Why Current Campaign to Recruit New Teachers

Won't Solve the Problem*

by Ken Futernick

Copyright 2002, 2003

In his 2000 State of the State speech, Governor Gray Davis declared: “We will never regain our former prominence without the most vital ingredient – a first-rate teacher for every classroom, in every school, in every neighborhood…After parents, teachers are California’s greatest force for social good…To our youth, let me say: There is no higher calling, no greater public service, no contribution more valued than to join the front lines of the future, in the classroom.  This is our generation’s call to arms.”

There is good reason for the governor’s focus on both the quantity and quality of teachers in California.  Because of expected teacher retirements and a growing student population, analysts predict the state will need 300,000 new teachers over the next 10 years.  The impact of the shortfall already is severe.  In 2003, approximately 12% of the state’s teachers are currently working without a teaching credential.  In response to this challenge, Governor Davis signed into law numerous bills aimed at recruiting and retaining teachers, including the following:

·         A state tax credit for teachers, the largest of its kind in America.

·         $20,000 teaching fellowships to attract 1,000 of the brightest college students.

·         Up to $11,000 in forgivable college loans through the APLE Program for those who agree to teach in lower performing schools.

·         $118 million in teacher recruitment block grants (for incentives such as signing bonuses and home loans) for lower performing schools.

·         Special assistance for both districts and job seekers from teacher recruitment centers that blanket the state in six regions.

·         A $9 million CalTeach recruitment campaign.

·         $2,500 grants for 12,700 teacher interns and pre-interns.

·         Performance bonuses of up to $25,000 for teachers at lower performing schools where test scores indicate extraordinary improvement.

·         $10,000 bonuses for teachers who earn national board certification, with an additional $20,000 if they teach for four years in a lower performing school.

·         Stipends to school districts to increase salaries for beginning teachers approximately 21%.

·         Enhanced retirement benefits for teachers.

·         A rigorous professional development program, with standards-based training for more than 76,000 teachers.

·         $1.84 billion in new discretionary funding, most of which is expected to be used by school districts for teacher salaries.[1]

Despite this broad range of initiatives, numerous experts are questioning whether the state’s efforts to recruit more teachers are sufficient to ensure that all children will have access to qualified teachers.  Most argue that attention must be paid to improving the working conditions in hard to staff schools in order to attract and retain qualified teachers. 

The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning recently conducted a comprehensive study of staffing patterns in California’s schools.  In its analysis of current programs designed to rectify the maldistribution of underqualified teachers, the Center wrote that “[a]lthough all these programs target a critical need, it remains to be seen whether they, along with other investments, are focused and powerful enough to reverse the increase and concentration of underqualified teachers.”[2]

Concerns about these initiatives arise from two separate perspectives: Are financial incentives enough to change the tide in lower performing schools—and if they are not, what would make the difference?  And are the reform efforts sufficiently powerful and adequately deployed to achieve success in our most challenging schools?  The answer to these questions lays the foundation for the argument that a different approach is needed—an approach that addresses both the kinds of incentives that attract high-quality school staff and the critical need to produce sustainable change.

The paradoxical nature of financial incentives

Many of the State’s initiatives include various kinds of financial incentives to recruit new teachers into the field.  There is no doubt they will get the attention of people who may not have considered teaching as a career.  But there is also reason to believe these financial incentives, or “combat pay” as some call it, will have the opposite effect for some people.  These incentives may actually repel as many teachers as they attract because the implicit message behind the offer serves as a disincentive:  They are paying me a little more to do something few others want to do.  A teacher just beginning his or her career knows that teaching under ordinary circumstances is challenging enough.  Teaching in a low-income school, where there is little parental support and many students who are learning to speak English, a place where most veteran teachers do not want to work, is no place for me—even with a financial incentive.  

Citing statistics from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, Pardington reveals what will surely come as a surprise to many observers: California does not have a shortage of teachers.  In fact, “enough credentialed teachers exist to fill every teaching job four times.”  The problem, she claims, is that very few are willing to work in high-poverty schools.  Her interviews with teachers offer some insight into why financial incentives are unlikely to make a difference.

Susan Wynn, a teacher's aide and substitute in Lafayette schools, said she wants to work in a school close to home after she earns her credential.

‘I don't think I have it in me to go to the neediest schools,’ she said. ‘I feel like I'd be frustrated every day. I don't think you'd get the resources.’

More money wouldn't be enough to change her mind, she added.

‘For some people that works, but not for me,’ she said. ‘I didn't go in this for the money. The money alone is not going to make teachers stay.’[3]

Another problem with the incentives designed to get teachers to hard-to-staff schools is that most are targeted at beginning teachers—essentially inducing the least-experienced teachers to teach our most challenging students.  It is also worth noting that legislative efforts to provide financial incentives to attract veteran teachers to hard-to-staff schools have failed largely because teacher unions have voiced opposition to differential pay schemes.

