Keep Them in Class : Studies Have Found That New Teachers are Dropping Out at a Faster Rate Than Inner-City Students. The Problems in the Classroom Can Overwhelm Instructors, but a Program That Offers Technical and Emotional Support Is Helping . . .

Because he saw teaching in the inner city as a mission, Daniel Sievers thought he knew what to expect when the Los Angeles Unified School District assigned him to an impoverished Watts neighborhood.

But nothing he learned in teacher training, Sievers says, prepared him for the sadness he felt watching children come to school hungry and exhausted, sometimes crying in frustration because no one put them to bed at night or got them up in the morning for breakfast.

“Imagine 8-year-olds having to get themselves up on time . . . get dressed and get themselves to school,” says Sievers, 31, the father of two young boys.

Guy Morales of Baldwin Hills comes from a family of educators. His father and mother, aunts and cousins are teachers. Nevertheless, Morales vividly recalls his shock when, as a first-year teacher in Los Angeles, he visited the home of a troublesome 12-year-old.

“Here’s his mom on the floor smoking crack,” Morales says. “I just stood outside (the screen door) looking at her. I opened the door and I’m trying to tell her about her son. The woman tells me, ‘I can’t get my own life together, how am I going to get his life together?’ ”

Like thousands of other new teachers across the Southland and the nation, Sievers and Morales found themselves suddenly all alone in classrooms where they were responsible for children whose needs outstripped their own teaching skills and the district’s resources.

As veteran educators will testify, the profession’s most time-honored tradition for new teachers is sink-or-swim. But, according to a spate of recent studies, it is also driving teachers to drop out of the profession at rates higher than those of inner-city high school dropouts.

In some of Los Angeles’ toughest schools, according to two professors at Cal State Dominguez Hills who studied retention rates, more than half the new teachers leave the profession within three years. Statewide, California loses more than 50% of its new teachers within five years, according to another study commissioned in 1990 by the state Department of Education.

Replacing new teachers who leave the classroom costs taxpayers $15 million a year to recruit, orient and train the replacements, according to a state report on teacher retention.

Sievers and Morales were luckier, though, than most beginning teachers. They were part of a three-year, pilot teacher retention program developed in the Los Angeles schools by the two Cal State Dominguez Hills education professors, Joel A. Colbert and Diana E. Wolff.

Now, having recently received a state grant of $825,000, the professors are expanding the program into four other districts, Lennox, Hawthorne, Compton and Long Beach. The grant is part of a $5-million effort this year by the state to promote teacher retention in the face of mushrooming school populations and a severe shortage of credentialed teachers.

The Colbert-Wolff program gives new teachers psychological support and technical assistance in two key ways. New teachers are assigned to small support groups led by experienced teachers at the school where they work. They are also enrolled in such university education courses as classroom management and planning.

“When you’re first in a classroom,” said Ida Alba, director of personnel for the Hawthorne School District, “you’re thinking, ‘What am I doing here? I’m going to fail . . .’ This program will let them know it’s all right to ask for help.”

Beginning teachers, Colbert said, are the ones assigned to the most difficult schools with the most needy children. Veteran teachers with seniority can choose easier assignments.

The pilot program served 118 new teachers over a three-year period beginning in the 1988-89 school year, and the bulk of the participants were teaching in the city’s toughest neighborhoods. With the new money, the program can serve 175 new teachers, Wolff said.

Teaching is lonely anywhere, said Melba Coleman, an instructor at Dominguez Hills and former principal of the 102nd Street School in Los Angeles, which participated in the pilot program.

“It takes a long time to learn the craft . . . and along the way you get beat up and you get burnt out,” she said.

Also, schools such as the 102nd, Coleman explained, are a tough assignment for even veteran teachers. The school serves Jordan Downs, one of the city’s largest housing projects, and children living in such concentrated areas of poverty have special problems and special needs, she said.

“The level of activity, the noise, is higher,” Coleman said. “They can be easily distracted; you have a lack of social graces; you have absentee parents; you have a lot of incarceration in fathers.”

And, she added, the transiency rate is high and the children often need special grief and loss programs because they witness violence that injures or kills their loved ones.

The success of the Dominguez Hills pilot program surprised even its founders. Of the original pilot group, 95% are still teaching today, three years after the program began, Colbert and Wolff said.

“The person across the hall from me was a new teacher but didn’t get into the program,” said Morales, who taught at Carver Junior High School but has since transferred to Jefferson High School, where he also coaches junior varsity football. “Every day, you’d go in there and it was havoc. . . . She would just break down and cry. She would spend hours after school developing lesson plans, but when it came to implementing them, it was havoc.”

Morales, 37, who holds education and business undergraduate and graduate degrees, had a career in business and real estate before going into teaching almost five years ago. For him, the classroom management courses in Dominguez’s curriculum were the most valuable parts of the retention program.

He said he learned, for example, that discipline is influenced in large measure by such simple things as how quickly a teacher gets class under way, how the seats are arranged and where the teacher stands in class.

“If you have a classroom that’s going to be a noisy class,” Morales said, “walk around. . . . The reason you’re walking around is proximity. If the teacher’s close to (the students), they behave better.”

He learned to stand at the door of his classroom, he said, handing out the work as students file inside, explaining that it gets them working right away instead of waiting for the bell to ring.

Most teachers use a standard classroom setup with long rows of seats that stretch from the front to the back of the classroom, Morales went on, explaining that such an arrangement makes it impossible for a teacher to reach the back of the class quickly to quell a disturbance. A better way is to put a large aisle down the center with the desks turned to face the space, he said.

In his first year of teaching, Morales recalled, there was a fight in the back of his class. Another time, a boy walked to the front to complain that a girl was threatening to shoot him with her gun.

“I said, ‘Oh, yeah, right,’ ” Morales said, mocking his initial disbelief.

When he walked to the back, he took what he thought was a cap gun from the girl but discovered it was a .22-caliber pistol.

He also remembers going to the home of one 14-year-old who was acting up in class and finding a house presided over by a 17-year-old stepmother and so crowded that people slept on sofas and even in the kitchen. “I thought, my God, the things we take for granted,” Morales recalled.

“To be honest with you,” said Morales, “if we really want to make a difference in our state with education, you’ve got to train the teachers (better). It’s just not cost- effective to send these teachers in there who don’t know what to do.”

The regular support group meetings emerged as a vitally important part of the retention program, according to evaluation studies done by the state on the Dominguez pilot program and others like it around the state. Dominguez’s Wolff said all she had to do was listen to her students, many of them already classroom teachers, to become convinced that support programs for beginning teachers was the key to retention.

“I kept hearing these horrifying stories,” she said. “I used to liken it to being a lifeguard while you’re learning to swim. . . . All they’d want to do is vent.”

Sievers agrees that sharing frustrations with other beginners was key to the program’s success. “You realized that you weren’t trapped in this room all by yourself and these things were not necessarily happening to just you,” he said.

Sievers started teaching at Compton Avenue Elementary School in Watts and is now teaching in South-Central at 109th Street School.

While many other new teachers are dropping out of the profession under what state studies indicate is a cloud of despair and depression, Morales and Sievers are still exuberant.

With three years behind him now, Sievers says he can’t see himself doing anything else. “Honestly, I feel like I’ve enjoyed some success,” he said. “I know that I’m doing some things well.”

Morales says: “I love teaching. If I won the lottery, I’d still teach.”