Our 3 kids returned to their schools this week, along with 55 million students and more than 3.8 million teachers.
As many parents will attest, this is a celebratory moment, not to be taken for granted after the COVID-19 closures. So, as educators set up their classrooms and schedules for the next 9 months, I wanted to take a pulse of what’s happening inside and outside schools.
Not to rain on anyone’s first week back to school, but the numbers are sobering.
Over 75% of US states are experiencing teacher shortages. 45% of public schools have at least one unfilled teaching position (down slightly from 53% a year ago). Roles in special education, science, and foreign languages remain some of the hardest to staff.
To get more of the story behind these numbers, I reached out to Dr. Emily Penner, a professor at UC Irvine, who has a unique approach to understanding the economic forces influencing almost 4 million educators serving students across the US.
Dr. Penner and her colleagues have figured out how to match anonymized data from educators’ IRS tax filings with school personnel records.
The result?
A bridge linking educators’ checkbooks to classrooms — tax records allow us to see where educators are going when they leave a school for another job.
Dr. Penner’s research on teacher turnover instantly resonated with me as a parent and educator. My oldest daughter, 15, while in elementary school, had 2 teachers leave the school, and 1 left the field of education entirely. Our son, 13, has had multiple teachers come and go during his elementary school journey through Special Education. I’ve moved between roles in several schools, districts, and states, in part influenced by salary, budget cuts, and school/district work conditions.
It’s not hard to imagine the impact the churn is having on students and families when as many as 3 in 10 educators shift into new roles in other schools, districts, or leave the profession altogether. Educators lose trusted or experienced colleagues or principals each year (note: a percentage of these educators do retire).
Research shows students, staff, and schools accrue benefits when educators stay in their schools for at least 3-5 years.
* Improved student achievement, especially in underserved communities.
* Stronger school culture and collegiality, which support both staff morale and retention.
* Reduced costs for districts, which otherwise must continually recruit and train new teachers.
* Greater equity, as students of color and English learners benefit from consistent relationships with teachers who understand their cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
For these reasons, I was eager to speak with Dr. Penner, who has spent much of her career asking questions about the economic and social forces shaping one of the country’s most critical human resources.
Here are a few examples of her work:
Cost of living $$$
In cities like Austin and San Francisco, the high cost of housing has skyrocketed over the last two decades. In 2019, Penner and colleagues examined economic anxiety among a sample of teachers in the San Francisco Unified School District. This study found that teachers experiencing economic stress (e.g., younger teachers) tended to have more negative attitudes about their jobs and worse attendance. These teachers were also 50% more likely to leave their district within two years.
Four-day work week
The use of four-day school weeks in the United States has expanded rapidly over the past two decades to save costs and reduce staffing shortages in schools. Penner and her team found that adopting a four-day work week (across a sample of Oregon schools) increased turnover by 3 percentage points among teachers in the initial year, with turnover dropping in the short term and then increasing again in the longer term. Data collected during this study suggested increases in teacher turnover may have been mediated by salaries that fell further behind five-day schools after policy adoption.
Compensation
Penner has found a nuanced relationship between educator compensation, credentials, and teacher retention.
* A 10% increase in base salary was associated with a 1.5 percentage point decrease in turnover.
* Salary bumps show bigger effects on early-career teachers than mid-career educators.
* Special education teachers were found to be more responsive to salary increases.
Roots in education
At 21, Dr. Penner found herself in a blended classroom of 1st-2nd graders in a school in East Oakland, California. She also worked as a reading intervention specialist and English Language Development coordinator in Vista, CA.
A few years at her elementary school in East Oakland, a federal law, No Child Left Behind Act (2001), required many schools to close their doors based on reporting lower standardized test scores.
Determined to reopen the school, Penner and a dedicated group of teachers, parents, and students put together a plan. A core team drew on pedagogical best practices to retool how the school approached student assessment, curriculum development, instruction, and teacher professional development.
Within a few years of reopening, the school became one of Oakland’s most improved. The lessons from this experience have continued to shape Penner’s research, which she described as living at the “intersection of education policy, sociology of education, and economics of education.”
Reframing educator turnover
Today, Dr. Penner helps school districts and states across the US to navigate educator attrition by helping them see patterns and potential solutions to calm the churn. Part of this work has included helping schools understand that turnover is a multifaceted phenomenon.
As the data below shows, “turnover” doesn’t mean all teachers are leaving the profession (some are); rather, teachers are hopping between districts and states in search of better compensation, improved working conditions, or job security. This is a solvable issue, according to Penner.
Turnover by educator role
For example, here are the turnover patterns by educator role for Oregon (2022). Penner’s team looked at common roles in schools and used tax data (e.g., W2s) to understand what percentage of these educators switched schools, districts, or left Oregon’s educator workforce.
