Study: Duval County Loses Half of First-Year Teachers within Five Years

[KenFSU]

A few days old, but this is really significant.

You really have to be a borderline saint to be a college-educated adult teaching in Duval County these days.

Study: Duval County Loses Half of First-Year Teachers within Five Years

http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2013-04-29/story/study-duval-loses-half-its-first-year-teachers-within-five-years

By Khristopher J. Brooks

About half of the first-year teachers that Duval County Public Schools recruits are gone within five years, according to a study released Monday by the Jacksonville Public Education Fund.

A combination of low pay, too much paperwork and a lack of voice in district and state education decision-making are the main reasons for the turnover, the study shows. To help reverse this trend, the fund’s leader says the school district should increase teacher pay, minimize the non-instruction duties of teachers and give teachers more control over what happens in their classrooms.

Trey Csar, the fund’s president, said district officials are already taking steps to fix this problem, but it’s important that those officials keep the “human capital” problem at the forefront.

“As we looked at this human capital issue, we see that it has become the pre-eminent issue they have to deal with,” he said. “This is really going to shock people; it’s going to cause folks chins to hit the ground.”

The education fund’s study was built from examining the employment trend of first-year teachers that the district hired in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. Looking at state and district data, the fund noted how many newbie teachers entered during each of those years then researched where those same teachers were employed after three years and after five years.

The study, which tracked 2,041 teachers, does not show the effectiveness of the teachers examined. The teachers counted as leaving also include those who went on to leadership roles within the district.

Responding to the study, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said too many rock-star teachers are being moved to leadership roles.

“We have to get out of this notion that our greatest teachers have to be administrators,” Vitti said Monday. “Not every teacher should be an administrator. Not every teacher wants to be an administrator.”

Csar said these findings are significant because it appears teachers are leaving the district at a time when educators usually hit their stride. The district should address this issue, he said, because it costs the organization more money to recruit replacements for teachers who could have been groomed to stay.

Vitti said the turnover problem won't change until the new leadership changes the culture of the school district. The new district culture must be one that listens to teachers and one that let's teachers teach what students should know, not what's required on a test.

Csar noted that Duval’s 50 percent turnover is 10 percentage points higher than the state’s average.

Jason Rose, the fund’s data and policy director, said they took on this study because one of the school district’s largest initiatives is to develop great teachers and great leaders.

This study, Rose said, gives the public a sense for “what do we know about the teachers we have already.”

“Then we wanted to go a step further and ask why,” he said.

Diana Rubin, a third-year teacher at Andrew Robinson Elementary School, said after reading the study it was a shock to see how widespread this problem is and how "it really affects our students."

"I've noticed that it's a problem even at my school," she said. "I've seen large turnover every year, but recently it hasn't been as bad."

Rubin said she's been able to stay this long because she gets support from Teach for America, her students' parents and the school’s staff.

khristopher.brooks@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4104

Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2013-04-29/story/study-duval-loses-half-its-first-year-teachers-within-five-years#ixzz2SErJhioQ

[Jaxson]

When I was a rookie teacher, I thought about quitting many times but chose to hang on because I truly enjoyed teaching.  Today, I do not think that I would get past my first five years in the classroom.  As public educators, we are already tagged as ineffective and have to prove ourselves otherwise. 

[spuwho]

This isn't just a DCPS thing, this is a national thing.

I have seen many a tenured teacher convince the administrators at their school to round up the bad apples and dump them on a 'just glad to be here' teaching graduate, who ends up spending most of their instruction time, either in the hall breaking up disturbances, trying to bring the bad apples to order in their class, or down in the vice-principals offices with 2 students trying to slice each other with knives.

To the tenured ones, this is just a "test" and a way to see if those graduates "have the passion" for teaching. For the new teachers, its forces them to believe they have made the worse career decision in their lives and they exit stage left forever.

Essentially they become babysitters with Ed degrees.

On the flip side, I have seen washed out teachers who after 15-20 years can't find a gig at any reasonable district, so they land at DCPS saying they will take any instruction, regardless of the school grading, and convince the kids to help them float through the year so they can get their credibility back to make the jump to a better gig.

Those who are lucky enough (or connected enough) to land at a reasonable school out of college may miss the drama and reach 5 years and decide to keep teaching because they didn't have to face the tenured legion protecting their interests while battling the next generation of students.

None of these issues has anything thing to do with salaries or school funding.