Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In a recent New York Times article titled At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice, Mitoko Rich wrote of how charter schools seem to be developing something of a “youth cult” in their teaching ranks. She reported that in the charter network “teaching for two to five years is seen as acceptable and, at times, even desirable.”
Teachers in the thirteen YES Prep Schools, which are located throughout Greater Houston, have a reported average of two and a half years of experience. The teachers who work for Achievement First—which has 25 schools in Connecticut, Brooklyn, and Providence, R.I.— “spend an average of 2.3 years in the classroom.” And the individuals who teach in the KIPP schools and the Success Academy Charter Schools stay in the classroom for an average of four years. This youth culture—or culture in which most classroom practitioners have little teaching experience— differs from that of our country’s traditional public schools where teachers average nearly fourteen years of experience…and where public school leaders have made it “a priority to reduce teacher turnover.”
In the NYT article, Jennifer Hines, senior vice president of people and programs at YES Prep, was quoted as saying, “We have this highly motivated, highly driven work force who are now wondering, ‘O.K., I’ve got this, what’s the next thing?’ There is a certain comfort level that we have with people who are perhaps going to come into YES Prep and not stay forever.” (Note: New teachers at the YES Prep schools receive just two and a half weeks of training over the summer before arriving in the classroom.)
Rich says it was Teach for America (TFA) that was mostly responsible for introducing the idea of a “foreshortened teaching career.” TFA is an organization that recruits “high-achieving” college graduates and places them in some of our neediest schools. In a piece for Policymic, Benjamin Cosman wrote about TFA recruits. He said that after just five weeks of training, “Teach for America participants lead a classroom for two years, slap it on their resume, and leave the school with a bevy of opportunities.”
Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, contends that “strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers. The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.” (Question for Wendy Kopp: Are you sending your teaching recruits into the “strongest” schools?)
Mark Naison, a professor of African American Studies and History at Fordham University and a man who once viewed Teach for America as a positive program, has a difference of opinion regarding teacher turnover. He has been disappointed that TFA doesn’t instill a commitment to teaching in its program participants. In fact, Naison no longer allows TFA to recruit his college students.
Naison said the following about Kopp’s organization:
Until Teach For America becomes committed to training lifetime educators and raises the length of service to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in impoverished areas, and then after two years encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity really rubs me the wrong way.
He added:
Never, in its recruiting literature, has Teach For America described teaching as the most valuable professional choice that an idealistic, socially conscious person can make. Nor do they encourage the brightest students to make teaching their permanent career; indeed, the organization goes out of its way to make joining TFA seem a like a great pathway to success in other, higher-paying professions.
Several years ago, a TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said “Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.” The message of that flyer was: “use teaching in high-poverty areas as a stepping stone to a career in business.” It was not only disrespectful to every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it effectively advocated using students in high-poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume-padding” for ambitious young people.
After reading Rich’s article about the high turnover rate of teachers in charter schools, Catherine M. Ionata responded in a letter to the editor. She wrote:
The charter school representatives in your article defend the rapid turnover of teachers. Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, even says that teachers can become great in one or two years! Would we expand this idea to other professions? Do we think the best lawyers are those fresh out of law school? Should we choose a rookie physician for complex surgery, because this surgeon is more “enthusiastic” than veteran surgeons?
Ronald Thorpe, president of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, said, “To become a master plumber you have to work for five years. Shouldn’t we have some kind of analog to that with the people we are entrusting our children to?”
Education expert Diane Ravitch also weighed in on the subject after reading Rich’s article:
Can you imagine that a “teacher” who graduated college in June is already “a great teacher” by September?
Why do we expect entrants to every other profession to spend years honing their craft but a brand-new teacher, with no experience, can be considered “great” in only one or two years, then leave to do something else?
This is a recipe to destroy the teaching profession.
How can anyone say they are education “reformers” if their goal is to destroy the profession?
What other nation is doing this?
This is not innovative. In fact, it returns us to the early nineteenth century, when the general belief was that “anyone can teach, no training needed.” Teaching then was a job for itinerants, widow ladies, young girls without a high school degree, and anyone who couldn’t do anything else. It took over a century to create a teaching profession, with qualifications and credentials needed before one could be certified to stand in front of a classroom of young children. We are rapidly going backwards.
Henry Seton, a humanities teacher at Community Charter School of Cambridge in Massachusetts, was another educator who responded to Rich’s article. He wrote:
The high teacher turnover at charter schools leaves these institutions fragile and ill equipped to support their most vulnerable students. It takes far more than a year or two in the classroom to develop that elusive set of skills needed to serve our nation’s neediest cohorts of students — young men of color, English language learners and so on. And I have seen some of the most well-regarded charters here in Massachusetts left reeling and in danger of closing after extensive teacher departures.