Teachers (32,634)
* 🔁 Turnover: 21.3%
* 🏫 Switched Schools: 6%
* 🌐 Switched Districts: 4.8%
* 🚪 Left Oregon public schools: 10.4%
Administrators (2,564)
* 🔁 Turnover: 26.1%
* 🏫 Switched Schools: 9.8%
* 🌐 Switched Districts: 7.4%
* 🚪 Left Oregon public schools: 9.0%
Paraprofessionals (14,676)
* 🔁 Turnover: 30.7%
* 🏫 Switched Schools: 8.1%
* 🌐 Switched Districts: 2.9%
* 🚪 Left OR public schools: 19.6%
Non-licensed staff (24,556: office staff, specialists, coaches)
* 🔁 Turnover: 26%
* 🏫 Switched Schools: 6.2%
* 🌐 Switched Districts: 1.9%
* 🚪 Left OR public schools: 17.9%
Turnover by years of experience
To save you from squinting (at the graph below), the taller bars (on the left side) show that novice educators (5 years or less) are more likely to experience turnover compared to more veteran educators on the right side of the graph. The grey bars are “total turnover %” similar to above (Note: veteran educators are also more likely to retire, which accounts for higher turnover rates).
Here’s what educator turnover patterns look like by years of experience (Oregon educators — average turnover rates: 2007-2022).
Double jeopardy
In states like Oregon, the good news is that the demographic picture is trending toward a more diverse workforce entering K-12 schools, more reflective of the student demographics. From 2012 to 2022, Oregon more than doubled the number of novice educators of color from 9.4% to 21.1%. That’s an over 50% increase in 10 years.
However, Oregon also experiences higher turnover for less experienced educators, who are also the state’s most diverse educator group. These trends pose a challenge for diversifying classrooms, which remain predominantly staffed by white females. The same patterns show up in other states experiencing similar trends, such as Washington, Maryland, and Massachusetts.
Penner’s data also shows that churn is experienced more acutely by paraeducators and classified staff, who also represent a more diverse part of the educator workforce compared to licensed educators. Paraeducators play an important role in helping students who receive special education services. In response, many states are investing in mentoring programs, building more affordable pathways into the profession, or bumping salary scales to support and retain novice educators.
So, what happens to educators who leave the profession?
States and districts are increasingly aware of the need to keep pace with the cost of living in their regions (e.g., housing, car, and grocery expenses) as part of retaining educators in their regions, especially in rural towns. But, for those leaving the field of education seeking larger paychecks or other careers, they may be surprised (or not) by what Penner’s team is finding:
* It takes time to catch up. The majority of “leavers” remain in education-related roles, and mean earnings are slightly below pre-exit earnings even 8 years later.
* Outcomes are mixed. Roughly 20% of leavers are unemployed, and the bottom quartile of employed leavers earn less than $20,000 annually. At the same time, earnings among the top quartile of employed leavers are higher than those of nearly all stayers, sometimes exceeding $100,000.
Understanding the economics of education
This time of year, educators are flooded with new curricula, staff trainings, and parent emails, most intended to get them off to a good start. Hopefully, educators are also feeling rejuvenated from well-deserved time off over the summer.
Yet, as students get settled into their classrooms, educators may be feeling less settled about their financial futures, which can pull them away from fine-tuning lesson plans or arranging table groups for their new students.
This also shows up in Penner’s research and related work:
* Financial woes. How do teachers’ feelings about personal finances impact their day-to-day work and decisions to stay put? Teachers’ salaries have remained relatively stable for many years, while housing costs have surged, particularly in metropolitan areas with competitive labor markets (e.g., many teachers are working second jobs to make ends meet).
* Recruitment is costly. U.S. schools allocate 2.2 billion annually for recruiting and hiring new teachers, scarce resources and time that could be used to support educators who are already hired and need more support to stay put in their current roles.
* Addressing gender disparities? Penner found that female “leavers” experience reduced employment and earnings losses that continue 4 years after exit (more than their male counterparts). Among the largest school districts in the United States, 57% offer no paid parental leave for teachers beyond normal sick days.
* Better data? This map, created by the Learning Policy Institute, highlights key factors pulled from national data that reflect and influence the supply and demand for teachers in US states. Many of these factors describe the appeal of the teaching profession in a given state and help to signal whether states are likely to have an adequate supply of qualified teachers to fill their classrooms.
* Regional collaboration? Part of the solution to addressing education turnover may require state-to-state agreements to match wages in a state like Oregon, so that educators aren’t lured into a higher wage job in Washington (next door).
Being mindful of the elephant in the classroom
There’s a lot more to understand about why educators stay or leave their schools, districts, or the profession itself. Economic conditions or trends do not tell the whole story about teacher turnover. Yet, I do think researchers like Dr. Penner and her team are breaking new ground by mining educators’ tax records to understand economic winds that are not easily observed or understood, but deserve a closer look.
Talking with Dr. Penner made me wonder, well beyond the dollars and cents set aside in a district’s or state’s education budget, how economic and societal factors are personally impacting our 4 million teachers as the new academic year starts — and what we can do to help address the elephant in the back of the classroom.
Special thanks to Aaron Ainsworth, graduate student at UC Irvine, for providing updated data for this post.
Website
https://emilykpenner.com/
References
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