Prelims

Opportunities and Challenges in Teacher Recruitment and Retention

Opportunities and Challenges in Teacher Recruitment and Retention

Teachers’ Voices Across the Pipeline

Carol R. Rinke

Marist College

Lynnette Mawhinney

University of Illinois at Chicago

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov

ISBN: 978-1-64113-659-4 (Paperback)

978-1-64113-660-0 (Hardcover)

978-1-64113-661-7 (ebook)

Copyright © 2019 Information Age Publishing Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

• Introduction: Bridging the Personal and the Professional in Teacher Recruitment and Retention

• Carol R. Rinke and Lynnette Mawhinney

• SECTION I OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES IN TEACHER RECRUITMENT

• 1 Building and Sustaining Social Capital: Understanding First Year Teachers’ Sense of Agency and Retention

• Ji Hong and Kristyna Looney

• 2 Analyzing Determinants of Teacher Commitment and Retention: Role of Teachers’ Professional Identity and Organizational Identification

• Ibrahim Duyar, Muhammed Fatih Bogrek, and Andrew L. Hunt

• 3 Gaining Insights Into Career Decisions of Prospective Teachers

• Zeynep Olçû Dinçer and Golge Seferoglu

• 4 “Teaching . . . It Just Feels Right”: Contemporary Perspectives of Career-Change Teachers and Their Motivations for Teaching

• Michelle Parks, Chad Morrison, Christine Gardner, and John Williamson

• SECTION II OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES IN TEACHER RETENTION

• 5 What It Takes to Stay: Three Stories of Teacher Retention

• Corey R. Sell

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

• Peshe Kuriloff, Brooke Hoffman, Will J. Jordan, Danielle Sutherland, and Annette Ponnock

• 7 An Irregular Verb They Cannot Conjugate: One Latina’s Autoethnographic Journey Out of Teaching

• Alba Isabel Lamar

• 8 Teacher Agency in the Context of Teacher Retention: Narratives of Teachers Who Leave

• Hayriye Kayi-Aydar and Angel Steadman

• SECTION III PROMISING DIRECTIONS FOR BUILDING AND SUPPORTING THE PIPELINE

• 9 “Why Not Become a Police Officer?”: Challenges in the Recruitment and Retention of Men in Early Childhood Education

• Kirsten Cole, Mindi Reich-Shapiro, Tina Siganporia, Jason Tan de Bibiana, and Jean-Yves Plaisir

• 10 Reshaping Perceptions Through Experiences: Recruiting, Promoting, and Retaining High Quality Educators for Urban Districts

• Laura Porterfield, Tracey Nix, Luciana Cançado, and Nina Linneman

• 11 Recruiting Future Physics Teachers Through a Field-Based Summer Enrichment Program

• Marissa E. Bellino, AJ Richards, Melissa Chessler, Lauren Madden, and Nathan Magee

• 12 Strengthening the Black Male Teacher Pipeline at HBCUs: Recruitment, Retention, and Breaking Down Barriers

• Larry J. Walker

• 13 “I Need to Take Care of Myself”: The Case for Self-Care as a Core Practice for Teaching

• Megan Madigan Peercy, Johanna Tigert, Karen Feagin, Tabitha Kidwell, Daisy Fredricks, Megan Lawyer, Melissa Bitter, Nancy Canales, Andrew Mallory, and the Voices From the Field Teachers

• SECTION IV THEMES AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

• 14 Conclusion: From Pipeline to Web in Teacher Career Development

• Carol R. Rinke and Lynnette Mawhinney

• About the Contributors

Carol R. Rinke and Lynnette Mawhinney

The past decade has seen a flourishing of research on the lives of teachers. In particular, research has more fully acknowledged the connection between teachers’ personal lives and their lifelong professional development, recognizing teachers not as passive agents but rather as active participants in crafting their lives and careers (Savickas, 2012). A burgeoning literature has emerged, in the United States and around the world, which captures teachers’ voices as they share their perspectives on their own career development (e.g., Day & Gu, 2010; Mawhinney & Rinke, 2019; Rinke, 2014; Santoro, 2017). The current approach to understanding teachers’ careers is a far cry from the isolated methods of the past, in which solitary factors, both individual and contextual, were used to predict career direction and longevity (Rinke, 2008), denying the inherent complexity and intersectionality of all of our identities (Adams, 2016). Today’s research merges the personal and the professional into a more multifaceted understanding of lifelong teacher growth. This volume is situated squarely within the current research tradition and anchors its contribution in the voices and wisdom of classroom teachers.