Benjamin Cosman (Policymic) wrote that young teachers in charter schools “are supposed to save education in the United States.” He thinks, however, that there is a “very real danger in valuing inexperience in the teaching field…” He believes this “supposed remedy” may possibly be hastening the “demise of public education.”
In his article titled It’s Harder for Charter Schools to Keep Teachers, Francisco Vara-Orta wrote about information provided in data collected by the Texas Education Agency. The data, taken from 47 local school districts from 2006 to 2011, showed that the “average teacher turnover rate for charter school districts was 46 percent, compared with 13 percent for traditional school districts.” Vara-Orta wrote that analysis of the data showed that teachers leave charter schools in Bexar County nearly three times more often than teachers in traditional public schools, “which generally pay more and perform better academically.” He continued, “Of the 10 districts rated academically unacceptable by the state in Bexar County last year, all were charters, with turnover ranging from 38 percent to 65 percent…”
Researchers from Vanderbilt University found that the teacher turnover rate in charter schools was nearly twice as high as that of traditional public schools. In addition, the researchers found that teachers in charter schools were also more likely to leave the profession.
Excerpt from the Vanderbilt report titled Teacher Turnover in Charter Schools:
Our analysis confirms that much of the explanation of this “turnover gap” lies in the differences in the types of teachers that charter schools and traditional public schools hire. The data lend minimal support to the claim that turnover is higher in charter schools because they are leveraging their flexibility in personnel policies to get rid of underperforming teachers. Rather, we found most of the turnover in charter schools is voluntary and dysfunctional as compared to that of traditional public schools.
A second reason is that attrition is highest among teachers that are new to the profession. Past research found teachers make important gains in effectiveness in their first three years and smaller gains over the next few years (McCaffrey, Koretz, Lockwood, and Hamilton, 2003; Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2005). Given that almost 50% of teachers leave the profession within their first five years (Ingersoll & Smith, 2003), many teachers are leaving the classroom before they have developed into optimally effective practitioners. Moreover, exiting new teachers are often replaced by similarly inexperienced teachers and consequently students in schools with high turnover may rarely be exposed to experienced teachers.
Third, turnover affects many of the organizational conditions important to effective schooling, such as instructional cohesion and staff trust. Effective schools hold shared beliefs in similar instructional goals and practices (Fuller & Izu, 1986; Bryk & Driscoll, 1988). Schools with high turnover are challenged to develop a shared commitment towards the same goals, pedagogy, and curriculum. The constant churning of teaching staff makes it difficult to collaborate, develop standard norms of practice, and maintain progress towards common goals. This can lead to fragmented instructional programs and professional development plans that must be adapted each year to meet the needs of a teaching staff in constant flux (Guin, 2004). High turnover also makes it difficult for teachers to build relational trust, which is critical towards productive collaboration in schools (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Guin, 2004).
Critics of charter schools argue that students and schools need stability. “When you stay in a school or community, you build relationships,” said Andrea Giunta, a senior policy analyst for teacher recruitment, retention and diversity at the National Education Association.
As might be expected, studies have shown that teacher turnover often “diminishes student achievement” and has a negative impact on “the overall school environment because it creates instability and a loss of institutional knowledge.”
Matthew Ronfeldt, an assistant professor of educational studies at the University of Michigan—along with colleagues Susanna Loeb and James Wyckoff—conducted a study on teacher turnover. Their report was titled How Teacher Turnover Harms Student Achievement. Loeb, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, said that the problem of teacher turnover had been well-documented. She noted, “One in three teachers leaves the profession within five years.” In their study, the three researchers sought to find out if students “do worse in the year after there is high turnover.” They discovered that high teacher turnover hurt student achievement in English and math—and that the negative impact was as “significant as the effect of free lunch eligibility (a standard measure of poverty) on test scores.” They also found the negative impact to be strongest “among schools with more low-performing and black students. “
In a Texas Tribune article dated January 27, 2010, Brian Temple wrote that at some charter schools in the state “it’s the teachers who can’t wait to clear out at the end of the school year.”
Temple reported that according to data that had been released at the time, 79 percent of the faculty of Accelerated Intermediate Academy in Houston turned over before the 2008-09 school year. At Peak Preparatory in Dallas, 71 percent of teachers did not return…and at Harmony Science Academy in College Station, “69 percent of teachers split.”
