Guest Post: Teacher Turnover – Who Stays and Who Leaves
EWA’s 66th National Seminar, held at Stanford University, took
place earlier this month. We asked some of the journalists
attending to contribute posts from the sessions. The majority of
the content will soon be available at EdMedia Commons. Over the
next few weeks I’ll be sharing a few of the posts. Melissa Bailey
of the New Haven
Independent is today’s guest blogger.
When a school loses a high percentage of teachers, what happens
to the kids they leave behind?
A researcher shed light on that question, and a former teacher
shared a solution, at a EWA National Seminar panel on teacher
turnover.
The researcher, Susanna Loeb of the Stanford Graduate School of
Education, said the teacher turnover problem has been
well-documented: One in three teachers leaves the profession
within five years.
Common sense would say that turnover hurts kids, but Loeb said
surprisingly little research has been done to test that
assumption. She and her co-authors tackle the question in a paper
published in the American Educational Research Journal in
February. The title: “How Teacher Turnover Harms Student
Achievement.” (Read it
here.)
Turnover is complicated, she said: Whether it’s good or bad
depends on the composition of the workforce—whether the teachers
who come in are more effective than the ones who leave. The
disruption itself may also be good or bad: It may lead to
innovation, but it can also make it harder for teachers to
coordinate among themselves, as new teachers have to be trained
and socialized.
Previous studies had shown schools with high turnover tend to
have lower student performance, but there was no causal
connection between the two, Loeb said. Looking for a causal tie,
Loeb’s group examined 850,000 observations of students in the 4th
and 5th grades of New York City schools over an eight-year
period. They looked at the percentage of teachers who left the
school, and how students fared on tests in the following
year.
Loeb sought to answer the question: “Do students do worse in
the year after there is high turnover?” Her answer was yes:
Teacher turnover hurt student achievement in English and math.
The effect was significant—about as significant as the effect of
free lunch eligibility (a standard measure of poverty) on test
scores, she said. The effect was strongest among schools with
more low-performing and black students.
What’s more, she reported, turnover appeared to have a ripple
effect throughout the school.In schools with high turnover,
achievement suffered even for kids in classrooms where the
teachers stayed.
Loeb said the research leaves a few questions to be explored: How
can schools reduce turnover? Why do teachers leave? And how can
schools buffer against the disruptive effects of turnover?
Anthony Cody—who taught for 24 years in Oakland public
schools—gave an on-the-ground solution to Loeb’s first question,
drawn from his experience working in a school with a significant
turnover problem. Two to three of 10 science teachers would leave
every year.
The high turnover took its toll on the experienced teachers who
saw new teachers come and go, he said. When a new teacher would
join the school, veteran teachers would “assess their likelihood
of survival, like birds in a nest. If one looks weak, you don’t
feed that one—you only give the food to the one who’s going to
make it.”
Cody created a new mentoring program called Team Science that
paired experienced science teachers with rookies. The school
built a “family” feeling within the department. The initiative
cut turnover to zero within the department, he said.
Cody, who has
blogged about teacher turnover at Education Week, argued that
some districts get into a “bad addiction” by turning to programs
like Teach For America to fill vacancies. The programs bring in
new teachers who don’t tend to stick around, he said, so, two
years later, the school is left back at square one.
Moderator Francisco Vara-Orta of the San Antonio Express-News
said the topic is ripe for stories. He dug into some data and
found that
charter schools in his region were shedding teachers at a
rate more than three times higher than regular public
schools.
Jessica Williams of The Lens in New Orleans asked about the
sustainability of charter schools where teachers stay up all
night working. Loeb said some charter schools like KIPP make it
easier for teachers to work there for short periods of time.
That’s not good, Loeb argued: “Our goal in reform should be to
stabilize schools that serve low-income kids.”
“We don’t want a system where poor kids get turnover and
middle-income kids don’t,” she said. “That’s just not the right
answer for the country.”