New study: charter schools have more chronically inexperienced teachers

RESEARCH BRIEF: Teacher Turnover in Charter Schools by authors David Stuit and Thomas M. Smith, National Center on School Choice, June 2010 (red emphasis is mine)

KEY FINDINGS:

• The rate that teachers leave the profession and move between schools is significantly higher in charter schools than in traditional public schools.
• Charter schools that are started from the ground up experience significantly more attrition and mobility than those converted from traditional public schools.
• Differences in teacher characteristics explain a large portion of the turnover gap among charter and traditional public school teachers.
• Dissatisfaction with working conditions is an important reason why charter school teachers are significantly more likely to switch schools or leave the profession.
• Involuntary attrition is significantly higher in charter schools.

The rapid growth in charter schools during the past two decades has occurred despite inconclusive evidence that they are academically superior to their traditional public school counterparts…

The current study aimed to contribute to a deeper understanding of the organizational conditions of charter schools by examining teacher turnover…the study examined how turnover varies within the charter school sector. Central questions of the study were:

• How does the rate of teacher turnover differ between charter schools and traditional public schools?
• How do teacher turnover rates vary within the charter school universe, and which types of charter schools have higher/lower turnover rates?
• To what extent are the differences in turnover rates between charter schools and traditional public schools explained by differences in teacher characteristics?
• To what extent are the differences in turnover rates between charter schools and traditional public schools explained by differences in organizational conditions and contextual factors?
• What reasons do charter school teachers give for leaving the profession or moving between schools, and how do these reasons differ from those given by traditional public school teachers?

The study ultimately was interested in the relationship between school sector (charter school and traditional public school) and teacher turnover (attrition and mobility)…

Charter school teachers leave the profession and move between schools at significantly higher rates than teachers in traditional public schools. The odds of a charter school teacher leaving the profession versus staying in the same school were 130 percent greater than those of a traditional public school teacher. Similarly, the odds of a charter school teacher moving to another school were 76 percent greater.

Charter schools that are started from the ground up experience significantly more attrition and mobility than those that are converted from traditional public schools. Teachers at start-up charter schools were almost twice as likely to leave the profession and almost three times as likely to switch schools as teachers at conversion charters. This finding aligns with Buddin and Zimmer’s (2005) conclusion that conversion charter schools behave more like traditional public schools than start-up charter schools. EMO-managed charter schools did not have significantly different turnover rates than their non-EMO counterparts. There also was not a significant difference in teacher turnover between new charter schools and those that have operated for more than three years.

Differences in teacher characteristics explain a large portion of the gap in turnover rates among charter and traditional public school teachers. Charter school teachers were on average younger than traditional public school teachers, which makes them more likely to leave the profession or change schools. In addition, charter school teachers were more likely to be part time and less likely to have an education degree or state certification of any type. The odds of an uncertified teacher leaving the profession were 200 percent greater than those of certified teachers, and part-time teachers were found to be twice as likely to leave teaching as their full-time peers. Simply put, charter schools tend to hire people who are at greater risk of both leaving the profession and switching schools.

Dissatisfaction with working conditions is an important reason why voluntary teacher mobility is significantly higher in charter schools than in traditional public schools. The most common reason given by charter school teachers for voluntarily leaving the teaching profession was that they were dissatisfied with the school. Furthermore, 47 percent of charter school teachers who voluntarily switched to different schools did so because they were dissatisfied with either the workplace conditions or administrator support in their previous schools. The data lend minimal support to the claim that turnover is higher in charter schools because these schools are leveraging flexibility in personnel policies to remove underperforming teachers. Rather, most of the turnover in charter schools is voluntary by teachers and dysfunctional (i.e., detrimental to the school) rather than functional (i.e., beneficial to the school). These findings support those of Miron and Applegate’s (2007) study of charter school teacher attrition, which found that charter school teachers were “voting with their feet” and leaving charter schools because of dissatisfaction with workplace conditions of the schools.

Involuntary attrition is significantly higher in charter schools. This finding may stem from the fact that charter schools have fewer regulatory barriers to dismissing poor-performing teachers but also may be due to other factors, such as school closings due to charter revocations or the dismissal of uncertified teachers in order to comply with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act’s Highly Qualified Teacher mandate.

Policy and Research Implications

Teacher turnover is a critical issue within K–12 public education. High turnover is expected to have detrimental effects on school quality and to result in substantial financial costs to schools and districts. These expenses arise from a range of activities, including moving the teacher from the school, recruiting and hiring a new teacher, and training the new teacher. Therefore, it is important to understand the nature of turnover as well as the factors that explain why it is higher in some schools than in others.