As a way to reward the efforts of those who have made extraordinary progress with their students, the state has begun awarding them cash bonuses.  The response to this incentive program among teachers has been mixed, however.  While many teachers have welcomed the extra pay, a good number have criticized the program for being divisive and for placing too much emphasis on test results.[4]  Unfortunately, there is very little hard data showing a direct link between monetary incentives and better education, so it is too early to predict the outcome of California’s pay-for-performance program.  But as it is evaluated over time, these questions should be asked:

·         Does it lead to better teaching and higher student achievement? 

·         Are there undesirable, unintended consequences?

·         Does it help to attract and retain teachers in the schools that need them most?

·         Are such programs cost effective compared with alternative approaches?

Non-financial Incentives and Teacher Retention  

Jay Mathews, a writer for the Washington Post, recently sought to find out why a school like Barcroft Elementary, a highly successful school located in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Arlington County in Virginia, has been able to attract and keep experienced teachers.  He asks, “Why would skilled, experienced instructors want to come to Barcroft rather than any of the dozens of other disadvantaged schools across the Washington area begging for help?”   The answer, he discovered, is the principal who, with her staff, integrated an arts program into the school’s curriculum and who established “an on-going, high-level conversation about pedagogy,” as one teacher described it.  According to Mathews, “Hughy-Guy and principals like her prove there is a third lure for good teachers—just as attractive as bigger salaries and fewer parental and administrative headaches.  They want to be effective.  They want to be on a winning team.”[5]

In his analysis of motivation and organizational behavior, the psychologist Robert Evans observes:

The returns on social capital for individuals and organizations are intangible as well as tangible, and those intangible returns are at least as important as the tangible ones. The familiar story of the online Eureka system used by Xerox copier repair technicians to share tips provides an example.  Those technicians actually rejected an offer of financial rewards for contributing tips because the intrinsic reward of reputation and gratitude among peers was so much important—a part of their personal identity, remarks John Seeley Brown, chief scientist at Xerox.[6]

If being successful and being part of a winning team are powerful motivators, their absence serves as equally powerful disincentives.  Most people who decide to become teachers do so not for the money, but because they want to effect the lives of children and, in some small way, the society at large.  This is what leads some beginning teachers to seek work in low-income schools where they believe they can make the biggest difference.  However, large numbers of the teachers who begin their careers in these schools transfer away or quit altogether within a few years.  For many, they leave not because the work is too hard, but because their efforts did not appear to matter.  Unless they work in one of the few outlier schools, they need only look at the newspaper or the Internet for confirmation to find their school listed at the bottom of the Academic Performance Index.  Schools like theirs are what education critics refer to when they describe the dismal state of American education.  Imagine how teachers in California’s lowest performing schools must feel.  These teachers work in what is reported to be the worst performing schools in one of the lowest performing states in the country.  They are at the very bottom of the education barrel. 

The message teachers hear is not one of gratitude for taking on this important and challenging work.  Indeed, with increasing emphasis on teacher accountability, they are made to feel responsible for the school’s failure.  A teacher from the Sacramento tells this story:

I worked for seven years with some of the poorest students in the district.  But when we were scolded by our administrator for having low test scores I thought, ‘That’s it.  I don’t need this.  It’s hard enough as it is here without my boss telling me I’m not doing a good enough job.  Now I work at a school where the kids get plenty of support from home, test scores are high, and my principal thinks I’m great.

In order to avoid the shortage created when teachers flee, the state’s response has been to step up its efforts to recruit new teachers to take their place.  But even if the state succeeds in attracting many more teachers to hard-to-staff schools after the recruitment programs have had time to work, what reason is there to believe that these recruits, the least experienced teachers, will not continue to transfer out of these demanding schools or quit the profession altogether?  The investment in teacher recruitment will be fruitless if we do not solve the retention problem.

This is the conclusion reached by the sociologist Richard Ingersoll:

[A]lthough seeing that all our nation's classrooms are staffed with qualified teachers is among the most important issues facing our schools, it is also among the least understood. Like many similarly worthwhile reforms, these recent efforts alone will not solve the problems of underqualified teachers and poor-quality teaching because they do not address some of their key causes.

The data show…that inadequate support from the administration, low salaries, rampant student discipline problems, and little faculty input into school decisions all contribute to high rates of teacher turnover. Improving these conditions would decrease turnover, which would quickly eliminate the so-called shortages.

