Stayers and leavers: Early-career teacher effectiveness and attrition

Henry, Gary T., Bastian, Kevin C., & Fortner, C. Kevin. (2011). Stayers and leavers: Early-career teacher effectiveness and attrition. Educational Researcher, 40(6), 271-280.

Anyone who has taught, and anyone who has worked with beginning teachers, knows that the learning curve for this profession is steep. It’s a difficult job, under difficult conditions, and even the best and brightest have a rough go of it in those crucial early years, and especially during that critical first year. Those first three years seem to “make or break” a new teacher. If things are going well by the fourth year, it is likely that they will continue to go well, and that we have someone in the profession who is going to be a “lifer”. However, there is a down side: Teachers tend to improve greatly during the first three years of teaching, particularly between the first and second years, but after a few short years, growth levels out. Some become complacent and “set” in the patterns they developed during their first few years, the patterns that enabled them to survive. Those of us who work with preservice and early career teachers have seen these trajectories play out time and time again, so the results presented here were no surprise.

This study looked at the achievement test scores, in math and reading, of teachers in their first, second, third, fourth, and fifth years of teaching in the North Carolina public school system. The study appears to be more compelling than some similar studies have been because care was taken to link teachers to their students’ test score data at the classroom level. Thus, “effectiveness” is defined as the degree to which student test scores were raised in comparison to how much those scores could be expected to be raised, when a number of potentially affecting variables were controlled for. The researchers found, not surprisingly, that by this definition, first year teachers were the least effective of all teachers. They found a sharp rise in effectiveness in the second year, a further but less sharp rise in the third year, and then a flattening out, with not much increase in effectiveness after the third year. The only change after the third year was in teachers who subsequently left the profession in the fourth or fifth year. Those “leavers”, who may have been considered effective in previous years, showed a drop in effectiveness during their final year in the profession.

So, what does this mean? Obviously, if the critical period for teacher development is this short, we need to do better at maximizing those first years, both to raise student test scores and to retain more teachers in the profession. The authors recommend utilizing and strengthening teacher induction programs. As a teacher educator, I am troubled by the question of what should be done for those who do not develop their effectiveness fast enough. Do we work to remediate and perhaps “save” a young teacher? Or do we let the job and its demands self-select, and help districts with procedures to “deselect” (read: fire) teachers whose students do not show the expected growth levels enough? The children have to come first, of course, but the “less effective” teachers sometimes will be my students or former students, and I don’t like the idea of just letting them sink or swim. On the other hand, a nagging voice inside tells me that if teachers are leaving the profession in the early years, then maybe they need to leave. Teacher educators almost always agonize over the tension between their desire to nurture their own students and their desire to protect K-12 students from ineffective teachers.

This study was an important and sobering one for anyone who works in teacher education and professional development. We absolutely have to think about what we do, and how we might do it better. I do not minimize the accountability that studies like this imply. I realize that test scores are one of the major ways we have to demonstrate that accountability. Moreover, in this study, other affecting variables were entered into the equations, so the problem of defining teacher effectiveness as student test score increases was not considered simplistically. Even so, determining teacher effectiveness based on test scores makes me uneasy. As I read this study, I could not help wondering if some of the teacher attrition mentioned here, and the reported drops in effectiveness that preceded that attrition, came from pure weariness of the ever-increasing pressure to raise test scores, even though so many variables are out of a teacher’s control, especially in some of the most difficult teaching situations in our urban areas. This IS a difficult job, even under the best of conditions. In some of the schools and classrooms I have seen, even a very good teacher has a daily challenge. Add test pressure, with the threat of losing one’s already modest livelihood if scores do not improve, on top of that, and you have a recipe for burnout and bailout. If the conditions and pressures continue to worsen, will we be able to get ANYONE to take on the important job of teaching America’s children, much less the most “effective” teachers?