Putting a stop in the revolving door

Turnover is main cause of staffing problems in high-poverty schools

One analysis of teacher supply and demand uses the analogy of a leaky bucket. If water is leaking through holes in the bucket, the best solution is to fix the holes rather than keep pouring in more water. Likewise with the teaching force, if high turnover is the problem, it makes sense to work on retaining teachers rather than simply increasing the supply of new teachers coming into the workforce.

That’s a central theme of a new report from the Center for American Progress and the Institute for America’s Future titled “Why Do High-Poverty Schools Have Difficulty Staffing Their Classrooms with Qualified Teachers?” The report points out that, contrary to many analyses, staffing challenges largely are not a result of growing student enrollment and increasing numbers of teacher retirements. These factors do play a part, notes study author Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania, but the revolving door—to use another analogy—is a much bigger reason for teacher shortages in high-poverty schools.

High-poverty urban schools, in particular, deal with huge outflows of teachers; each year, they lose an average of one-fifth of their faculty. While no schools are immune from teacher turnover, the annual turnover in low-poverty schools is about half of that in high-poverty urban schools. The rate for high-poverty rural schools is about 16 percent.

These teachers are generally not leaving to retire, the report says. It found that only 14 percent of those who left urban high-poverty schools and 25 percent of those departing poor rural schools were retiring. Teachers indicate they are leaving because of dissatisfaction related to low pay, poor administrative support, student discipline and too many intrusions into teaching time (especially in urban schools). Three issues that surprisingly didn’t rank high as causes of dissatisfaction, the report notes, are large class sizes, lack of opportunity for professional advancement and poor student motivation.

Clearly, better salaries and benefits are an important strategy to retain more teachers—a way to patch the larger holes in the bucket, to return to that analogy. But teachers who left their jobs in high-poverty schools suggested other fixes, as well. Student discipline, in particular, is strongly tied to teacher turnover, the report shows, with much higher rates in schools with more behavior problems. The report also indicates that teacher turnover is lower in schools where teachers have more input and decision-making authority. Although class size did not rank high on the list of reasons teachers leave, they did suggest that smaller class sizes could help retain more faculty.

Not surprisingly, the report strongly warns against an isolated focus on simply increasing teacher supply through recruitment. In fact, it says, “if recruitment strategies involve lowering teacher standards, or if the effect of increasing teacher supply is to deflate salaries or erode working conditions, then these measures may simply exacerbate the root factors behind school staffing problems.” The result could be even higher rates of teacher turnover.

The full report is available online at www.americanprogress.org.