Temple continued:
In all, more than 40 of nearly 200 charter operators the state tracked — some which oversee multiple schools — had to replace more than half their teaching staffs before the last school year. Even more established and successful operators, including KIPP and YES Prep in Houston, lose nearly a third of their teachers annually. In contrast, just six of more than 1,000 non-charter school districts statewide had more than half their teachers leave, and none of the 20 largest school districts had a turnover rate higher than 16 percent.
The financial cost of teacher turnover is high. According to a study conducted by the National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future, teacher attrition costs approximately $7.3 billion per year. Since teacher attrition is so costly and has been shown to have a negative effect on student performance, Benjamin Cosman wonders why TFA and charter organizations like the Yes Prep schools encourage teachers to have a “get out while you can” mentality.
Cosman argued:
We should be cultivating teachers who are in it for the long haul, who build steady careers based on longevity, who become the wizened old stalwarts who’ve been around the block a few times. Yes, there are problems with tenure and bad teachers sticking around too long, and those issues need to be addressed. But the exact opposite — getting teachers in and out as fast as we can — is certainly not the solution.
Excerpt from Teacher Attrition: A Costly Loss to the Nation and to the States, an issue brief released by the National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future (NCTAF) in August 2005:
There is a growing consensus among researchers and educators that the single most important factor in determining student performance is the quality of his or her teachers. Therefore, if the national goal of providing an equitable education to children across the nation is to be met, it is critical that efforts be concentrated on developing and retaining high-quality teachers in every community and at every grade level…
According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ 1999–2000 “Public School Teacher Survey,” 47 percent of public school teachers worked with a mentor teacher in the same subject area.12 Sixty-six percent of teachers who were formally mentored by another teacher reported that it “improved their classroom teaching a lot.”13
Mentors are an important factor in providing support for new teachers as they enter the real world of the classroom, but mentoring alone is not enough. Comprehensive induction proves most effective at keeping good teachers in the classroom. Studies demonstrate that new teacher turnover rates can be cut in half through comprehensive induction—a combination of high-quality mentoring, professional development and support, scheduled interaction with other teachers in the school and in the larger community, and formal assessments for new teachers during at least their first two years of teaching.14
I can speak from experience. Mentor teachers can prove invaluable in helping young and inexperienced teachers by providing them with advice, insight, educational ideas and materials that have proved successful in the classroom, and by being a sounding board for them when they feel a need to express their frustrations, insecurities, and fears. Experienced teachers helped me when I was a teaching “ingénue.” Later, when I was a seasoned professional, I helped guide and advise young teachers. I shared books and teaching materials with them. I also listened to their new ideas. Other experienced educators at my school and I found that mentoring new teachers helped us to bond with them and to become a close-knit educational community.
Older teachers provide wisdom. Young teachers bring in a “breath of fresh air.” I think the healthiest school communities have teachers with different perspectives and levels of classroom experience—new teachers, teachers in mid career, and the old sages who have been around the block more than a few times.
One has to wonder how difficult it must be for young and inexperienced teachers to find mentors in their schools if most of the classroom practitioners have little more experience than they. One has to wonder how schools where teachers stay for just two or three years can develop their own culture and institutional memory—as well as a sense of stability and community. One has to wonder how children feel when their teachers come and go so frequently and rarely show evidence of a commitment to their schools and the student population.
It saddens me to think that there are “school reformers” in our country who encourage “foreshortened careers” in education…who think that youth trumps experience…who don’t instill a commitment to education in the young people they recruit for their teaching programs.
SOURCES
At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice (New York Times)
The High Turnover at Charter Schools (New York Times)
Charter schools are developing teachers with short tenure (Examiner)
Teacher Attrition in Charter vs. District Schools (CRPE–Center on Reinventing Public Education)
High teacher turnover in charters: Does student achievement suffer? (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
A Revolving Door (Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff)
Teacher Turnover in Charter Schools (Vanderbilt University)
It’s harder for charter schools to keep teachers (My San Antonio)
Teacher Attrition in Charter Schools 2007 (NEPC–National Education Policy Center)
Professor: Why Teach For America can’t recruit in my classroom (Washington Post)
Teacher Turnover Negatively Impacts Student Achievement in Math and English (The Journal)
Teacher turnover harms student learning (University of Michigan)
Teacher turnover affects all students’ achievement, study indicates (Stanford University)
Churn, Churn, Churn, Is Not Good for Kids or the Teaching Profession (Diane Ravitch)
LA students more true to their charter schools than teachers, studies say (UC Berkeley)
Charter Schools Battle High Teacher Turnover (Texas Tribune)
Teach For America: Let’s Stop Encouraging Teachers to Leave After Two Years, Maybe? (Policymic)
Guest Post: Teacher turnover – who stays and who leaves (Stanford University)
High Teacher Turnover Rates are a Big Problem for America’s Public Schools (Forbes)
Teacher Attrition: A Costly Loss to the Nation and to the States (NCTAF-National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future)
NCTAF Study: Teacher Attrition Costs U.S. Over $7 Billion Annually (American Association of Colleges for Teacher education)
“bettykath,
What’s difficult to understand is, if charter schools are so terrible, why do so many families find them so satisfactory?”
