THOMPSON: The Schools Teachers Leave

The Consortium on Chicago School Research has another "must read" report on teacher mobility. About 100 Chicago schools suffer from chronically high rates of turnover and the reasons are hiding in plain sight. Thirteen high schools and 84 elementary schools lose more than 30% of their teachers every year. "Most important for teacher stability is the degree to which teachers feel they have an influence over school decisions," wrote the Consortium. "Teachers are more likely to stay where the environment is conducive to teaching," and particularly for high schools, "teachers are more likely to stay at schools where students feel safe, and where students report that their classroom peers engage in appropriate academic behavior."

There has been a lot of discussion about teachers fleeing African-American schools, but in high schools it is classroom behavior that explains ½ of this mobility. Please excuse the social scientific phrasing, but the following is representative of the care in which this invaluable report explains these sensitive issues. "In fact, once we consider teachers’ reports of the climate and organization of the work at their school, only a quarter of the variation in teacher stability rates among elementary schools remains to be explained (24%), and almost no variation remains among high schools." - John Thompson

Comments

[Pamzella]

Absolutely nothing surprising about this one. What is true in Chicago is true in CA as well.

[Claus]

The Center for Teaching Quality has done a lot of research on working conditions and teacher migration. For a very interesting take on this issue--and one that makes reference to the CCSR report, see Barnett Berry's recent blog posting: http://teachingquality.typepad.com/building_the_profession/2009/07/listen-closely-working-conditions-matter-in-high-needs-schools.html.

[Steve]

John,

Another good report. Teacher movement is an unsettling thing. It's hard to develop a staff if your staff changes every year. And with big numbers like the ones you show in your piece, there's little rationale for spending money to train people who have a one in three chance of leaving.

As usual, here's my take on the issue:

I’m always leary of studies based on self-reporting of anyone’s complaints. In one large urban school where I worked for three years, the #1 factor we discovered in why teachers left schools was the length of their commute!

But on a more serious level, my own experience as someone who has been in front of tough kids at least a few times, and who has watched teachers in front of tough kids many times, tells me that classroom behavior – day after day after day – is the straw that most often breaks the camel’s back.

The irony here comes down to a question I pose at almost all my workshops: “Can you name your approach to classroom management?” The wording is intentional. I’m looking for people who have read any research at all on classroom management and who have picked up at least a thread of a particular philosophy or approach. To date, after hundreds of workshops with thousands of teachers, only a handful, less than 1%, have any kind of answer to the question.

As I observe teachers in their rooms, even so-called “good” teachers working with so-called “good” kids, I see horrible examples of classroom management that defy not only the research but common sense.

I submit that most teachers do find themselves ground down by kids’ behavior. But I also submit that most of that behavior is caused or at least abetted by teachers who have never had any substantive training in classroom management.

Now, having had no training is no excuse. I have had no training. And my wife has had no training. And we do OK. In my case, I read a few books and talked to a few teachers with well-managed rooms. In my wife’s case, she talked to me.

In short, it wasn’t that hard for either of us to pick up a few things that worked. We’re not the best by any means, but we get by. And we can always help someone who is struggling. It has been our experience that a few things that work go a long way to a happy classroom and a sustainable teaching environment. (Just for the record, after reviewing Lee Canter, Fred Jones, Love and Logic, and Positive Discipline, we choose L&L for our basic philosophy. We also make use of participation guidelines, student self-assessment of behavior, participation-based grading, and procedural management. I think it’s important to have names for these things so they can be analyzed, researched, and ideally improved over time.)

Hand in hand with classroom management is school-wide discipline. In a similarly informal survey, I have asked about 50 principals around the country if they can name their approach to school-wide discipline. So far, zero have been up to the task.

Most principals favor the traditional approach of escalating consequences (though none seems to know this by name). With each offense, something slightly worse happens to the student until in-school suspension leads to out-of-school suspension, and eventually, though in rare cases, expulsion followed by, at the high school level, the infamous summertime credit recovery (for which kids are often paid cash or given other tangible rewards).

One need not be a behavioral psychologist to understand the problem with the escalating consequences model. Kids merely “walk up the stairs” to whatever level of punishment they are comfortable with. And since most punishments take kids farther and farther from the classroom, they’re really more like rewards.

Another name for this kind of system is “a system of arbitrary consequences”. This has dangerous implications for kids who get caught up in it for many years as they never learn the real-world rules of natural or logical consequences.

And yet, most schools in the United States favor this deeply flawed approach even though they readily admit that it does little to improve school-wide discipline. I guess reading a book from ASCD or Jossey-Bass is just too much trouble for most school leaders. Heck, even the Love and Logic folks have a three-day Las Vegas training. But I suppose what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

My point here is a very simple one: Teachers: clean up your act and get a management system that works for you and your kids; Principals: get a clue and get a management system that works for you and your teachers. Teachers who do not feel supported by their principals are highly likely to move to a new school. And one of the best places a principal can support a teacher is with discipline.

Finally, let me say that I have a tremendous amount of respect for people who teach kids who are hard to teach. At the same time, however, I recognize that the main reason they are hard to teach is because they have not been taught well in the past. Dare to break the cycle of poor classroom management. It isn’t hard to learn. And it will make the single biggest difference in both the quality of one’s teaching and the joy one takes in one’s career.