The implications for reform are clear. The way to make sure that there are qualified teachers in every classroom is not to assume that the problem stems from teacher unions or a deficit in the quality or quantity of teachers. The way to make sure that there are qualified teachers in every classroom is to upgrade the job of teaching.[7]

The problem, of course, is that monetary incentives cannot compensate for the disincentives created by a work environment that virtually guarantees failure.  One program in California that is designed to do just this is the Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA) program.  In participating schools, beginning teachers are paired with veteran staff members who have been trained as support providers.  The results of BTSA have been impressive.  Beginning teachers who participate in this program are more effective than those who do not—and they are far less likely to quit.  On average, 95% of those participating in BTSA still teach after 5 years compared to estimates of 50% or more turnover for other beginning teachers.  In light of this success, the State of California allocated $67 million to this program in 1999 and increased the amount to $75 million in 2000.  Changes in the state’s credentialing policies will soon require all new teachers to participate in a two-year BTSA-like induction program to become eligible for a final professional credential. 

Unfortunately, even a proven program like BTSA will not make a significant difference in the most severely challenged schools—those with the highest concentrations of underqualified teachers.  At Lockwood Elementary School in Oakland, for instance, 46% of the school’s 44 teachers were uncredentialed last year.   These people without any experience or training get no support since BTSA regulations prohibit support providers from working with non-credentialed teachers.  Another seven of Lockwood’s teachers are in their first or second year, leaving only 16 among 44 who have a credential and more than two years of experience.  With the demanding conditions in these schools, there may be few in this group of 16 that have the interest, the time, and the qualifications to serve as a BTSA support provider.  When beginning teachers, credentialed or not, cannot find enough qualified teachers to support them, it becomes one more reason that it is so difficult to reverse the cycle of dysfunction in schools like Lockwood Elementary.

Clearly, financial incentives alone are not sufficient to attract and keep our most qualified teachers in the schools that need them the most.

Inadequacy of the Reform Effort

Failing systems tend not to operate very long in an intermediate state—they either get enough of what they need to thrive or they return to a state of failure.  Anyone who has had an illness treated with antibiotics knows one must take the full regimen in order to get well.  Even though one is likely to feel better after a couple of days of treatment, doctors tell us the illness will return if we do not take all of the medicine.  Here, a little help is equivalent to no help.  In fact, with too little medicine we are probably worse off.  Because some of the bacteria remain alive, the body figures out how to resist the therapeutic effects of the medicine.  The medicine will be less capable of curing the disease the next time it is needed. 

And so it is with ailing schools.  Unless they can quickly be pushed all the way to a point of stability, most will eventually return to their prior state of dysfunction.  In fact, they may be worse off.  Just like the patient who builds up resistance to medicine when too little is taken, the school builds up its own resistance when too little is done to turn it around.  When people are asked to adopt new programs or new ways of teaching and the results fall short of expectations, many become cynical and uncooperative.  Not only have resources been wasted, but also the school is less able to respond effectively the next time a new plan is introduced, no matter how promising it might be.  And, those in a position to support (and fund) future reform efforts may be less inclined to try anything similar to what was done before. 

The state’s approach to reforming the lowest performing schools has been guided by conventional wisdom, which holds that educational change must occur gradually.  This view is expressed by James Stigler’s important book, The Teaching Gap. “Because teaching is a system that is deeply embedded in the surrounding culture of the schools,” he says, “any changes will come in small steps, not in dramatic leaps.”[8]  The belief implicitly expressed is: We do the best we can with existing resources and, even if we do not succeed in getting them to a level comparable to schools in wealthier districts, well at least we will have made some improvement.  Some help is better than no help.

But if the theory about ailing systems is valid, if dysfunctional schools are bi-modal and prone to regress unless they reach a threshold of stability, then this gradualist approach to reform is misguided. The theory presented in this proposal suggests that whatever is done for these schools, it must be sufficient to ensure they reach a threshold where change can be sustained.  And it suggests that offering some help may be the equivalent of offing no help. In fact, more harm than good may be done if all that is provided to dysfunctional schools is the equivalent of two days worth of antibiotics. 

All of this suggests that California must be prepared to take drastic action in our lower performing schools—and many would argue that initiatives like the Immediate Intervention/Underperforming Schools program are designed to do just that.  But because this program applies to thousands of schools—all of those who are in the bottom half of the performance index statewide—the resources are thinly spread.  An alternative approach to reform would be to focus maximum attention on the most challenged schools rather than minimal attention on many.  This, of course, raises troubling questions about equity.  With limited resources, how do we decide which schools get treated first and which ones must wait? 

In medicine the rules of triage give first priority to the sickest patients.  Under such rules, there is no question that schools targeted would be those whose students are most at risk of educational failure.  This is easier said than done given the current political climate and policy makers’ inclination to channel most resources to students who are least at-risk—a practice that is tantamount to “reverse triage.”  Stigler is right in noting how the culture of the school works to preserve the status quo.  But if the culture can be transformed, and if enough support is provided to at-risk students in failing schools, then perhaps change can be achieved in dramatic leaps.