Teachers and Student Race

I've been MIA for a few days while I busily jumped through hoops. I just read through all the blogging I missed, and here's the exchange I found most interesting:

Eduwonkette pointed out that a wide body of research has found that teachers are less likely to stay in schools with a large population of racial minority students.

Mike Petrilli responded by asking if that meant that teachers are racist and points out that KIPP schools and some others have had success attracting teachers to teach in schools with overwhelmingly racial minority student bodies.

I have two things to add:

1. No, it doesn't mean teachers are racist. Recent work has found that teachers tend to end up in schools where they feel more comfortable -- where students and teachers are from the same geographic area, social class, race, etc. as themselves. That makes sense. People like be surrounded by familiar things.

2. Pointing out that KIPP attracts teachers to teach racial minorities is a bad example for two reasons. First: I don't have statistics handy, but I don't think KIPP's teacher retention rates are too stellar. KIPP and some other high-flying charter schools rely on young idealistic teachers (including many in TFA) who are willing to devote their lives to the school for a few years before they move on to something else. Secondly, even if KIPP retained the talented teachers it recruits, that wouldn't be proof that there are enough people willing to teach in these schools across the entire country. I'll agree with his point that the working conditions probably matter more than the racial make-up of the student body, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't consider the racial make-up of a school.

All Research is "Mesearch"

So says my roommate, who heard it from a friend. As a relatively new member of the research community, I have two thoughts on this:

1. There's a lot of truth in that statement
2. "All" is too strong

I don't really have a rooting interest in any particular intervention, but I would be lying if I said that my personal experiences hadn't shaped my research interests. I'm a private person -- when I talk about myself, it's not usually about personal things. Education is, to me, however, very personal. Particularly my decision to quit teaching. I know not everybody quit for the same reason as me. I don't know exactly how the exit of people like myself affects schools. But I've been convinced by my experiences that it merits further investigation.

I'm in an unusually pensive mood b/c TMAO has started to expound a bit on his decision to quit, and it stirs up a lot of memories for me. He makes a list of all the reasons he didn't quit and, oddly enough, these are mostly reasons why I did quit. Here are all the reasons he lists that he didn't quit:

1. I wasn't prepared - I certainly wasn't. It's not really the reason that I quit, but it certainly hindered the amount of success I had.
2. I'm not successful - I certainly never felt successful. Maybe I just set the bar too high for myself, but I always felt like I was trying to preside over chaos.
3. I'm not supported - TMAO says he doesn't know what this means. In my school, it meant that when I struggled I was told I was a bad teacher rather than helped. When a student flipped out, I was berated and the student remained in my room.
   
4. I can no longer stand to work with the disastrously declined youth of today or their apathetic, uninvolved families - I'll agree with him on this one -- that had nothing to do with my decision
5. I'm not paid enough - Of course I wasn't paid enough for what I went through, but that had very little to do with my decision to leave.
6. I really want to teach at a KIPP school - That was probably the last thing on my mind as the kids ran out the door on my last day.
   
7. I'm burnt out - TMAO wrestles with whether or not he was burnt out. I have no such quandary: I was burnt out -- badly.

Considering that these are the reasons he didn't quit, I'd very much like to hear more on why he did. Personally, I'd add discipline problems and the overall hostility level of the school at the top of a list of other reasons why I left.

But enough about me; back to my point. Just as everybody has experiences that define their lives, this one has defined mine. And these experiences define not just who people are but also what they research. Part of me feels that this is a bad thing -- in which case I plead guilty -- but part of me isn't so sure.

On the one hand, it means that people have more personally at stake in their research than we might like to believe (I'm guessing that most people who are interested in merit pay or teacher education believe that they are potentially powerful interventions). But, on the other, it also means that people have some context for the questions they ask and, for that matter, that they are motivated to spend time on the topic.

I know that my experiences have shaped my interests (and probably always will), and I think I can be ok with this as long as I start a project answering questions that I genuinely believe can be answered in either direction. It's the difference between starting off saying "I'm going to prove that discipline problems influence teacher retention" and saying "I wonder if discipline problems influence teacher retention and, if so, how much?" I'm not perfect, but that's the goal for which I'll aim.

