School Is Out

How many teachers are leaving the profession?
Nationwide, one-third of the new teachers leave within three years, and 45 to 50 percent within five years. A 2004-'05 study done in the Boston public schools showed that 57 percent of new teachers were leaving after three years.

What are schools doing?
It's really only been in the last two to three years that some large urban districts have begun to assess what their turnover rates are. Consequently, they have become more aggressive about finding where their shortage areas are. Even more recently, they have begun to look at why people are leaving when they do.

Are city schools worse than suburban ones?
I don't think this is an urban-suburban issue. It's also not always a district issue. It's a school-by-school issue. It has to do with resources. You can have schools that work well in very low-income neighborhoods where the principal, teachers, and parents have decided that the school is going to work well with kids.

Can you put a dollar figure on turnover?
A study done in 2004-'05 showed that replacing a third-year teacher in Boston is over $25,000 per year per teacher. The city estimated that it spent $3.3 million in the 2004-'05 school year replacing about 190 teachers.

You say that schools need to recruit the "best and brightest." Who are they?
It's an incredibly demanding job, and it means that you have to have bright, committed, well-educated people to do it well. The challenge today is that the pool has shrunk. Once young women and men of color automatically went to teaching. Today there are so many options. Fields and professions that once excluded these people - or quietly failed to encourage them - are now recruiting them.

How can schools become friendly for new teachers?
Schools have not caught up with the expectations of new teachers. Veteran teachers, for the most part, have come to terms with working in isolation and in spite of poor conditions. New teachers bring a different set of assumptions.

Like what?
The people entering teaching now are part of a different social group, in a sense. They have grown up learning and working in teams, and they expect the opportunity for professional growth and advancement. They want to collaborate with experienced teachers.

What about new or experimental schools?
Very often teachers at these schools are making a very short-term, tentative commitment to teaching. It's a mission - more like the Peace Corps than a profession. They work very hard, then they leave. You simply can't afford, either financially or organizationally, to have that kind of turnover.

What if these problems aren't solved?
If we don't figure out how to recruit and support these new people, we will lose them, and the whole fabric of the schools will unravel. We will find that we are running organizations filled with short-term workers - what someone once described to me as Christmas help. As a society, we just can't afford that.