Stopping teacher turnover

The Baltimore Sun

Having a qualified teacher in each classroom is a crucial requirement of the federal No Child Left Behind law, but a recent study suggests that teachers are coming and going as if through a revolving door, particularly younger teachers. And it estimates that the cost of so much turnover is more than $7 billion annually.

Beyond the financial costs, however, the lack of consistent, high-quality teaching hurts students, especially those in high-poverty, low-performing schools with large minority populations. These students need the most help in bridging the achievement gap, and school districts must do more to ensure that they have effective teachers.

The latest report, by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a teacher advocacy group, shows that only about 25 percent of teacher attrition each year is a result of retirement. Most teachers leave the classroom for other pursuits. And although researchers have found compensation to be a key complaint, teachers are also driven out by working conditions, especially a lack of support from principals and colleagues and an inability to connect with a school's instructional program.

In many cases, attrition might not be a bad thing, but there is a particularly disruptive and destructive pattern of younger, less-experienced teachers who leave the most challenging schools after a year or two and are replaced repeatedly by similarly inexperienced instructors.

That points to the need to manage teacher turnover better so that students will suffer less harm. Baltimore, with a large number of high-poverty and low-performing schools, has started to apply that lesson by being more deliberate in its hiring practices. City school officials have been recruiting earlier and offering more incentives so that they can compete more effectively with neighboring districts for top teaching prospects. One result has been an increase in the proportion of new teachers who are considered highly qualified from less than 65 percent two years ago to nearly 100 percent for the coming school year.

But when it comes to recruiting and retaining top-notch teachers, Baltimore is still playing catch-up compared with surrounding counties. City school officials need to move more aggressively to provide more-extensive mentoring and focused instructional leadership, promote career ladder opportunities and address teachers' concerns about school safety.

Attention to these and other issues could keep reducing the attrition rate among Baltimore's teachers, which is expected to be about 10 percent this year - the same rate as Baltimore County's - compared with nearly 17 percent last year. Keeping more good teachers in classrooms is essential to increasing the number of engaged students who won't drop out as well.

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