How Do We Retain Our Teachers?

by Richard Schramm

Like many states throughout the nation, North Carolina has tried hard in recent years to improve its schools. Among other reforms, it has instituted end-of-course testing in key disciplines to enforce higher standards. It has toughened admission criteria for its state universities, increased the number of teacher aides in classrooms, and given schools more flexibility to try innovative teaching strategies. Yet now, after years of effort and millions of dollars, a report by the North Carolina Professional Practices Commission, a group that monitors pre-collegiate teaching in the state, has concluded that the "very existence of [North Carolina's] public school system" is in jeopardy.

Why? Because, like many states, North Carolina has overlooked a fundamental element in the educational equation--the professional lives of teachers. The conditions teachers face in North Carolina are driving them out of the profession at a rate so high that the very foundations of public education in the state are threatened. Nearly 20 percent of all first-year teachers quit. Among veterans, the attrition rate is nearly one in ten, up from one in fifteen just five years ago. "As schools worsen," the Commission warns, "parents will increasingly use private schools. Ultimately, the public schools will primarily serve the poor and powerless and students difficult to educate. In sum, the public schools will no longer be performing the historic mission of public schools in a democracy."

It is important to emphasize that North Carolina is not alone in this problem. The working conditions that have imperiled its public schools can be found across the nation and jeopardize other school systems as well.

Why are so many teachers bailing out? Some of the reasons have nothing to do with the schools. A teacher may leave to start a family or to accompany a spouse to a new job. Yet far too many leave because the conditions under which they work have become unbearable. Teachers today must conjure with increasing and, in some cases, contradictory expectations. Every day they face administrators who treat them like children and children who treat them like the enemy. And, of course, in these times of downsizing they are constantly told to do more with less. For a growing number of teachers the pressures and frustrations are outstripping the emotional and financial rewards. They are burning out and walking out.

To insure that good teachers stay in the profession, the Commission urges colleges and universities to prepare aspiring teachers more effectively for the hard realities of the contemporary classroom. It also calls upon schools themselves to improve the on-the-job training they make available.

I would like to focus on that latter recommendation because good in-service training is crucial to keeping teachers in the classroom. If schools across the country attempt to better the professional lives of teachers simply by furnishing more of the sort of on-the-job training they are currently providing, teachers will continue to head for the exits. I once met with a group of teachers who were still glassy-eyed a full day after they had sat in a gym for eight hours viewing 208 transparencies on how to teach, all of which they had seen the year before. Another group described being confined in an auditorium for five hours listening to administrators lecture on why lecturing was not an effective way to communicate.

Most in-service workshops and seminars deal, in one way or another, with pedagogy or classroom management. Though these skills are essential to good teaching and should be part of the training mix, offering more instruction in them, even vastly improved instruction, will not keep teachers in the profession. They are not leaving because they do not know how to teach. They are leaving because they are exhausted--physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Another workshop on the exceptional child or multicultural sensitivity will neither revive nor retain them.

What will keep them in class are training programs that bring teachers together to explore substantive and challenging topics in a community of mutual inquiry, programs built around the vivifying power of ideas. Many institutions across the country--colleges, universities, museums--offer such programs, often funded by the now-endangered National Endowment for the Humanities. The ones I know best are the summer institutes that we have offered at the National Humanities Center since 1984. These programs give high school history and English teachers from across the country the chance to collaborate with leading scholars on subjects such as religion in American history or the relationship between a writer and his or her audience. When we saw the impact these programs were having on teachers, we developed a version of them for use directly in the schools during the academic year. We tested this new approach at several high schools, and independent evaluators found that, among other benefits, it greatly enhances teacher morale, a critical factor in teacher retention. We have expanded the program across North Carolina and plan to offer it to schools nationwide.

Many administrators dismiss such programs as focusing too much on teachers for their own sake and providing no measurable impact on student performance, but that objection ignores the fundamental need of teachers to stay intellectually alive and vitally connected to the subjects that brought them to teaching in the first place. When I am asked how the National Humanities Center's programs affect student outcomes, I respond with a question of my own: Who, I ask, would you rather have teaching your child, a burned-out case who has not had a fresh idea in years or a teacher who is always thinking, always learning more about the subject she teaches?

Do faculty development programs aimed at intellectual rejuvenation really keep teachers in the classroom? Let me answer that by quoting from a letter we received from a Massachusetts teacher who participated in one of our summer institutes.

"I am more fatigued than ever this year," she wrote, "yet I am not leaving teaching. This is a direct result of the institute. This time a year ago I had seriously begun to consider leaving my profession. I had even met with a career counselor to examine alternative fields. I left for the institute with some trepidation--Would I be wasting your money by leaving the profession within a year? Still, I went. Working with so many exciting, capable, dedicated, stimulating, and caring teachers made me proud to be in the profession again. Observing them, and hearing them discuss their work against odds similar to mine, re-energized me to continue to 'fight the Good Fight.' Clearly, their efforts were valuable and made a difference; maybe mine would too. The intellectual stimulation of the institute also refreshed my own academic skills, and any educator knows that one must be a scholar to guide other scholars. I left North Carolina inspired, reinvigorated, and strengthened for the year ahead." Last we heard, she was still teaching.

Return to Ideas Menu.
Return to National Humanities Center Home Page.

Ideas is published twice a year. Editor: Jean Anne Leuchtenburg.
Copyright © 1996 by the National Humanities Center.
Comments to: lmorgan@ga.unc.edu
Revised: September 1996
nationalhumanitiescenter.org