Another One Bites the Dust

A sad day in the world of teaching. The writer of the blog Teaching in the 408 has announced he's resigning. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it sounds like he was frustrated.

I've never seen him teach, but it sounds like he was an effective teacher in a tough school. A smart, determined, dedicated Teach For America alum. In other words, just the type of teacher that we should be trying to keep.

How Does Teacher Retention Affect Schools?

I've been on the road for two weeks now and all the conference presentations are starting to muddle together in my head. As such, I'm just going to talk briefly about the paper I presented yesterday. It's one of the few things that I can keep straight in my head right now.

Here's the premise of the paper:

Lots of people have investigated why teachers leave schools, but I haven't seen much on how schools are affected by teachers leaving. The simplest version of this question would be "does retaining more teachers improve student performance?"

As I've discussed before, the nature of teacher retention is very different in different schools. Since retention rates are notably low in high-poverty urban schools, I chose to focus solely on them. I had some data and was able to compile a dataset of 43 NYC middle schools that had large percentages of poor students (not including magnet, K-8, and some other schools with unreliable statistics). Across these schools, about 40% of teachers were in their first or second year of teaching at their current schools and less than half had a total of 5 or more years of teaching experience.

There was also a moderately strong (r=.44, p<.05) relationship between the average student score on the 8th grade state math test and the percent of teachers who had been teaching for at least two years at that school. In other words, schools with higher rates of teacher retention also had higher student achievement.

Using regression analysis and controlling for race and attendance rate, teacher retention was still significantly related to student achievement. Teacher retention had a fairly sizable effect and the model did a pretty good job of explaining the variance in test scores (effect size of .20 and R-squared of .70).

So, in short, among high-poverty middle schools in NYC those with higher rates of teacher retention also had higher test scores, even when controlling for other things that influence student test scores. The question that I can't answer with the data is whether better schools make teachers want to stay there more or if more teachers staying in a school improves the school and boosts student achievement (or a little of both). I hope to come closer to answering this question in the future.

Is There a Teacher Shortage or Not?

A paper presented yesterday at the Incentive Pay Conference held on campus raised some eyebrows. The authors looked at the relationship between teacher effectiveness and teacher retention -- in some contexts less effective teachers were more likely to leave a school while in others there was no statistically significant difference between more and less effective teachers.

The statistic that seemed to raise eyebrows was that after 5 years about 2/3 of the beginning teachers were still teaching at a public school in Florida (the paper examined 5 cohorts of first-year teachers in Florida public schools over 5 years). One economist suggested that this was a much higher retention rate than any other professional field and that, perhaps, we should be asking why so many teachers stay in the field instead of why so many leave.

The point raised is a valid one, it appears that teacher retention is not a problem in a lot of places and that, taken as a whole, there is no "teacher shortage" in this country. But there's a dangerous caveat that makes saying "teacher retention isn't a problem" just as false as saying that it is; teacher retention is a problem in some areas -- most notably high-poverty schools.

In this particular study, the authors found that only 20% of teachers in high-poverty schools were still teaching in that school in their fifth year and that teachers tended to transfer to schools with fewer minorities, fewer students in poverty, and higher test scores. To be fair, after reading the paper in full, the authors do acknowledge this -- but that doesn't change the fact that the reaction in the room seemed to be agreement that teacher retention was overblown as a problem in America's schools.

Secondly, the utility of an overall number is limited because it remains to be seen how much it helps or hurts a school when a teacher leaves one school in favor of teaching in another. Imagine the most extreme scenario: all teachers remain in teaching for their entire career, leading to an overall retention rates of 100%, but switch to a different school each year; even though teacher retention is not a problem for the system as a whole, it might be within schools.

In summary:
There is no "teacher shortage" in this country, but some schools are short on teachers. Most teachers continue to teach, but not in certain schools. Teacher retention may not be a problem at the school down the street, but it may be at the school across town -- and dismissing it as a problem is just as dangerous as exaggerating the scope of the problem.