This unique volume grows from the foundation of valuing and honoring the voices of teachers and applies this practice to one particular, pressing issue facing the field of education: the recruitment and retention of quality educators for our next generation of students. This edited book offers a unique look at one of the greatest challenges as well as one of the most important tasks for supporting meaningful student learning: building an effective, committed, and sustainable teaching force, particularly in the hardest-to-staff contexts. Opportunities and Challenges in Teacher Recruitment and Retention: Teachers’ Voices Across the Pipeline offers a distinctive perspective on teacher recruitment and retention through its comprehensive and lifelong view on teacher career development, its acceptance of the complexity of professional growth, its inclusion of multiple methodologies and international perspectives, and its emphasis on the well-being of all members of the educational community.

Despite its ubiquity, importance, and influence on the next generation of society, teaching has long been viewed as not fully professional. Hoyle (2001) defined occupational prestige as, “the public perception of the relative position of an occupation in a hierarchy of occupations” (p. 139), and used the Standard International Occupational Prestige Scale (SIOPS) to rank teaching among the semi-professions. He notes that its perception as a semi-profession may be due to the manner in which it is situated between the world of children and adults. Hargreaves (2009) echoes this ranking of education below law and medicine but above social work and nursing, arguing that its relatively lower status emerges from its female-dominated nature and serves as a barrier to raising professionalism, qualifications, and pay. Rury (1989) complements these views by highlighting the long history of teaching as a transient role, often occupied first by young men, and more recently by young women, on their road to more lasting vocations as professionals or caregivers.

Teachers today operate with this professional legacy of low status and transient work. Thus, it is not all that surprising that the recruitment and retention of a high-quality, representative, and committed teaching force remains an ongoing challenge in today’s world. Evidence from the research literature demonstrates that the United States, as one example, prepares a sufficient number of teachers to meet classroom needs, particularly in the most popular fields such as elementary education (New York State School Boards Association, 2017). Instead, recruitment challenges lie in attracting a representative and high quality group of individuals to teaching. Although sheer volume of teachers is not of concern, teacher preparation institutions and schools report ongoing vacancies in specialized areas such as science, mathematics, and special education (New York State School Boards Association, 2017) with challenging work contexts and high opportunity costs for teaching, as compared with other relevant fields (Murnane & Olsen, 1990).

Moreover, today’s teaching force, at least in the United States, remains largely White, female, and monolingual, in contrast to the increasing diversity of U.S. schools (Papay, 2007). Despite the fact that students of color are already in the majority in some U.S. states, only 25% of enrolled pre-service teachers and only 18% of practicing teachers were individuals of color in the most recent national survey (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). Moreover, current students of color are often reluctant to pursue teaching due to negative educational experiences (Gordon, 1994) as well as growing opportunities in other fields, resulting in the elimination of the “hidden subsidy” of women and teachers of color in education (Johnson, 2004, p. 19). Despite this lack of representation, the recruitment of teachers of color is vitally important to the educational system because they serve as role models for all students, increase academic outcomes for students of color, and reduce shortages in high-poverty areas (Villegas & Irvine, 2010).

A variety of methodologies illustrate that teachers are primarily motivated to enter the profession due to the intrinsic rewards of working with students, pursuing a sense of mission, and promoting democracy and social justice (Lortie, 1975; Nieto, 2003). For instance, Watt and colleagues (2012) have noted that teachers around the world report both the personal utility as well as the social utility of teaching. These factors notwithstanding, it is also clear that teachers are responsive to extrinsic rewards as well and teachers are highly attracted to several key features: wages, high-achieving students and general working conditions, and geography in the form of distance from home (Boyd, Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2005b). Altogether, the existing evidence paints the picture of a semi-profession that consistently recruits a sufficient number of teachers, but needs greater attention to distribution of teachers and demographic representation. Further, while the teaching profession has relied on its natural, intrinsic attributes to construct a high-quality workforce, even more could be done to attract individuals to teaching through enhancement of formal, extrinsic rewards.

