Retention needs reforms too

Every year tens of thousands of teachers quit the profession.

With approximately 1.6 million teachers set to retire in the next decade, replenishing America’s teaching force should be a top priority. But filling classrooms with new teachers is only half the battle. Retaining them is equally important.

Numerous studies show that teachers perform best after being in the classroom for at least five years. According to a McKinsey study, 14 percent of American teachers leave after only one year, and 46 percent quit before their fifth year. In countries with the highest results on international tests, teacher turnover rates are much lower—around 3 percent.

Few if any corporate education reformer seem to want to address this problem, which is not particulaly suprising. Having high turnover is a mechanism for keeping costs low, by constantly replenishing large percentages of the workforce with younger, cheaper employees. However, for those interested in the critical importance of teacher retention and few interesting articles were published recently that indicated that school management plays a criticl role.

Principal Plays Surprising Role in Why New Teachers Quit

Why do so many beginning teachers quit the profession or change schools? Surprising new research finds it's not a heavy workload or lack of resources that has the most significant effect, but instead the relationship between teachers and their principal.
[…]
The study gauged novice teachers' intent to remain teaching and the factors that might influence that decision. Youngs said he was surprised to learn the frequency with which novices met with their school-assigned mentor teachers did not make them more or less likely to continue teaching.

In fact, the most important factor that influenced commitment was the beginning teacher's perception of how well the school principal worked with the teaching staff as a whole. This was a stronger predictor of intent to remain teaching than having adequate resources, the amount of administrative duties the teacher had or the size of their workload.

Another, unrelated article in Forbes, hinted at this too

First, Public Agenda found, at the nine successful schools “principals lead with a strong and clear vision . . . and never lose sight” of their goals. What’s more, “these principals earn trust and respect by engaging and supporting their staff in building the structures, practices and confidence necessary to fulfill this vision.”

Public Agenda, referenced above produced a report titled "Failure is not an Option". It laid out a number of factors that affected success in nine of Ohio's high-poverty, high-achieving schools

Second, according to Public Agenda, leaders of the successful schools “provide genuine opportunities and incentives for teachers to collaborate, and teachers say that collaboration and sharing best practices are keys to their effectiveness.” Most every organization, of course, insists that its employees work together seamlessly. More often than not, they’re mistaken or lying. “Even within the same company,” Drucker observed in Managing in a Time of Great Change, “people tend to resist sharing information.”

Third, teachers at the successful schools “regard student data as clarifying and helpful, and they use it to plan instruction.” In fact, “examining student data and talking about how to address the specific problems it reveals often produce further opportunities for staff to work together and learn from one another.”

In other words, while everyone is held accountable for results, test data is used to help foster a culture of continuous improvement; it is not used as a cudgel. Whenever any organization—whether a school or corporation—turns measurement into an excuse for punishment, Drucker noted in The Practice of Management, it will destroy morale, and employees will invariably find a way “not to obtain the best performance but to obtain the best showing” on the test or audit by gaming the system.

We need to start a discussion on policies that will lead to greater teacher retention - this is far more critical to maintaining a high quality education system than Rube Goldberg mechanisms to weed out a few underperformers.

Teacher Retention: Estimating and Understanding the Effects of Financial Incentives

There is currently much interest in improving access to high-quality teachers (Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2010; Hanushek, 2007) through improved recruitment and retention. Prior research has shown that it is difficult to retain teachers, particularly in high-poverty schools (Boyd et al., 2011; Ingersoll, 2004). Although there is no one reason for this difficulty, there is some evidence to suggest teachers may leave certain schools or the profession in part because of dissatisfaction with low salaries (Ingersoll, 2001).

Thus, it is possible that by offering teachers financial incentives, whether in the form of alternative compensation systems or standalone bonuses, they would become more satisfied with their jobs and retention would increase. As of yet, however, support for this approach has not been grounded in empirical research.

Denver’s Professional Compensation System for Teachers (“ProComp”) is one of the most prominent alternative teacher compensation reforms in the nation.* Via a combination of ten financial incentives, ProComp seeks to increase student achievement by motivating teachers to improve their instructional practices and by attracting and retaining high-quality teachers to work in the district.

My research examines ProComp in terms of: 1) whether it has increased retention rates; 2) the relationship between retention and school quality (defined in terms of student test score growth); and 3) the reasons underlying these effects. I pay special attention to the effects of ProComp on schools that serve high concentrations of poor students – “Hard to Serve” (HTS) schools where teachers are eligible to receive a financial incentive to stay. The quantitative findings are discussed briefly below (I will discuss my other results in a future post).

