keep them in the profession or worse provide a survival mentality?

◆ Are we prepared to seize the day to really look at what we do in our training programs and schools to support teacher learning and professional development?

◆ Are we ready as a dedicated community to design a career induction program that begins the process of professional learning and promotes a vision of professional development for a lifetime of practice?

Status of Teaching: The Big Picture

Based on data from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) Education Policy Clearinghouse (Laitsch, 2001), policy makers in more than 20 states have taken legislative action around the issues of teacher quality and teacher shortages. Most consistent is the support for National Board for Professional Teacher Standards (NBPTS) and teacher recruitment programs. Many new policies are showing a renewed effort by states to deal with issues of quality and supply in innovative approaches. Here are a few examples:

◆ Shortages Issues

• Extension of scholarship and loan forgiveness programs
• Increased support for NBPTS certification
• Giving reciprocity for national board certification

◆ Teacher Quality Issues

• Draft resolutions to examine areas for future legislative activity, including issues related to: (a) uncertified pubic school employees; (b) the impact on candidate ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and age of using Pre-Professional Skills Test for admission into teacher preparation programs; and (c) the demand for, and preparation of, classroom teachers as well as determining the adequacy of pre-service and in-service training.

◆ Professional Development Issues

• Assessment of teacher preparation programs.
• Enactment of 1 to 3 year mentorship/induction programs.
• Ability of community colleges to provide coursework in K-12 education and professional development.
• Establishment of alternate certification programs for degreed individuals or certification as an educational assistant.
• Allowing distance-learning methods to account for 50 percent of continuing education requirements.

◆ Certification Issues

• Use of uncertified or out-of-field teachers in a classroom is limited to 30 days unless a waiver is obtained by the state board of education, which requires written notification to parents of affected students.
• Teachers with at least 30 years of experience are granted a lifetime license.

◆ Testing Issues

• Exemption of teachers who have previous experience from licensure exams.
• Postponement of Praxis II subject area exams for up to one year.

◆ Whole System Reform

Adoption of a more systematic approach to broad teacher quality reforms that focus on:

• induction and mentoring
• professional development and best practices
• additional team-based variable pay compensation when student performance improves
• implementation of a comprehensive continuum of data-driven strategies concerning recruitment, pre-service, licensure, induction, professional development and evaluation.

(Adapted and paraphrased from AACTE Legislative Update—www.edpolicy.org)

The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (1996), after conducting research over the last 10 years, concluded that "the single most important factor influencing student learning is teacher expertise, measured by teacher experience and master's degrees as well as teacher performance on statewide teacher examinations." One study, in particular, found that funds spent on qualified teachers resulted in greater improvements in student performance than any other allocation of school resources. Highlights of their findings indicated:

◆ Hiring and recruiting practices are not in line with current standards.

◆ School districts lack systems and resources to attract and retain qualified candidates.

◆ Professional development offerings do not meet the demands created by new standards for student learning.

◆ School systems do not have formulas to reward expert teaching performance.

The Commission concluded that "we know what to do in order to connect teacher learning to student learning—there is just no state or school system that has put together all the pieces of the teacher development continuum (i.e., recruitment, selection, preparation, evaluation, professional development, and reward).

Teacher Retention—A Pressing Problem

Concerns about teachers and teaching seem to reoccur whenever teacher supply and demand problems raise their threatening alarm. As a result, there are the predicable responses, such as catch-up salary increases, bonuses for early contract signing, new scholarship programs for prospective teachers, additional professional development dollars, and more focus on teacher induction and support programs.

When supply and demand problems ebb, however, there is the tendency to slip back to busine...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Sizing Up the Situation
• 1 Teacher Shortages: A Profession at Risk
• 2 Career Staging: A Professional Framework
• 3 Teacher Retention Profile
• Part II Professional Career Framework
• Career Stage One: Teacher Inductee
• 4 Career Induction
• 5 Reducing the Risk Factors
• 6 Mentoring: Doing the Right Thing
• 7 Implications for Continuous Professional Learning
• Career Stage Two: Teacher Specialist
• 8 Fostering and Valuing Expertise
• Career Stage Three: Teacher Leader
• 9 Teachers Leading Teachers
• Career Stage Four: Teacher Steward
• 10 Professional Continuity and Commitment