In contrast to the issue of recruitment, which is centered on a few, specific, high-need areas, abundant evidence illustrates that retention of teachers is of significant concern overall. The pioneering work of Ingersoll and colleagues (e.g., Ingersoll, 2003a; Ingersoll & May, 2010, 2011; Ingersoll & Perda, 2011) has convincingly demonstrated that teacher shortages are not caused by limited recruitment, but by the inability to retain teachers in the profession舒essentially the profession is a “leaky bucket.” Using evidence from the National Center for Educational Statistics’ (NCES) Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), Ingersoll (2003a) has shown that approximately 47% of teachers leave the classroom within their first 5 years in the profession, what he has been termed a revolving door. Although recent evidence has questioned this number, estimating it to be only 17% of new teachers in the most recent analysis, it is nevertheless clear that U.S. schools struggle to retain teachers and many countries around the world face similar challenges (OECD, 2005). Additional evidence illustrates that some high poverty schools lose up to one-fifth of their faculty each year, possibly destabilizing the school culture (Quartz et al., 2004), and that highly qualified teachers are most likely to leave, especially when paired with low performing students (Boyd, Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2005a).

These high rates of teacher attrition are problematic not only because they cause teacher shortages, but also because they carry high costs for students, districts, and the teachers themselves. Ronfeldt, Loeb, and Wyckoff (2013) demonstrated that teacher departures had a disruptive effect on student achievement grade-wide, beyond the classroom experiencing turnover firsthand. These effects were particularly strong in schools with low performing students and Black students. Moreover, turnover comes with high financial costs to districts and other local educational agencies. Estimates vary, but have been as high as $7 billion annually in the United States (Carroll, 2007), costs which are associated with ongoing recruitment, hiring, training, and support. Finally, evidence indicates that although many teachers expect to glide in and out of the profession with ease, those who do choose to leave teaching face unanticipated and daunting challenges such as extended periods of unemployment, re-training, and even mental health supports (Rinke, 2013). While valuable in the classroom, their credentials are often not accepted by other fields (Maier, 2012).

In a context of high attrition rates for teachers, certain structural factors appear to be influential. Evidence from a variety of sources indicates that salary does matter: teachers with higher starting salaries, higher relative salaries, and higher maximum district salaries are all less likely to leave classroom teaching (Gray & Taie, 2015; Imazeki, 2002). Mentoring, support, and a sense of community are also vital to sustaining teachers in their work. New teachers who were paired with mentors, who participated in an induction program, and who had a professional network of support were all less likely to leave the classroom (Gray & Taie, 2015; Ingersoll & Strong, 2011). A sense of autonomy and shared decision-making is another vital factor; prior research suggests that a distributed leadership model is the most effective for promoting teacher commitment and retention (Inger-soll, 2003b; Johnson, 2012). Finally, teacher preparation has long-lasting effects for career direction. Teachers from traditional preparation routes and context-specific programs, particularly those that prepare educators for working in high-need, low income schools, remain in the classroom longer than their peers (Gray & Taie, 2015; Quartz et al., 2008).

Further, it is not only structural features, but also teachers’ personal interpretations of their work life that matter for career development. Much of the research on the lives of teachers has inquired into how teachers conceptualize their careers and has generated insights for how and why they make career decisions. For instance, some research has indicated that today’s teachers conceptualize their careers in a more exploratory manner, seeing classroom teaching as one of many phases in their lifelong professional growth (Peske, Liu, Johnson, Kauffman, & Kardos, 2001). Others have suggested that attrition is not an either-or proposition, but rather it is vital to consider the group of teachers who shift into non-classroom teaching but nevertheless education-related roles (Olsen & Anderson, 2007). Other studies have pointed out the role of resilience (Day & Gu, 2014), resistance (Glazer, 2018), and the moral dimensions of teaching (Santoro, 2011). Finally, narrative inquiry has indicated that attrition decisions often unfold through an identity-making process (Clandinin et al., 2015; Flores & Day, 2006; Schaefer, 2013).

Prior research has been critical to understanding teacher recruitment and retention and has made great strides in linking the voices of teachers to those same career pathways. The present, abundant body of research indicates areas of promise (e.g., leadership and support), areas of challenge (e.g., diversifying the teacher workforce), and key insights from the teachers themselves (e.g., the identity-making process). Additional strengths of the current body of knowledge include the use of multiple methodological approaches, from narrative inquiry to life histories to analysis of national data sets. Next steps include the need for synthesis across multiple studies to increase coherence within the field as well as a strengthening of policy connections, such that the findings from this work are applied directly in schools.

