How to Stop High Teacher Turnover

When I entered the first staff meeting of the school year, I looked around the room and found that I did not recognize several faces in the crowd. This did not shock me. After 14 years as an elementary educator, I am used to seeing new teachers come and go. Over the years, I have taught in a private school, a charter school and several hard-to-staff schools in Los Angeles and have found that teachers are leaving at an alarming rate.

Statewide, teachers--especially those who have been teaching less than five years--are leaving in droves. In a January 1999 report on teacher quality, Richard Riley, U.S. secretary of Education, stated that new teachers are five times more likely to quit their jobs than veteran teachers.

While some turnover can be expected in any profession, one must ask what is happening in our schools that is driving new teachers out of the classroom.

Teacher retention has been a critical issue for several years, especially in California, where legislation has mandated class-size reduction in grades K-3. Because there are not enough teachers to fill this need, hundreds of urban schools are hiring teachers on emergency credentials. Many of these new hires have no formal training in teaching methods or child development. They are expected to learn the curriculum and how to manage a class with very little guidance.

Clearly, new teachers need more support. The time that mentors have for classroom observations is not sufficient for the kind of direct intervention during school hours, when new teachers need the most help.

For newly credentialed teachers and district interns of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the state-run Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment program provides support through seminars and weekly meetings where curriculum, methods and classroom management are discussed. Interns and probationary teachers are assigned a BTSA provider for two years, but again, help is provided mostly after school hours. As one novice said, “I appreciate all the help, but I just can’t be reflective when I’m exhausted and have a stack of papers to grade.”

The fact is that new teachers need continuous and directed support during their first years of teaching. Many new teachers turn to their grade-level peers or other helpful colleagues over their assigned mentor teachers for advice.

Districts should encourage veteran teachers to align themselves with novices to provide ongoing support. These partnerships would be most effective if weekly meetings were held during the school day. New teachers need to feel less isolated and less frustrated with the day-to-day business of running a classroom.

With the need for 2 million teachers in the next 10 years, we need to keep as many teachers in the classroom as possible to provide meaningful learning experiences for our nation’s children.