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

Opportunities and Challenges in Teacher Recruitment and Retention: Teachers’ Voices Across the Pipeline captures the perspectives of teachers on their own careers across the professional lifespan. The chapters address critical issues ranging from recruitment and retention to specific staffing needs for high-need areas and teacher self-care. These contributions capture the voices of teachers across multiple continents and represent a range of institutional contexts. Taken together, these chapters remind us of what Dana Goldstein, the popular chronicler of the teaching profession, offered as the start to her 2014 book Teacher Wars, that, “Public school teaching [is] the most controversial profession in America” (Goldstein, 2014, p. 1) and beyond, as the international voices in this book can attest to. Goldstein (2014) further reminds us that teachers’ work is personal as well as political, and that although teachers feel “passionate and mission-driven” (p. 3) about what they do each day, only 39% report feeling very satisfied professionally, the lowest level of satisfaction in 25 years. Her themes of teaching as personal and political echo similar intersections at the foundation of this volume and her notes on dipping satisfaction parallel the lives of teachers represented throughout this book.