Smart Teacher Retention Is the Best Turnaround Strategy

From the Marshall Memo #447

“The real teacher retention crisis is not simply the failure to retain enough teachers,” says this New Teacher Project study of 90,000 teachers in four urban school districts. “It is the failure to retain the right teachers… The primary retention strategy in most schools is not having a strategy at all.” 

The report estimates that every year, 10,000 highly effective teachers (dubbed “the irreplaceables”) leave their schools, while 100,000 mediocre teachers stay. Each departing irreplaceable leaves a vacuum that it takes eleven subsequent hires to fill. These teachers leave because they feel isolated, unappreciated, and unsupported. One highly effective elementary teacher who was reluctantly leaving her school said of her principal, “If he would have said, ‘What’s it going to take for me to get you to stay?’ that’s all he had to do.” Like most other principals in the study, he made no effort to keep her.

Apart from the student learning gains they produce, what distinguishes the irreplaceables from other teachers? It’s not the hours they work, says the report, nor primarily their beliefs: “Diligence and good intentions are poor predictors of good teaching.” What makes the difference is the daily application of effective teaching practices. Surveys of the most effective teachers’ students reveal significant differences on questions like these, compared with students who had low-performing teachers:

• Students in this class treat the teacher with respect.
• My teacher explains difficult things clearly.
• My teacher in this class makes me feel that s/he really cares about me.
• My teacher doesn’t let people give up when the work gets hard.
• My teacher wants us to use our thinking skills, not just memorize things.
• My teacher makes learning enjoyable.

Students see the difference, but administrators apparently don’t. “The nation’s urban school districts are losing their most and least successful teachers at strikingly similar rates,” says the report. “Instead of improving the quality of instruction they offer their students by increasing the proportion of great teachers and decreasing the proportion of struggling teachers, our schools are running in place. This is the real teacher retention crisis.” 

A disturbing finding in the study: many low-performing teachers said their administrators told them they were high-performing, steered them toward teacher-leadership opportunities, and encouraged them to stay at the school. The result: low-performing teachers were retained at quite similar rates to high-performing teachers. 

“I love teaching at my school because the leadership is supportive,” said one of the irreplaceable teachers interviewed in the study. “However, it also supports poor teaching.” Underlying this administration’s posture are two deeply rooted fallacies about teacher performance: (a) low-performing teachers will improve; and (b) a struggling veteran will do better than a brand-new teacher. “Both assumptions encourage a simplistic and hands-off approach to teacher retention,” say the authors. “But both assumptions are wrong.” In fact, struggling veterans rarely improve – and rarely “self-select out.” In most cases, even a brand-new teacher would do better. “Three out of four times, new teachers perform better in their first year than the low-performing teachers they replace,” say the authors, “and they are more likely to improve over time.” 

Teacher turnover is not the best data point. The question is which teachers are turning over. When an ineffective teacher is replaced by one with greater classroom skills, hundreds of students benefit for years to come. “Most schools take an approach to teacher retention that neglects the irreplaceables and allows unsuccessful teachers to stay indefinitely. Principals have tools to retain their best teachers and counsel out their lowest performers, but they rarely use them.” The report highlights the following causes of this process:

• Principals make far too little effort to retain irreplaceables or remove low-performing teachers. More irreplaceables are influenced by their principals’ actions and attitudes than by working conditions and personal reasons for leaving (e.g., starting a family). Here are eight low-cost strategies principals could use to keep great teachers:

• Provide them with regular, positive feedback.
• Help identify areas for development.
• Informally give critical feedback about their performance.
• Publicly recognize accomplishments. 
• Tell them they’re high-performing.
• Identify pathways for teacher-leader roles.
• Put them in charge of something important.
• Provide them with access to additional resources for their classrooms.

“These are strategies most school leaders could start implementing tomorrow, without any changes in policies, contracts or laws, and at little or no cost,” say the authors. But most irreplaceables had experienced fewer than two of them. As for underperformers, only one-fifth of them had been encouraged to leave and more than one-third were encouraged to stay.

• Poor school cultures and working conditions drive away great teachers. School conditions definitely make a difference, says the report. Turnover rates among irreplaceables were 50 percent higher in schools with weak instructional cultures. This is primarily the principal’s job, but district leaders have an important responsibility – including bringing data about school culture to the attention of school leaders. 

• Policies give principals and district leaders few incentives to change their ways. “In most districts, managing teacher retention is simply not considered a priority for principals,” says the report. “None of the districts we studied recruit, train, or evaluate principals based on their willingness or ability to make smart decisions about teacher retention based on performance. Most don’t even track separate retention rates for irreplaceables and low performers.” A number of policy roadblocks need to be removed before principals will seriously apply themselves to the work that needs to be done:

• Meaningless teacher-evaluation systems;
• Lockstep compensation systems;
• Lack of career pathways;
• Performance-blind layoff rules;
• Forced placement of teachers;
• Onerous dismissal rules. 

As a result, turning around a school is nearly impossible – and the teaching profession is degraded. 

What is to be done? To improve teacher retention, many reformers suggest improving working conditions and boosting teacher pay. These are important, but they increase the retention of both effective and ineffective teachers. “The solution is to improve retention, not to blindly improve it,” says the report. “Schools must retain more irreplaceables while simultaneously raising expectations for teachers and retaining fewer of those who consistently perform poorly. This smarter approach to teacher retention could improve the quality of teaching at almost any school right away, and it has the potential to boost student learning substantially.

“Lamenting the low prestige of the teaching profession without addressing the low standards that perpetuate it will not solve the real retention crisis,” the report continues, “nor will focusing on greater accountability for teachers without regard for the exceptionally challenging circumstances in which they work. These approaches have been repeated and debated for decades, enduring right along with the problem. We believe the time has come for a more serious strategy. Teachers and education leaders at all levels need to embrace the more difficult, more complex work of demanding respect and rigor: better working conditions for teachers along with the higher performance standards worthy of the teaching profession.” 

The report’s final recommendations: Make retention of irreplaceables a top priority; counsel out low performers; make this a major factor in principals’ evaluations; pay irreplaceables more; and strengthen the teaching profession through higher expectations. “Teachers who cannot teach as well as the average first-year teacher should be considered ineffective – unless they are first-year teachers,” concludes the report. “Those who fail to improve rapidly – within one year – should not remain in the classroom, and principals should be held accountable for making sure they don’t.” 

“The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis in America’s Urban Schools” by Melissa Wu, Kelli Morgan, Jennifer Hur, Kymberlie Schifrin, Lisa Gordon, Gina Russell, Hai Huynh, and Sandy Shannon et al., a report from The New Teacher Project, 2012, 

http://tntp.org/assets/documents/TNTP_Irreplaceables_2012.pdf