Collectively, the findings from this study illuminate a critical challenge facing charter schools and may explain in part why they do not systematically outperform their traditional public school counterparts. The rates of both attrition and mobility for charter schools are high by any standard. Although this study found minimal evidence that charter schools are taking advantage of their more flexible personnel policies to remove underperforming teachers, the greater cause of the higher attrition and mobility rates in charter schools is teachers choosing to leave out of dissatisfaction with the school and/or its working conditions. The organizational disruption caused by this high level of dysfunctional turnover likely makes it more difficult for charter schools to develop and sustain high levels of instructional quality from year to year.

This brief is supported by the National Center on School Choice, which is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) (R305A040043). All opinions expressed in this paper represent those of the authors and not necessarily the institutions with which they are affiliated or the U.S. Department of Education. All errors in this paper are solely the responsibility of the authors. For more information, please visit the Center website at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/schoolchoice/.

The NCSC is funded by a five-year, $13.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. Its lead institution is Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. The center is housed on the campus of Peabody College, one of the nation’s top graduate schools of education.

Locate the full working paper @ http://www.vanderbilt.edu/schoolchoice/search/publication.php?id=62

Reflecting on longevity

This post and the previous one are dedicated to the current and former, dedicated-over-time, "true" teachers that my family has experienced so far during our OUSD years. Their names are listed at the bottom.

Yesterday, I compared the teacher salaries of eleven Alameda County school districts: Alameda, Albany, Berkeley, Castro Valley, Emery (Emeryville), Fremont, Hayward, Oakland, Piedmont, San Leandro, and San Lorenzo.

Today, I compared the amount of experience of the teachers in those same eleven districts. Here are the rankings:

• Average number of years teaching: OUSD placed 9^th at 11. 4 years. The longest was Piedmont at 15.3 years. The shortest was Emery at 6.7 years.
• Average number of years in the district: OUSD placed 10^th at 7.9 years. The longest was Fremont at 11.1 years, and the shortest was Emery at 4.3 years.
• Percentage of first year teachers: OUSD placed 3^rd at 11.7%. The district with the largest percentage of first year teachers was Albany at 28.2%, followed by Emery at 27.7%. The district with the smallest percentage of first year teachers was Piedmont at 1.7%.
• Percentage of second year teachers: OUSD placed 3^rd at 8.7%. The district with the largest percentage of second year teachers was San Lorenzo at 14.5%, followed by Castro Valley at 9.7%.
• Percentage of first and second year teachers: OUSD placed 4^th at 20.4%. During the time period of the most recent public data, one out of five OUSD teachers had been teaching for less than two years.

School District	Avg. Yrs. Teaching	Avg. Yrs. In District	% 1st Year	% 2nd Year	Total % 1st & 2nd Year
Oakland	11.4	7.9	11.7	8.7	20.4
Emery	6.7	4.3	27.7	2.1	29.8
San Lorenzo	10.4	8.5	9.2	14.5	23.7
Alameda	11.5	10.1	10.1	5	15.1
Albany*	11.8	9.2	28.2	4.8	33
Castro Valley	12.1	9.3	7.6	9.7	17.3
Berkeley	12.9	8.9	5.8	6.6	12.3
Hayward	12.9	10.2	10	4.6	14.6
Fremont	13	11.1	3.5	5.1	8.6
San Leandro	13.2	9.4	5.4	5.1	10.5
Piedmont	15.3	10.9	1.7	1.7	3.4

THE BOTTOM FOUR DISTRICTS The least experienced teachers The lowest district longevity The lowest starting salary
Avg. Yrs. Teaching	Avg. Yrs. In District	Lowest salary offered
Alameda	Berkeley	Berkeley
Emery	Emery	Emery
Oakland	Oakland	Oakland
San Lorenzo	San Lorenzo	San Lorenzo

THE TOP FOUR DISTRICTS The most experienced teachers The highest district longevity The highest potential salary
Avg. Yrs. Teaching	Avg. Yrs. In District	Highest salary offered
Fremont	Fremont	Fremont
Hayward	Hayward	Hayward
San Leandro	Alameda	San Leandro
Piedmont	Piedmont	San Lorenzo

The scheme now being steadily employed by inner-city school districts across the nation is to replace as many of their career teachers as possible with 22-year-old teaching “temps.” These energetic, young, recent college graduates have a do-gooder mentality and are willing to work in the worst inner-city school situations for very little pay. It is also beneficial to school districts that these fill-ins are green to the world of work and have zero family obligations. Those qualities, and being able to constantly take comfort in knowing they are short-timers, means that they don't tend to get agitated and complain (see this related link). Their lack of experience and interest in the career of teaching would be completely unacceptable to middle-class parents using either private or dominantly middle-class schools, the type of parent who these "teachers" themselves will become one day.