This volume is an effort to expand the present understanding of teacher recruitment and retention in the United States and around the world by emphasizing teachers’ own voices in their career development. It aims to serve as a positive and constructive resource for understanding and promoting meaningful career development over time. While problems exist, it is our goal not to dwell on these concerns, but rather to use research as a vehicle for first understanding and then constructing a stronger, more diverse, and more sustainable teaching force for our schools and students in a variety of educational contexts.

This work is also intended to be comprehensive in nature, touching on the most critical issues related to teacher recruitment and retention, and from an international context. Teachers’ lives and careers are seen as a continuum, with early experiences influencing later conceptions, skills, and decisions. Teachers’ work lives are not examined in singular or isolated stages; rather, the continuum is connected over time. To accomplish this goal, this volume is separated into three parts to reflect the teaching career as a lifelong endeavor. Part I, “Opportunities and Challenges in Teacher Recruitment,” explores the experiences of preservice teachers and beginning teachers within the field. In Chapter 1, “Building and Sustaining Social Capital: Understanding First Year Teachers’ Sense of Agency and Retention,” Ji Hong and Kristyna Looney consider the importance of novice teachers’ professional agency among their administrators and colleagues and the available in-school dynamics and support. Through their research, they provide various implications on how to foster agency and community for beginning teachers. Chapter 2, “Analyzing Determinants of Teacher Commitment and Retention: Role of Teachers’ Professional Identity and Organizational Identification” by Ibrahim Duyar, Muhammed Faith Bogrek, and Andrew Hunt, also explores beginning teachers with a lens on how identity, specifically professional and organizational identity, offers insight into the role of working conditions on teachers. In Chapter 3, “Gaining Insights into Career Decisions of Prospective Teachers in Turkey,” Zeynep Ôlçû Dinçer and Gôlge Seferoglu capture the narratives of recent teacher education graduates in Turkey and their future career aspirations. The chapter provides clarity on teacher recruitment and career decision-making. And in Chapter 4, “’Teaching . . . ItJust Feels Right:’ Contemporary Perspectives of Career-Change Teachers and Their Motivations for Teaching,” Michelle Parks, Chad Morrison, Christine Gardner, and John Williamson discuss career changes in Australia and their motivations for entering teaching. This unique longitudinal study grasps the voices of these teachers throughout their teacher education program.

While Part I embodies the lived experiences of those entering the teaching field, Part II, entitled “Opportunities and Challenges in Teacher Retention,” explores the lives of teachers that have stayed, moved, or left the profession. The section opens up with Chapter 5, “What It Takes to Stay: Three Stories of Teacher Retention” where Corey R. Sell captures the lived experiences and complexities of teachers who have stayed. It highlights a micro-understanding of three elementary teachers and how their persistence in the field is encompassed by the larger ecological systems in schools and communities. Chapter 6 explores a related dynamic舒teachers who choose to leave one school for another. In this chapter, “Why Teachers Move: School Context Influences on Teachers’ Experiences” by Peshe Kuriloff, Brooke Hoffman, Will J. Jordan, Danielle Sutherland, and Annette Ponnock, we gain insight into teacher migrations in Philadelphia and teachers’ perspectives on those career choices. Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 round out Part II by highlighting teachers that opted to leave the field. In Chapter 7, “An Irregular Verb They Cannot Conjugate: One Latina’s Autoethnographic Journey Out of Teaching,” Alba Isabel Lamar provides a very personal and intimate reflection upon her career as a teacher. Specifically, she outlines the challenges of being a teacher of color in a racialized educational space and uses Latinx Critical Race Theory to unpack those experiences. Meanwhile, in Chapter 8, “Teacher Agency in the Context of Teacher Retention: Narratives of Teachers Who Leave,” Hayriye Kaye-Aydar and Angel Steadman look at former teachers’ micro-political discourses that ultimately influenced four ESL teachers to leave the profession.