I’ve been busy this weekend with family business and the Jewish Holidays so I haven’t been able to keep up with the doings on this blog. Nevertheless, Elaine has written about a subject that is of great import and interest. she has done so persuasively and provided copious evidence to back up her premise.
Some have responded skeptically and the quote from RJM above is quite typical of their manner of response. While all the responses have been made civilly and are well thought out and written there is something missing from all of them and that is any counter evidence. What is RJM’s reference point for saying “so many families find them satisfactory”. Surely, in a subject such as this which has raised controversy there must be other studies that show a different picture? Do some here really think it is enough to refute Elaine’s multitudinous points by mere assertion sans supporting data?
As I see it Elaine has developed the following theses and backed it up with evidence:
1. The idea of the AFA that one can get good teachers by hiring inexperienced young people, who are only committed to working in the profession for two years does a disservice to those they are teaching.
2. The financial “powers that be” have identified a new opportunity to channel the flow of public dollars into their own coffers.
3. The driving propaganda of this movement is the notion that public schools are failing, yet many of the best public schools in the world are located in the United States, though in upper income areas.
4. The overwhelming majority of studies have shown that good education is directly driven by family income, not by schemes meant to enrich corporate entities.
From those four ideas one can extrapolate into many other effects, but in the end it comes down to the same problem identified in “Brown vs. The Board of Education” and that is that separate (in this case economically) is not equal.
Elaine has made her case and done it brilliantly. For those who would challenge her, I would challenge you. Show me the basis of you differing contentions in terms of evidence that directly contradicts it. Without that no matter what simplistic arguments you bring to bear you are merely using “smoke and mirrors” in addition to rhetorical flourishes disguising themselves as debate.
Elaine,
Yep….
AY,
The mania for high stakes testing and the pressure placed on teachers to spend valuable classroom time prepping students for them is the cause of some veteran teachers retiring early. It’s the reason that I left the classroom.
*****
Ron Maggiano, Virginia Teacher, Retires Over ‘Testing Regime’ That’s ‘Suffocating Creativity’
The Huffington Post
By Rebecca Klein
05/29/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/29/virginia-teacher-retires-ron-maggiano-testing_n_3354212.html
Excerpt:
Ron Maggiano is among several teachers leaving the profession due to what they feel is an overemphasis on standardized testing.
Earlier this month, Maggiano, who has been teaching for more than 30 years, announced his retirement on Facebook. A history teacher at West Springfield High School in Virginia, Maggiano won the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Family Teaching Prize for outstanding K-12 teaching in 2006 and the Disney Teacher Award for innovation and creativity in 2005, the Washington Post reports.
Maggiano told the school’s student newspaper, The Oracle, that he was retiring in part because of the new significance placed on high-stakes testing. Maggiano told the outlet last week that he felt the education system’s obsession with testing stifled real learning and creativity.
“When I started teaching, the worst thing a teacher could do is teach to the test. Now, all we are doing is teaching to the test. From the first day of school to the final exam, that’s all we are doing,” Maggiano told the paper.
Maggiano told the outlet that he would rather retire than be part of the education system as it stands.
*****
Teacher’s resignation letter: ‘My profession … no longer exists’
By Valerie Strauss
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/06/teachers-resignation-letter-my-profession-no-longer-exists/
Excerpt:
Increasingly teachers are speaking out against school reforms that they believe are demeaning their profession, and some are simply quitting because they have had enough.
Here is one resignation letter from a veteran teacher, Gerald J. Conti, a social studies teacher at Westhill High School in Syracuse, N.Y….
(Note: Click on the link above to read the teacher’s resignation letter.)
Anybody who knows anything about for-profit schools knows that only the owners make any money. And almost all schools are inaccurate (lying) about their attendance and test scores.
Follow the money.
Wow…. Good teachers are hard to come by…..