Although they are good people, these inexperienced short-timers are not true teachers and should be called something like “impermanent educational technicians” or "temporary student trainers."** Nannies, who certainly function as temporary, surrogate mothers, are not exactly referred to as “mothers," are they?

Let’s all just stop pretending and call it what it is. Despite the pronouncements requiring "highly qualified" teachers in our most challenging public schools, career teachers who are well-trained and experienced are not really longer wanted in the schools that need them most. To supply them to all students would cost more than US citizens are willing to pay.

So, the ed "reformers" have come up with a cheaper product that's being promoted for them by the media. Programs to create stopgap teachers, like Teach For America and Oakland Teaching Fellows, are on the rise. Their minimal preparation time is a benefit, too. For instance, TFA training only takes five weeks; OTF training takes six, and voilà, zee young, totally un-experienced teacher is ready to start work in zee most difficult classroom in zee entire school district!

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines stopgap as an improvised substitute for something lacking; a temporary expedient. (Except I'm not sure the idea is that they'll be temporary. I'd rather like to see these teaching corps as a supplement to the classroom, not as replacements for teachers.)

So, despite the recent educational rhetoric about civil rights and not leaving any of the children behind, it is obvious to me that our social policy is concretely demonstrating every-single-day that it doesn't consider the kids in those schools to be worth much. So as to divert our attention away from that fact, it's become commonplace, and very, very big, to blame the "true" teachers for society's failings, and (based on an obsession with test scores) to declare that they are hopelessly incompetent in order to demoralize and drive them out. Simultaneously, a set of upper-middle-class 22-year-olds is nationally glorified as stepping in to "save the day."

Like my mother occasionally reminds me, "Just follow the money."

ABOUT THE TEACHERS BELOW:

I admired and trusted these teachers and was personally able to witness their patience, wisdom, generosity, steadfastness, creativity, dependability, and dedication towards children as they toiled along with inadequate support (except at Redwood Heights where they had quite a bit in those days). These are primarily the teachers who my daughters had, and because I worked at a school for seven years and have been a very active parent, I know of many more. How much personal experience have most of the people who bad-mouth OUSD and other urban public school teachers had with them at all?

All of the "true" teachers in this country need more respect, care, and reward. And to make all the accountability folks happy, wasn't it the teachers of OUSD who gave enough of their blood, sweat and tears to recently make the District into California's "most improved urban school district?" For this, and all the other things they do, they most definitely deserve a raise.

Here are their names and I honor them:

Mr. Allen (Skyline)

Ms. Bale (Skyline)

Dr. Brown (Skyline)

Ms. Brekke-Brownell (Redwood Heights)

Ms. Ceremello (Bret Harte)

Ms. Chisholm (Bret Harte)

Ms. Cooper (Redwood Heights)

Mr. Correa (Skyline)

Ms. Dinell (Bret Harte)

Ms. Erata (Bret Harte)

Mr. Fitzsimmons (Bret Harte)

Ms. Grimes (Bret Harte)

Ms. Hamadeh (Bret Harte)

Ms. Harris (Redwood Heights)

Ms. Henrikson (Skyline)

Mr. Jollymore (Skyline)

Ms. Luzar (Redwood Heights)

Ms. MacElwain (Skyline)

Ms. Maffeo (Bret Harte)

Mr. Mates (Skyline)

Ms. McCrary-Holmes (Skyline)

Mr. Miller (Skyline)

Ms. Morici (Skyline)

Ms. Olinga (Skyline)

Ms. Ostrom (Skyline)

Ms. Ream (Redwood Heights)

Mr. Richter (Skyline)

Ms. Rodezno (Redwood Heights)

Mr. Salazar (Bret Harte)

Ms. Schneider (Bret Harte)

Ms. Smiley (Redwood Heights)

Ms. Sutton (Bret Harte)

Ms. Swayne (Bret Harte)

Ms. Toland (Redwood Heights)

Mr. Tolliver (Skyline)

Ms. Wallach (Redwood Heights)

Ms. Warner (Bret Harte)

Ms. Wilson (Bret Harte)

Mr. Worm (Bret Harte)

Ms. Wright (Redwood Heights)

Ms. Yoshimura (Bret Harte)

Mr. Zak (Skyline)

*I don't know what is going on in Albany, a lovely community which is home to a lot of professionals, but the teacher retention of their school district has plummeted in the last five years or so. Go to EdData and pull up Albany Unified, then locate the Teacher Experience table and look at the "pop-trends" pull-down graphs. If you know why this has happened, please submit a comment on this post.

** Here are other entertaining options from Roget's Thesaurus for the word "temporary": transient, transitory, provisional, impermanent, momentary, brief, fleeting, short-lived, transitional, provisional, standby, fill-in, stopgap, and substitute.