New Teacher Center: college of education. (Research Centers at The University of Memphis).

A Promising Approach to Retain Teachers and Improve Quality

The College of Education at The University of Memphis is establishing a New Teacher Center (NTC) that will become operational in April 2003. The NTC will provide a model of support for new teachers that will lead to higher retention rates for new teachers, increased quality of teaching, and, in turn, higher student achievement. Establishment of the NTC is coming at a critical time in public education, especially with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

The bipartisan passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 recognizes that American society requires public schools that work and requires highly qualified teachers in every classroom by the 2005-06 school year. But, we are now more than halfway to 2006 and America is still far from providing all children with highly qualified teachers. Like other similar parts of our country, the shortfall is particularly severe in West Tennessee urban, low-income communities and rural areas where inexperienced or underprepared teachers are too often concentrated in schools beset with difficult societal problems that make success difficult. Not only are students who need quality teaching paying an unacceptable price, but so are our local and state economies.

What Is "the Problem"?

In its 2003 bipartisan report No Dream Denied: A Pledge to America's Children, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) challenges the conventional wisdom that American schools lack enough teachers to provide every American child with high quality teaching. The problem of supporting high quality teaching in many urban schools is not driven by too few teachers entering the profession, but by too many leaving it for other jobs. The report lays out extensive evidence that the real school staffing problem is teacher retention. In short, the ability to create and maintain a quality teaching and learning environment in urban and rural low-income schools is limited not so much by teacher supply, but by high turnover among the teachers who are already there.

The NCTAF report pulls no punches as it seeks to answer the question, "Why doesn't every child have quality teaching?"

In the mistaken belief that teacher supply is the core problem, quality teaching is too often compromised in an effort to recruit a sufficient quantity of teachers to fill classrooms. The results: standards for entry into the profession are lowered; quality teacher preparation is undercut; licensure becomes a bureaucratic barrier to be sidestepped, instead of a mark of quality; and the mythology that "anyone can teach" gains more ground with each fall's round of stopgap hiring. Today, thousands of unqualified individuals are in classrooms across the nation, hired because state laws and district policies are ignored in the name of meeting immediate needs of schools that appear to face "shortages." But the real problem is that these schools are unable to retain a sufficient number of teachers with the proper credentials. We have mistaken the symptom for the problem.

The Commission does not shrink from the commitment to recruit and prepare highly qualified teachers, but concludes that America cannot achieve quality teaching for all children unless those teachers can be kept in the classroom.

Not only is teacher retention a problem in West Tennessee schools, it is a national crisis; teacher turnover is now undermining teacher quality, and it is driving teacher shortages. In contrast to the superficial conclusion that growing student enrollment, smaller class sizes, and teacher retirement are the problem, the facts speak otherwise. Overall, the nation dramatically increased its teacher supply during the 1990s, and with the exception of mathematics, science, special education, and bilingual education, produces enough teachers to meet each year's new needs.

In spite of steady increases in the number of teachers entering the schools during the 1990s, the problem is that teacher attrition was increasing more rapidly. Despite redoubled recruiting efforts, many schools show a net loss of teaching staff each year. For example, America's schools hired 232,000 teachers who had not been teaching the year before (i.e., new and reentering teachers, not just those changing schools). However, just one year later, the schools lost more than 287,000 teachers--55,000 more than had been hired--for a net loss of 24.0 percent.

No teacher supply strategy will keep schools--particularly schools in low-income urban and rural areas--staffed with high quality teachers unless we can reverse debilitating turnover rates. On one hand, teacher turnover rates reflect those who move from one school to another, as well as those who leave teaching; on the other, teacher attrition reflects only those who leave teaching. 'While turnover rates are high, it's the attrition rates that are most troubling. Analysis of the most recent data from the National Center for Educational Statistics found that approximately a third of America's new teachers leave teaching sometime during their first three years of teaching; almost half may leave during the first five years.

Not surprisingly, turnover rates are highest in our nation's low-income urban schools; with the rate for teachers in high poverty schools being almost a third higher than the rate for teachers in all schools. Teacher attrition, a fist-size leak in the teacher supply bucket, is increasing. For example, in 19992000, teachers leaving teaching exceeded teachers entering teaching by 23.0 percent. Increasingly, teaching is becoming a revolving door occupation; for example, in the 1999-2000 school year, the total teaching force in America was 3,451,316. Thirty percent of this teaching force was in transition.

What Are the Costs of "the Problem"?

Teacher turnover and attrition have unacceptable costs to schools, school systems, and to students--particularly low-income students. Certainly, some turnover is unavoidable as teachers retire, start families, or pursue other jobs. Further, turnover can be positive as new enthusiasm and ideas enter the system. But, excessive teacher turnover has great financial, institutional, and human costs.

One largely hidden cost for states is the loss of the great public investment that goes into tuition and tax support for preparing new teachers--as many as half of whom then proceed to leave schools within the first five years of work. The costs of the revolving door to school districts are astronomical. For example, a recent analysis in Texas estimated the cost of annual, statewide turnover to be conservatively set at $329 million.

For school districts, there are real costs associated with hiring, preparation, and replacement of the new teachers needed to replace those who leave the system and those who leave teaching entirely. For systems and individual schools, the costs associated with up to a third of their teachers in transition are great, regardless of whether the teacher in one school is being lost to another school in the district or dropping out of teaching altogether. The outcome is the same: a churning loss of continuity, coherence, and community, essential elements for any strong school and viable organization.

The costs are particularly severe where chronic turnover and attrition produce high concentrations of under-prepared and inexperienced teachers. Without strong mentoring support, new teachers feel isolated and alone. Districts with high turnover schools are caught in an endless cycle of funding recruitment and professional support for new teachers who often end up leaving the profession or moving to more desirable schools in affluent communities. Thus, not only do high turnover schools lose the benefit of professional development investments, but high turnover also undercuts the ability of schools to build and sustain essential professional teaching communities that are essential to support school reform.

Perhaps most critical are the costs to students. The most damaging long-term effect of high teacher turnover is the impact on teaching quality and student achievement. Beginning teachers with less than two or three years of experience are often noticeably less effective than their more senior colleagues. Typically, large urban schools with the highest percentage of poor and minority students have the highest teacher turnover rates. These same schools also typically have the highest percentage of first year teachers, the highest percentage of teachers with fewer than five years of teaching experience, and the lowest percentage of veteran, accomplished teachers. Not surprisingly, it is the lowest income students who suffer most.

High turnover of faculty in low-income and high-minority schools creates a no-win situation for the students who, having lost one or more of their teachers, must sit in classrooms taught by unqualified replacements or short-term substitutes. The long-term effect on these students can be devastating. For example, an analysis of Tennessee Value Added Assessment data shows that children who had the least effective teachers three years ma row posted academic achievement gains that were 54.0 percent lower than the gains of children who had the most effective teachers three years in a row. Studies in Boston and Dallas have yielded comparable findings.

What Is the Solution? How Do We Begin to Solve "the Problem"?