Nashville charter schools ‘lose’ problem students to public schools—just in time for testing
by Laura Clawson
MAY 21, 2013
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/05/21/1210512/-Nashville-charter-schools-lose-problem-students-to-public-schools-just-in-time-for-testing
If all you care about are test scores, one of the big advantages charter schools have over traditional public schools is that they don’t have to take every kid who shows up. Charters can push out the weak students, leaving them for someone else to deal with. That certainly looks like what’s happening in Nashville, Tennessee, where the eight schools with the highest net loss of students are all charter schools, WSMV’s Dennis Ferrier reports. The only schools losing more than 10 percent of their students are charters, which are losing up to 33 percent.
The highly regarded national KIPP chain’s Nashville school lost 18 percent of its students, a situation its principal says is unacceptable. Which it might be easier to believe he really meant if it wasn’t such a common occurrence and if it didn’t work out so well for his school:
“[Metro Nashville Public Schools[ feels it’s unacceptable as well, because not only are they getting kids from charter schools, but they are also getting troubled kids and then getting them right before testing time.
“That’s also a frustration for the zoned-school principals. They are getting clearly challenging kids back in their schools just prior to accountability testing,” said MNPS Chief Operating Officer Fred Carr.
“Nineteen of the last 20 children to leave Kipp Academy had multiple out-of-school suspensions. Eleven of the 19 are classified as special needs, and all of them took their TCAPs at Metro zoned schools, so their scores won’t count against Kipp.”
Then those kids’ test scores—the scores the charters didn’t want to have on their records—get held against public schools. And we’re told charters are such an amazing answer to all the problems our school systems supposedly have. If charters are so great, they should be great for all kids, not just the ones it’s convenient for them to take.
*****
Charter schools losing struggling students to zoned schools
Posted: May 16, 2013 10:36 PM EDT
Updated: May 30, 2013 10:37 PM EDT
Reported by Dennis Ferrier
http://www.wsmv.com/story/22277105/charter-schools-losing-struggling-students-to-zoned-schools
Excerpt:
NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) –
Leaders with Metro Nashville Public Schools have serious concerns about what is happening at some of the city’s most popular charter schools.
Students are leaving in large numbers at a particularly important time of the school year, and the consequences may have an impact on test scores.
Charter schools are literally built on the idea that they will outperform public, zoned schools. They are popular because they promise and deliver results, but some new numbers are raising big questions about charter schools.
One of the first things a visitor sees when stepping into Kipp Academy is a graph that shows how Kipp is outperforming Metro schools in every subject.
Unfair Funding: How Charter Schools Win & Traditional Schools Lose
Innovation Ohio
http://innovationohio.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Unfair-Funding-IO-charter-schools-report-1.pdf
Excerpt:
Introduction
Proponents have long claimed that community or ‘charter’ schools are the cure for much of what ails Ohio’s education system. If only parents had more “choice” over where their children attend school, they say, competition and the magic of the market would surely improve all schools.
Equally important, boosters claim that charter schools are cost neutral to the state. Unfortunately, a data set recently produced by the Ohio Department of Educationi explodes that particular myth. According to the data, the way charter schools are funded in this state has a profoundly negative impact on the resources that remain for the overwhelming majority of kids — 1.6 million — who stay in Ohio’s traditional public schools. Actually, it’s even worse than that. In the vast majority of cases — even in many urban school districts — the state is transferring money to charter schools that perform substantially worse than the public schools from which the students supposedly “escaped.”
Here are the facts:
Because of the $774 million deducted from traditional public schools in FY 2012 to fund charters, children in traditional public schools received, on average, $235 (or 6.5%) less state aid than the state itself said they needed.
More than 90% of the money sent to rated charter schools1 in the 2011-2012 school year went to charters that on average score significantly lower on the Performance Index Score than the public schools students had left.ii
Over 40% of state funding for charters in 2011-2012 ($326 million) was transferred from traditional public districts that performed better on both the State Report Card and Performance Index.
IO does not claim that all charter schools are bad, or that charters don’t have a place in Ohio’s education landscape. We do say that the way Ohio’s political leaders have chosen to fund charters has had a profoundly negative impact on the children who remain in traditional public schools. That impact can no longer be ignored, and IO believes it is incumbent on the Governor and the General Assembly to develop a funding system that is not detrimental to the majority of Ohio’s school children…
Collateral Damage
There are real consequences to the current funding scheme set up by state lawmakers. In FY 12, traditional schools were told they collectively would receive $6.3 billion to educate the 1.7 million students in Ohio, which broke down to $3,634 per pupil.vii However, when deductions totaling $774 million for charter schools are removed (for the just over 108,000 children they enroll),viii traditional schools are left with $5.9 billion to educate the remaining 1.6 million children – or just $3,399 per pupil. By contrast, charter schools receive $774 million from the state to educate 108,000 students — or $7,141 per pupil, more than twice the amount received by traditional schools.
