Chapter 6: Why Teachers Move: School Context Influences on Teachers’ Experiences

Researchers and practitioners bemoan the degree of teacher mobility especially common in large urban school districts. Not only are the costs of constantly replacing teachers a major drag on the financial health of the system (National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 2007), but many schools suffer from a lack of stability and insider knowledge about students, cultures, and communities, which are highly correlated with school success (Darling-Hammond, 2003).

In a study of the relationship between teacher preparation and teacher quality in Philadelphia, we learned a great deal about how teachers’ view their development in their early years of teaching. Their feelings of preparedness for the challenges they face, often in low-performing urban schools, influenced their ability to feel successful, which ultimately influenced their decision-making about whether to stay in the schools where they began teaching. We also learned how much the school context in which they found themselves tends to overpower what they learn in their preparation programs and how it shapes their thinking about teaching and about themselves as teaching professionals as they move forward.