Part III, “Promising Directions for Building and Supporting the Pipeline,” recognizes the unique workforce challenges inherent in early childhood classrooms, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects, low-income, urban schools, and for Black male teachers generally. Together, these chapters capture the complexity, the intersec-tionality, and the distinctiveness of particular subgroups working within the field of education. Some of these specialized groups naturally intersect, such as recruiting male teachers and teachers of color to early childhood classrooms and promoting positive conceptions of low-income, urban schools. In Chapter 9, “’Why not become a police officer?’: Challenges in the Recruitment and Retention of Men in Early Childhood Education,” Kirsten Cole, Mindi Reich-Shapiro, Tina Siganporia, Jason Tan de Bibiana, and Jean-Yves Plaisir discuss the intricacies of building a pipeline of male educators for early childhood education classrooms. The authors use the storied experiences of these men and the gender inequities inherent within early childhood education to leverage solid policy recommendations to help rectify this issue. Chapter 10, “Reshaping Perceptions Through Experiences: Recruiting, Promoting, and Retaining High Quality Educators for Urban Districts” by Laura Porterfield, Tracey Nix, and Luciana Cançado focuses on reshaping perceptions of urban schools. Particularly, the authors unpack White preservice teachers’ capstone experiences in Milwaukee schools and suggest approaches for holistically shaping their cultural awareness, understanding, and skill for working in urban communities.

In Chapter 11, “Recruiting Future Physics Teachers Through a Field-Based Summer Enrichment Program,” Marissa E. Bellino, A. J. Richards, Melissa Chessler, Lauren Madden, and Nathan Magee share promising methods for recruiting content- and pedagogically-rich physics teachers. They explore an intervention summer program and its influence on pre-service teachers decisions to opt into teaching in high needs schools. Chapter 12, “Strengthening the Black Male Teacher Pipeline at HBCUs: Recruitment, Retention, and Breaking Down Barriers” by Larry J. Walker shares insights on breaking barriers for Black male educators through his own storied experiences as a teacher of color. His experiences speak directly to the ways in which Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), the largest producers of Black teachers in the United States, along with school districts can leverage programmatic changes to remove barriers and strengthen the pipeline for Black teachers.

Lastly, Chapter 13, “I Need to Take Care of Myself: The Case for Self-Care as a Core Practice for Teaching,” by Megan Madigan Peercy, Johanna Tigert, Karen Feagin, Tabitha Kidwell, Daisy Fredricks, Megan Lawyer, Melissa Bitter, Nancy Canales, Andrew Mallory, and the Voices From the Field teachers, focuses on self-care as a core practice for teaching that highlights the social-emotional competence needed by teachers of English as a second language. They consider teachers not as workers or widgets but instead as human beings who take agency over their lives and are deserving of good health and well-being. This is critical not only for the teachers, but also for the students they work with each day as well as future educators considering a career in the classroom.

Ultimately, this volume draws from the perspective of teachers in a wide variety of teaching contexts. Chapters come from three countries on three continents, including the United States, Turkey, and Australia. They capture the perspectives of teachers in large, urban school districts as well as smaller cities and towns. Chapters also highlight a variety of institutional perspectives, including traditional, 4-year colleges and universities, 2-year community colleges, and HBCUs, and authors include university researchers, members of nonprofits and community organizations, and classroom teachers.

Finally, the chapters employ a vast array of theoretical and methodological approaches. While all value the contribution and voices of teachers, authors vary in their designs from autoethnography and self-study to case studies, discourse analysis, survey research with path analysis, and mixed methods approaches. Likewise, authors adopted a range of theoretical perspectives on the data, here again ranging from critical race theory to social identity theory to ecological structure of the educational environment. This range of theoretical and methodological methods stresses that there are many, valuable ways of knowing about teacher recruitment and retention and that multiple epistemologies are acceptable in this line of work.

This volume strives to serve as a comprehensive, inclusive, and productive contribution to the literature on teacher recruitment and retention, one that is grounded in the lives and voices of teachers and values the continuum of teacher development, the heterogeneity of the teacher workforce, the well-being of teachers, and the diversity of perspectives around the world, across academia, and throughout research designs. It also serves to synthesize key issues and principles, while highlighting productive directions for research, policy, and practice. In these ways, Opportunities and Challenges in Teacher Recruitment and Retention: Teachers’ Voices Across the Pipeline will serve as a valuable resource for constructing and sustaining the teacher workforce for years to come.