Chapter 7: Reducing Novice Teacher Attrition in Urban Districts: Focusing on the Moving Target

Changing and improving schools has become, as Seymour Sarason observes, one of the largest cottage industries in 21st century America. Innumerable strategies for school improvement have been developed and are subject to ongoing experimentation. Yet, as Bowman so aptly notes, educating children is essentially a labor-dependent enterprise, and as such, school improvement efforts focus on placing qualified teachers in every elementary and secondary classroom.

This chapter summarizes briefly the first component of an ongoing project that explores how many teachers are leaving urban public school districts, in four Midwest states (IL, IN, MN, WI), during their first five years in teaching. This component of the research project analyzes separately four types of novice teachers, those who: (a) taught continuously in the same district all five years (“stayers”), (b) transferred to another school district(s) within a state, but remained in the same state all five years (“movers”), (c) left public school teaching in a state and did not return (leavers”), and (d) left public school teaching in a state, but returned (“returnees”). The second component of the project consists of gathering statements from five-year veteran teachers concerning their reasons for staying in the profession. Results from the second component will be reported elsewhere. In short, the first component of this research focuses on determining which kinds of teachers are more prone to stay in teaching and the second component seeks to answer why they choose to stay.