Draft White Paper January, 2005

Teacher Retention: A Crisis in American Education

Dr. Jon Pedersen
Professor Science Education
The University of Oklahoma
Dr. Ron Bonnstettter
Professor Science Education
The University of Nebraska - Lincoln

There is a national crisis in education and at it's foundation is the huge turn over of classroom teachers. The Texas Public Policy Foundation (Sep. 2002) stated, The most crucial problem in teacher employment, pertains to teacher retention. After five years in a classroom, nearly 60 percent of teachers quit the profession. Nationally, over 25-30% of all teachers leave the profession within three to five years of their first job (Georgia Retention Teachers Study). Today, school districts are able to ignore the problem by hiring replacements; almost 80 percent of the demand for teachers represents the need to replace experienced teachers, not to fill new classroom positions. These numbers are frightening not only in the sheer number of individuals that are passing through our schools but also regarding the costs associated with recruiting, hiring and "training" teachers new to a system each year. The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a group that helped make teacher quality a major national issue stated in their report, What Matters Most; "Most states could solve their public school teacher shortages if they simply did a better job of holding on to their classroom teachers." Richard M. Ingersoll's 2003 report, "Is There Really a Teacher Shortage?", states "Contrary to conventional wisdom, retirement is not an especially prominent factor (p.18). He concludes that "27 percent of teacher turnover could be accredited to teachers pursuing of other jobs" and another 29 percent leaving because of "job dissatisfaction". Of those who left because of job dissatisfaction, 61 percent cited "poor salary" as the major factor.

The evidence is overwhelming. The Education Commission of the States, in 1999 recognized that retention of teachers is an issue; they went one step further by indicating that hard-to-staff schools are the central problem in retention. They define hard-to-staff schools as those schools with a large percentage of socio-economically disadvantaged students, difficult teaching environment, undesirable school locations, and low academic achievement of student population. They go on to say that, "The basic problem for hard-to-staff schools can be expressed as an issue of teacher shortage: an insufficient supply of effective teachers (teachers who can successfully promote student learning) for all students, including high-poverty and minority students. This implies that the problem involves the issues of supply, teacher quality and disposition." Not surprising then are the movements across the nation to mandate retention. This can be seen at the state and local levels. For example, in Philadelphia a council person prepared a resolution for the City Council Committee on Education to hold hearings on methods and practices of teacher retention and recruitment (Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown, Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller, February 15, 2001). The trend does not seem to be slowing down. In the Georgia Teacher Retention Study, data suggests that the retention crisis is growing, not shrinking. The same is true for most all regions in the nation. Many state have initiated "retention projects" to try to curb the exodus of teachers from schools (e.g., Excelsior Teaching Initiative, Mississippi Teacher Fellowship Program, Project ReSpecT: Retaining Special Education Teachers, Mentoring Induction Project, Hawaii Recruitment and Retention Support Center, Oregon Special.
Education Recruitment and Retention Project, The South Carolina Center for Teacher Recruitment, The New Teacher Center (NTC) at University of California Santa Cruz). Most of these programs focus on mentoring or induction programs that take a new teacher (after they are hired) and attempts to mentor or induct those individuals into the context, culture and society of the school and its constituents. Although, these are strong programs that have made great strides towards reducing the retention crisis, they have not begun to make a difference that is noticeable at a systemic level. In any other profession a dropout rate of somewhere between 25 and 60 percent is not only unacceptable, it would be unbelievable and potentially drive a business into bankruptcy. Employee Retention is and has been a focus for businesses throughout the nation. As the Nobscot Corporation indicates, "Companies and organizations are calculating (based on current cost per hire data) that hundreds of thousands of dollars can be saved annually by reducing employee turnover." This is also very true for schools, both public and private. Nobscot goes on to state, "Nowhere is this more important than in the school system. For example, a school system with roughly 10,000 teachers and an estimated turnover rate of 20% would stand to save approximately $500,000.00/year by reducing turnover by just 1 percentage point." The key question is how to stop the hemorrhaging.
How is it that we can reduce turnover is provide savings to school districts and provide for our children's educational future. Again, research provides with some suggestions that we believe can assist in resolving the retention issue, as it has in the business world. Most commonly used tools for hiring teachers are perceiver interviews. Although these interviews are effective at what they do (comparing a teacher candidate to an "ideal" teacher in terms of knowledge and skills), it does not go far enough. The American Association of School Administrators (AASA) investigated the characteristics of effective teachers and suggested that they fall into two categories a) management and b) personal characteristics (Demmon-Berger, 1986). In part, the characteristics described by this study were; highly flexible, enthusiastic, and imaginative, emphasize perceptual meanings, believe in their own abilities and have high expectations. Although there is a need to have knowledge and skills of teaching, it is the dispositions for the profession of teaching that are missing in most preparation programs and within the hiring process. The difference here that we are suggesting is that instead of examining the "ideal" for a teacher, we examine the ideal for a particular position, in a particular context, in a particular building, with a particular set of colleagues. That is, the position itself is the benchmark for matching the teacher candidates' dispositions. Although a somewhat different perspective, we know intuitively that not all individuals are "cut out" for all positions. Yet we attempt in education to hire those individuals with "great teacher qualities" and fit those square pegs into the round, rectangular and triangular holes, asking each individual to adjust their own beliefs, values and personal attributes to the setting rather than matching the necessary values, beliefs and personal attributes of the setting to the candidate. This can be illustrated through an actual experience of teacher examining his own dispositions relating to teaching. "The gentleman left after reflecting on whether he held a passion for teaching, whether he could find the dispositions to continue his work in the classroom and be the best for the kids', the man who had five years of experience decided to leave teaching and return to something that gave him greater joy."
This statement validates what we have known for many years, most teachers leave the classroom for reasons relating to the values, beliefs and personal attributes they have and the mismatch with the position they are in (e.g., discipline, working conditions, administrative issues, Henderson and Henderson, 2002). It appears that an instrument must be developed to allow us to match teacher candidates' values, beliefs and personal attributes to specific positions in order to achieve a higher retention rate in our public schools. Without accomplishing this, the crisis will continue. Only when we can ensure that teachers' dispositions match the required dispositions of the job will we ever move beyond the biggest crisis in education.