|
Double-click any word
or phrase on this web page and see
the AnswerTip appear. The patented AnswerTips technology
enables readers to launch a helpful "information bubble" with a
relevant explanation and/or definition. It's an effective,
just-in-time delivery of learning.
Greensboro, N.C. - The retirement of thousands of baby boomer
teachers coupled with the departure of younger teachers frustrated
by the stress of working in low-performing schools is fueling a
crisis in teacher turnover that is costing school districts
substantial amounts of money as they scramble to fill their ranks
for the fall term.
August 27, 2007. Source: The New York
Times by Sam Dillon
Superintendents and recruiters across
the nation say the challenge of putting a qualified teacher in every
classroom is heightened in subjects like math and science and is a
particular struggle in high-poverty schools, where the turnover is
highest. Thousands of classes in such schools have opened with
substitute teachers in recent years.
Here in Guilford County, N.C., turnover had become so severe in some
high-poverty schools that principals were hiring new teachers for
nearly every class, every term. To staff its neediest schools before
classes start on Aug. 28, recruiters have been advertising
nationwide, organizing teacher fairs and offering one of the
nation’s largest recruitment bonuses, $10,000 to instructors who
sign up to teach Algebra I.
“We had schools where we didn’t have a single certified math
teacher,” said Terry Grier, the schools superintendent. “We needed
an incentive, because we couldn’t convince teachers to go to these
schools without one.”
Guilford County, which has 116 schools, is far from the only
district to take this route as school systems compete to fill their
ranks. Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher
Quality, a nonprofit policy group that seeks to encourage better
teaching, said hundreds of districts were offering recruitment
incentives this summer.
Officials in New York, which has the nation’s largest school system,
said they had recruited about 5,000 new teachers by mid-August,
attracting those certified in math, science and special education
with a housing incentive that can include $5,000 for a down payment.
New York also offers subsidies through its teaching fellows program,
which recruits midcareer professionals from fields like health care,
law and finance. The money helps defer the cost of study for a
master’s degree. The city expects to hire at least 1,300 additional
teachers before school begins on Sept. 4, said Vicki Bernstein,
director of teacher recruitment.
Los Angeles has offered teachers signing with low-performing schools
a $5,000 bonus. The district, the second-largest in the country, had
hired only about 500 of the 2,500 teachers it needed by Aug. 15 but
hoped to begin classes fully staffed, said Deborah Ignagni, chief of
teacher recruitment.
In Kansas, Alexa Posny, the state’s education commissioner, said the
schools had been working to fill “the largest number of vacancies”
the state had ever faced. This is partly because of baby boomer
retirements and partly because districts in Texas and elsewhere were
offering recruitment bonuses and housing allowances, luring Kansas
teachers away.
“This is an acute problem that is becoming a crisis,” Ms. Posny
said.
In June, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a
nonprofit group that seeks to increase the retention of quality
teachers, estimated from a survey of several districts that teacher
turnover was costing the nation’s districts some $7 billion annually
for recruiting, hiring and training.
Demographers agree that education is one of the fields hardest hit
by the departure of hundreds of thousands of baby boomers from the
work force, particularly because a slowdown in hiring in the 1980s
and 1990s raised the average age of the teaching profession. Still,
they debate how serious the attrition will turn out to be.
In New York, the wave of such retirements crested in the early years
of this decade as teachers left well before they hit their 60s,
without a disruptive teacher shortage, Ms. Bernstein said.
In other parts of the country, the retirement bulge is still
approaching, because pension policies vary among states, said
Michael Podgursky, an economist at the University of Missouri.
California is projecting that it will need 100,000 new teachers over
the next decade from the retirement of the baby boomers alone.
Some educators say it is the confluence of such retirements with the
departure of disillusioned young teachers that is creating the
challenge. In addition, higher salaries in the business world and
more opportunities for women are drawing away from the field
recruits who might in another era have proved to be talented
teachers with strong academic backgrounds.
“The problem is not mainly with retirement,” said Thomas G. Carroll,
the president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s
Future. “Our teacher preparation system can accommodate the
retirement rate. The problem is that our schools are like a bucket
with holes in the bottom, and we keep pouring in teachers.”
The commission has calculated that these days nearly a third of all
new teachers leave the profession after just three years, and that
after five years almost half are gone — a higher turnover rate than
in the past.
All the coming and going of young teachers is tremendously
disruptive, especially to schools in poor neighborhoods where
teacher turnover is highest and students’ needs are greatest.
According to the most recent Department of Education statistics
available, about 269,000 of the nation’s 3.2 million public school
teachers, or 8.4 percent, quit the field in the 2003-4 school year.
Thirty percent of them retired, and 56 percent said they left to
pursue another career or because they were dissatisfied.
The federal No Child Left Behind law requires schools and districts
to put a qualified teacher in every classroom. The law has led
districts to focus more seriously on staffing its low-performing
schools, educators said, but it does not appear to have helped
persuade veteran teachers to continue their service in them.
Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a group that helps
urban districts recruit teachers, said attrition often resulted from
chaotic hiring practices, because novice teachers are often assigned
at the last moment to positions for which they have not even
interviewed. Later, overwhelmed by classroom stress, many leave the
field.
Chicago and New York are districts that have invested heavily and
worked with teachers unions in recent years to improve hiring and
transfer policies, Mr. Daly said.
“But most of the urban districts have no coherent hiring strategy,”
he said. Many receive thousands of teacher applications in the
spring but leave them unprocessed until principals return from
August vacations, when more organized suburban districts have
already hired the most-qualified teachers, he said.
“There isn’t any maliciousness in this,” Mr. Daly said, “it’s just a
conspiracy of dysfunction.”
In Guilford County, Washington Elementary School, which serves
students from a housing project, had churned through several
principals and most of its teachers several years ago, and had
repeatedly failed to make federal testing goals, said Dr. Grier, the
superintendent.
“Teachers were worried it was becoming a failing school,” Dr. Grier
said. To rebuild morale, he recruited a principal from Chicago,
Grenita Lathan. Her first year at Washington was a nightmare, Ms.
Lathan said, because her predecessors had been so panicked to fill
classroom vacancies that they had hired “just anybody.”
“All they wanted was warm bodies in the classroom,” she said. At job
fairs, qualified teachers she tried to hire shunned her, she said.
Under Guilford County’s incentive program, math or reading teachers
who sign on at any of 29 high-poverty schools receive bonuses of
$2,500 to $10,000. They can earn additional bonuses if they raise
achievement.
Those incentives helped Ms. Lathan recruit solid teachers last year,
she said, and after much tutoring and hard work, students met
federal testing targets. This summer all but one teacher signed up
for another year.
Other Guilford County schools have also used the incentives to hire
promising people.
Rebecca Rheinheimer moved from Indiana this summer, attracted by a
$2,500 bonus to teach at Oak Hill Elementary, where the teaching
staff has been strengthened by the use of such bonuses. The school,
in High Point, met its federal testing targets this spring for the
first time in several years.
Margaret Eaddy-Busch, a veteran math teacher, moved from
Philadelphia this summer to teach at Dudley High, which had become
known as a hard-to-staff school. She will receive a $10,000 bonus
for teaching Algebra I.
“If I survived in Philly for 10 years,” Ms. Eaddy-Busch said, “I’ll
do just fine here.”
But it remains unclear whether the incentive program will retain
good teachers as effectively as it attracts them.
“It’s challenging to teach in these high-needs schools,” said Mark
Jewell, president of the local teachers union. “These new teachers
will have a trial by fire, and then it’ll be a revolving door.”
Read this story from Sunday’s New York Times.
|