In other words, students who attend traditional public schools actually receive $235 — or 6.5% — less from the state than what the state says they need because charter schools are costing the state so much more.
Regardless of how one feels about charters, the way in which Ohio currently funds them has a negative impact on the children who remain in traditional public schools.
How to Keep Great Teachers at Your Charter School
Charter Notebook
Posted on: December 22, 2011
by Rachel Scott
The Finance Project
http://www.charternotebook.org/how-to-keep-great-teachers-at-your-charter-sc/
Excerpt:
Connectedness to the learning community, excitement about what each new school day can bring, positive relationships with role models, consistent performance, a commitment to come back next year… these are some of the outcomes independent charter schools hope to elicit for kids in their schools. With a rate of 25% teacher turnover (compared to 14% at public schools) in one study, charter school leaders must also think about how to bring about those sorts of outcomes for their teachers. While schools’ charters often give administrators the flexibility to ensure that the teachers they employ have the right skills and the right “fit” with a school, the majority of turnover can still be attributed to voluntary choice by the teachers.
Beyond the obvious costs of frequently searching for, hiring, and orienting new teachers to charter schools, teacher attrition has other costs that are harder to quantify. David Stuit and Thomas M. Smith at Vanderbilt University (2009) recap the findings of several researchers who find that teachers with the strongest academic achievement themselves are the ones most likely to leave charter schools (and the teaching profession altogether) — a move that pulls some of the most qualified teachers out of charter schools. Perhaps just as costly, when teachers don’t return, the critical network of adults at any given charter school who know the children well and are invested in their success as they grow erodes.
Causes for Teacher Attrition
Discovering the reasons why good teachers leave is essential to knowing what leaders of independent charter schools can do to keep them. Research on the subject is readily available. It is worth noting, however, that the examination of teacher attrition in charter schools is often connected to other political or ideological ‘baggage.” Charter school leaders must understand that teacher retention is, to a large degree, linked to other sensitive issues like unionization of charter school teachers and comparative assessments of student achievement between independent charter schools, managed multi-site charters, and public schools.
Several studies point to the relatively young age of charter school teachers (compared to public school teachers) as the strongest predictor of turnover, as it is with teachers in any setting. Other factors correlated with teacher attrition in charter schools include: low number of years at the school, non-certified teachers or teachers teaching outside their certification areas, and “teachers’ relative satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the school’s: 1) mission, 2) perceived ability to attain the mission, and 3) administration and governance” (Miron and Applegate; Western Michigan University, 2007).) One study of teacher attrition in charter schools in Wisconsin that controls for many of these factors concludes that “high turnover rates in Wisconsin charter schools appear to be a disadvantaged school problem rather than a charter school problem per se”– pointing perhaps to increased needs for more wraparound services for students and families, as well as teacher support and training in cultural competence.
Others posit that teachers are less likely to want to stay in charter schools where they tend to be paid less than in public schools and are more likely to be without union protection. In fact, the Century Foundation suggests that 90% of charter schools are non-unionized environments, and many teachers cite job security and protection of wages and benefits as primary factors as they select jobs.
LJM,
Yes, I know not all charter schools are bad. In many of my school posts, I’ve been addressing the issue of people in the reform movement who have less than benevolent motives. I have a difference of opinion from you. I think real reformers and others who truly care about children and their education should speak out against such people and groups and inform the public. How are parents and other citizens to find out about people who would use the school reform movement and children as a means for enriching themselves if we don’t talk about the issue in a public forum? Just because there are good charter schools run be dedicated people doesn’t mean there aren’t bad charter schools. Most school reformers have painted all traditional public schools as failing…and teachers as the main culprits to blame for the problem.
*****
“Whenever people complain about charter schools, they inevitably bring up test scores.”
I find that comment amusing. It has been school reformers who have used poor test scores in traditional public schools as an argument for establishing charter schools and for school vouchers. It was the school reformers in Massachusetts who pushed for the high stakes MCAS testing of students. It’s the school reformers and the mania for high stakes testing of children that are destroying the best public schools in my state. I speak from experience.
I told you about the principal of the charter school in the town where I taught because you suggested I get to know the people who work in a local charter school. He’s one charter school employee that I knew a lot about because of his questionable behavior–including trying to physically intimidate the superintendent of schools after a public meeting, being arrested for drunk driving, violating a conflict of interest law. The last I heard about that charter school was that it wasn’t fully enrolled. In addition, not that many town residents send their children to the school these days. It is mostly populated with children who live out of town.