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The full paper can is below:

TEACHER RETENTION: ESTIMATING AND UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTS OF FINANCIAL INCENTIVES IN DENVER

Experienced educators are critical

Here at JTf we try to bring attention to as much of the latest reputable education policy research as possible. You can check our scribd account for the back catalogue. What consistently comes to light are the following observations

• Education policy covers a vast area of issues
• A lot of research is paid for by organizations with an agenda
• Most research is in a state of relative infancy
• There's a lot of contradictory research

As we have been delving into one policy area, namely teacher attrition, we came across 2 studies. The first form the National Center for Education Statistic, titled "Beginning Teacher Attrition and Mobility: Results From the First Through Third Waves of the 2007–08". One of the questions this study is looking at is the impact of early career mentoring and its impact on attrition. This study has tentatively found

Among beginning public school teachers who were assigned a mentor in 2007-08, about 8 percent were not teaching in 2008–09 and 10 percent were not teaching in 2009–10. In contrast, among the beginning public school teachers who were not assigned a mentor in 2007–08, about 16 percent were not teaching in 2008–09 and 23 percent were not teaching in 2009–10 (table 2).

In other words, having a senior teacher mentor a younger teacher has quite a dramatic effect on the attrition rates of new teachers. This is an important finding for many reasons, but especially important to understand if we were to move away from collaborative work places to a more merit based system where competition rules.

A second study, from the US Department of Education titled "Impacts of Comprehensive Teacher Induction Final Results from a Randomized Controlled Study", had a different finding regarding the question of mentoring

Neither exposure to one year nor exposure to two years of comprehensive induction had a positive impact on retention or other teacher workforce outcomes
[...]
-There was no impact on teacher retention over the first four years of the teachers’ careers. This was true of retention in the original school, the original school district, and the teaching profession.

These are the kinds of problems that need to be wrestled with, in order to produce the most effective education system possible.

For the record, mentoring does produce important positive results, as the Dept. of Ed study found

• For teachers who received two years of comprehensive induction, there was no impact on student achievement in the first two years. In the third year, there was a positive and statistically significant impact on student achievement.

- In the third year, in districts and grades in which students’ test scores from the current and prior year are available, students of treatment teachers outperformed students of the corresponding control teachers on average. These impacts are equivalent to effect sizes of 0.11 in reading and 0.20 in math, which is enough to move the average student from the 50th percentile up 4 percentile points in reading and 8 percentile points in math.

- These results are based on the subset of data for which students’ test scores from the current and prior year are available. If the analyses are conducted without requiring test scores from the prior year, we do not find an impact on math or reading scores. This alternative approach nearly doubles the available sample of study teachers but the lack of data on students’ prior achievement results in a less precise estimate. This means that we are less likely to detect a true impact if it exists, despite the larger sample size.

We can't build a strong education system without experienced educators prepared to mentor young teachers, and that mentorship requires multiple years of effort to show results.

Teacher attrition and education policy

One of the genuine major issues facing education is one of teacher attrition. Each year significant numbers of teachers leave the profession. From a human capital perspective, this is hugely expensive and impacts education delivery. A large number of studies have been performed to asses this problem. A recent study, published by the american Education Research Association looked at all the major studies in this area. The study can be found here (pdf). What follows are come of the concluding remarks.

This literature review provides a summary and critical evaluation of the recent published research on the topic of teacher recruitment and retention. We reviewed studies that examined (1) the characteristics of individuals who enter teaching, (2) the characteristics of individuals who remain in teaching, (3) the external characteristics of schools and districts that affect recruitment and retention, (4) compensation policies that affect recruitment and retention, (5) pre-service policies that affect recruitment and retention, and (6) in-service policies that affect recruitment and retention.

The reviewed research offered several consistent findings. The strongest results were those relating to the influence of various factors on attrition due to the widespread availability of longitudinal data sets that track the employment of teachers. Below, we summarize the findings that emerged in the recent empirical research literature.