LJM, Parents are the clients. We don’t have “free” public education. It is paid for w/ tax dollars from parents, people w/o children, and businesses. I went into teaching after having run my own business for 20 years. I knew that if I didn’t treat my clients right, I would lose them. When I started teaching in 1999, I saw the education industry didn’t treat parents like clients. Some individual teachers certainly did, but too many did not. So, your question to bettykath hits the nail on the head. Parents now have a choice. Not just parents w/ the money to send their kids to private schools, but all parents. Some see this as a threat. Most see it as a long time coming.
bettykath,
What’s difficult to understand is, if charter schools are so terrible, why do so many families find them so satisfactory?
Elaine,
I’m sorry to hear about that charter school and its director. Needless to say, there are lots of charter schools which do (as they should) accept special needs students, and lots of public schools with staff who sexually assault children while neglecting other students. Again, it’s not about the system, it’s about the people running it.
There are many public schools which do a fine job in dealing with special needs students. There are also many public schools which have abused and neglected special needs students. What does one take from this? Obviously, it’s wrong to ignore the first sentence and use the second as evidence that public schools don’t care about special needs students. But, unfortunately, that’s the approach I see in your articles on charter schools.
I appreciate all the research you’ve done on the subject. But lots of people, including myself, have been doing the same. There is simply no evidence, whatsoever, that increasing educational choices for low income students makes things worse. There is a mountain of evidence to support the assertion that the U.S., which spends more per-pupil than all but two countries, has seriously (often criminally) mismanaged its education dollars.
Whenever people complain about charter schools, they inevitably bring up test scores. You know, the test scores that shouldn’t be used to judge quality in teachers? (A sentiment I agree with.) Without test scores, all you have is the opinion of the people who matter most. Not education professors, not education journalists or bloggers, but students and parents. And they tend to like their charter schools at similar or, usually, higher rates than they liked their public schools.
How many low-income families are doing their level best to get their kids out of charter schools and into public schools? There must be a few, I’m sure. But the number is much lower than families who are trying to do the opposite.
I don’t think it matters if a company profits from schooling kids. Currently, Superintendents of public schools, along with a variety of textbook companies make ridiculous profits from public school. There are many public employees who make well over six figures and can count on making that much in pension payments for the rest of their lives. To pretend that greed is something unique to for-profit companies is to ignore the evidence.
The bottom line is, with real choice, if a for-profit school is doing a bad job, it won’t be in business very long. When people are free to choose what school they prefer, none of the concerns about for-profit education companies matter one bit.
Because, despite what “anti-choice in education” folks may think, the vast majority of people are smart enough to stick with the schools which give them satisfaction and leave the schools which don’t.
Charter schools are a for-profit enterprise. Lower costs = greater profit. Teachers with little experience cost less than those with more experience. Workers expect raises. Teachers who stay in the same job expect raises. New teachers come in at the new teacher rate. It’s not difficult to understand. The real cost is to the students who don’t get the benefit of the experienced teachers.
rafflaw,
I just found the following article:
Published on Friday, June 21, 2013 by Dollars & Sense
School Data Profiteering
Data-collecting software is riling privacy and education activists.
by Dan Schneider
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/06/21
Excerpt:
When you were a kid and got in trouble at school, did they ever threaten to “put it in your permanent record?” That’s a scary prospect, knowing that the information could be seen forever by anyone with access to it. But what if that record had more in it than just grades and disciplinary problems? What if it included things like when your parents got divorced, or that you had been homeless for a while?
Starting at the end of last year, a nonprofit organization called inBloom began to test new cloud-based software to collect information from student records and use it to individualize the education a student receives. Much of this individualized instruction will come from third-party for-profit companies that will be granted access to students’ data, effectively giving corporations that deal with inBloom free rein to mine student data as they see fit.
A joint venture of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, inBloom has a long list of corporate partners, including Amazon, Dell, and Scholastic (maker of The Magic School Bus and The Magic Treehouse children’s book series). Originally, inBloom was known as the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC), a Gates Foundation- and NewsCorp-backed organization that had been quietly developing a “set of shared technology services” for several years, in order to “connect student data and instructional materials.”
By 2013’s South-by-Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, SLC had rebranded itself as inBloom. The Gates Foundation is a well-known advocate of charter schools, school-privatization measures, and reforms like increased reliance on standardized testing and merit-based pay. (All these changes are unpopular with teachers and teachers’ unions.)
The information collected by inBloom goes well beyond what’s found in a typical permanent record. The data elements that the inBloom database is set up to collect include “Pregnant Teen,” “Unschooled Refugee,” “Foster Care,” and “Removed by Child Protective Services.” It also includes whether, in a disciplinary incident, a student was a “Victim,” “Perpetrator,” “Witness,” or “Reporter.”