1. Results that arose fairly consistently regarding the characteristics of individuals who enter the teaching profession were as follows:
• Females formed greater proportions of new teachers than males.
• Whites formed greater proportions of new teachers than minorities, although there is evidence that minority participation rose in the early 1990s.
• College graduates with higher measured academic ability were less likely to enter teaching than were other college graduates. It is possible, however, that these differences were driven by the measured ability of elementary school teachers, who represent the majority of teachers.
• A more tentative finding based on a small number of weaker studies is that an altruistic desire to serve society is one of the primary motivations for pursuing teaching.
2. Several findings emerged with a strong degree of consistency in empirical studies of the characteristics of individuals who leave the teaching profession:
• The highest turnover and attrition rates seen for teachers occurred in their first years of teaching and after many years of teaching when they were near retirement, thus producing a U-shaped pattern of attrition with respect to age or experience.
• Minority teachers tended to have lower attrition rates than White teachers.
• Teachers in the fields of science and mathematics were more likely to leave teaching than teachers in other fields.
• Teachers with higher measured academic ability (as measured by test scores) were more likely to leave teaching.
• Female teachers typically had higher attrition rates than male teachers.
3. Regarding the external characteristics of schools and districts that are related to teacher recruitment and retention rates, the empirical literature provided the following fairly consistent findings:
• Schools with higher proportions of minority, low-income, and low-performing students tended to have higher attrition rates.
• In most studies, urban school districts had higher attrition rates than suburban and rural districts.
• Teacher retention was generally found to be higher in public schools than in private schools.
4. The following statements summarize the consistent research findings regarding compensation policies and their relationship to teacher recruitment and retention:
• Higher salaries were associated with lower teacher attrition.
• Teachers were responsive to salaries outside their districts and their profession.
• In surveys of teachers, self-reported dissatisfaction with salary was associated with higher attrition and decreased commitment to teaching.Teacher Recruitment and Retention
5. Rigorous empirical studies of the impact of pre-service policies on teacher recruitment and retention were sparse. In general, few results emerged across studies, and the following findings were therefore not particularly robust:
• Graduates of nontraditional and alternative teacher education programs appear to have higher rates of retention in teaching than national comparison groups and may differ from traditional recruits in their background characteristics.
• There was tentative evidence that streamlined routes to credentialing provide more incentive to enter teaching than monetary rewards.
• Pre-service testing requirements may adversely affect the entry of minority candidates into teaching.
6. Findings from the research on in-service policies that affect teacher recruitment and retention were as follows:
• Schools that provided mentoring and induction programs, particularly those related to collegial support, had lower rates of turnover among beginning teachers.
• Schools that provided teachers with more autonomy and administrative support had lower levels of teacher attrition and migration.
• A tentative finding was that accountability policies might lead to increased attrition in low-performing schools. The entry, mobility, and attrition patterns summarized

One can see from the results of these studies, creating a lower paid, less secure profession as some current corporate education reform policies would do, would create a situation of worse renention, to the determiment of students. The importance of workplace conditions, classroom resources, and support are also critical, and may be lost without the ability to bargain for them.

Clearly, delivery of high quality education at an affordable cost is a complex subject with many complex variables at play. SB5 and HB153's highly prescriptive, and simplistic appoaches to reform without any broad expert consultation are bound to produce sub-optimal results. Ohio should take advantage of it's localized control and delivery of education, and its vast expert resources in education and pedagogy to experiment in reform before committing to a one size fits all simplistic approach.

A second literature review on teacher attrition an be found here.

How unemployed parents might affect your job

A recent paper titled "Short-run Effects of Parental Job Loss on Children's Academic Achievement", found the following

We study the relationship between parental job loss and children’s academic achievement using data on job loss and grade retention from the 1996, 2001, and 2004 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We find that a parental job loss increases the probability of children’s grade retention by 0.8 percentage points, or around 15 percent. After conditioning on child fixed effects, there is no evidence of significantly increased grade retention prior to the job loss, suggesting a causal link between the parental employment shock and children’s academic difficulties. These effects are concentrated among children whose parents have a high school education or less.

Parents becoming unemployed affect their children's academic achievement. Here's the unemployment trend for Ohio

As you can see, in recent years, unemployment in Ohio has escalated alarmingly to around 10%. That's a lot of students who have potentially been academically impacted by this trend.

We mention this because this is just one variable of many that isn't captured through student/teacher linkage, or the Value Add calculation, yet could critically affect student achievement and hence their teacher's evaluations.

What happens to these teacher level value add scores when a large local employer has mass layo-offs? Will it lead to lower performance evaluations for teachers in that area? Would that be fair?

These kinds of questions are going to need to be investiagted, and having silly web forms isn't going to cut it.