Louisiana is currently inBloom’s largest guinea pig. In addition, the program has been deployed for testing in public school districts in Massachusetts, Illinois, Colorado, and North Carolina. New York City’s Department of Education is also participating. Schools in Delaware, Georgia, and Kentucky will begin their own tests of the data-gathering software in fall 2013. In New York City, Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, an advocacy organization for smaller class sizes, has been working diligently to make parents across the country aware of what their school districts may be doing. “There’s not a single school district that’s allowing parents the right of consent, or to opt out of the program,” Haimson told Dollars & Sense.
Haimson also pointed out the lack of certainty in inBloom’s own privacy policy, which states that the company “cannot guarantee the security of the information” or that the “information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted.” That should be, Haimson said, “a huge red flag.” The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), an advocacy group which seeks to decommercialize the lives of American children, is among those spearheading the campaign against inBloom in Massachusetts.
Education profiteering
Wall Street’s next big thing?
By Jeff Faux
October 1, 2012
http://www.epi.org/publication/education-profiteering-wall-street/
Excerpt:
The end of the Chicago teachers’ strike was but a temporary regional truce in the civil war that plagues the nation’s public schools. There is no end in sight, in part because—as often happens in wartime—the conflict is increasingly being driven by profiteers.
The familiar media narrative tells us that this is a fight over how to improve our schools. On the one side are the self-styled reformers, who argue that the central problem with American K-12 education is low-quality teachers protected by their unions. Their solution is privatization, with its most common form being the privately run but publicly financed charter school. Because charter schools are mostly unregulated, nonunion and compete for students, their promoters claim they will, ipso facto, perform better than public schools.
On the other side are teachers and their unions who are cast as villains. The conventional plot line is that they resist change, blame poverty for their schools’ failings and protect their jobs and turf.
It is well known, although rarely acknowledged in the press, that the reform movement has been financed and led by the corporate class. For more than 20 years large business oriented foundations, such as Gates (Microsoft), Walton (Walmart) and Broad (Sun Life) have poured billions into charter school start-ups, sympathetic academics and pundits, media campaigns (including Hollywood movies) and sophisticated nurturing of the careers of privatization promoters who now dominate the education policy debate from local school boards to the U.S. Department of Education.
In recent years, hedge fund operators, leverage-buy-out artists and investment bankers have joined the crusade. They finance schools, sit on the boards of their associations and the management companies that run them, and—most important—have made support of charter schools one of the criteria for campaign giving in the post-Citizens United era. Since most Republicans are already on board for privatization, the political pressure has been mostly directed at Democrats.
Thus, for example, when Andrew Cuomo wanted to get the support of hedge fund managers for his run for governor of New York, he was told to talk to Joe Williams, director of Democrats for Education Reform, a group set up to lobby liberals on privatization. Cuomo is now a champion of charter schools. As Joanne Barkan noted in a Dissent Magazine report, privatizers are even targeting school board elections, in one case spending over $630,000 to elect two members in a local school board race last year in Colorado.
Elaine,
unfortunately, I believe that money is the driving force behind privatizing public education. Without the profit motive, there would be very little movement in the direction of charter schools.
rafflaw,
Yes, some people hope to make money by privatizing public education.
LJM,
I worked in a public school that had an exceptional special needs program…and dedicated teachers. It housed the town’s special needs preschool. Nearly all the special needs preschoolers remained at our school even though they lived in other districts. We mainstreamed children with cerebral palsy, autism, Down syndrome, serious behavioral issues, etc.
Elaine,
There is money to be made at the expense of students.
LJM,
We had a charter school established in the town where I taught some years ago. It didn’t provide the special educational services that some of the children needed. Our traditional public school provided them. The first director was let go. A student caught him drinking alcohol in his office. He was accused of assaulting her.
*****
It’s the corporate takeover of the school reform movement and charter schools that I find troublesome. I think a number of people involved in the school reform movement see money to be made in public education.
A Look at Some of the Driving Forces behind the School Reform Movement and the Effort to Privatize Public Education
http://jonathanturley.org/2013/03/03/a-look-at-some-of-the-driving-forces-behind-the-school-reform-movement-and-the-effort-to-privatize-public-education/
Charter Schools and The Profit Motive
http://jonathanturley.org/2013/03/16/charter-schools-and-the-profit-motive/
From the ABC’s of Privatizing Public Education: A Is for ALEC, I is for iPad…and P Is for Profits
http://jonathanturley.org/2013/07/28/from-the-abcs-of-privatizing-public-education-a-is-for-alec-i-is-for-ipad-and-p-is-for-profits/