Why Do Teachers Quit?

Lots of reaosns, here's a sample

Ingersoll extrapolated and then later confirmed that anywhere between 40 and 50 percent of teachers will leave the classroom within their first five years (that includes the nine and a half percent that leave before the end of their first year.) Certainly, all professions have turnover, and some shuffling out the door is good for bringing in young blood and fresh faces. But, turnover in teaching is about four percent higher than other professions.

Approximately 15.7 percent of teachers leave their posts every year, and 40 percent of teachers who pursue undergraduate degrees in teaching never even enter the classroom at all. With teacher effectiveness a top priority of the education reform movement, the question remains: Why are all these teachers leaving—or not even entering the classroom in the first place?

“One of the big reasons I quit was sort of intangible,” Ingersoll says. “But it’s very real: It’s just a lack of respect,” he says. “Teachers in schools do not call the shots. They have very little say. They’re told what to do; it’s a very disempowered line of work.”

Other teachers—especially the younger ones—are also leaving the classroom for seemingly nebulous reasons. I spoke with nearly a dozen public and private school teachers and former teachers around the country. (I used pseudonyms for the teachers throughout this piece so that they could speak freely.) Many of them cited “personal reasons,” ranging from individual stress levels to work-life balance struggles.

“We are held up to a really high standard for everything,” says Emma, a 26-year-old former teacher at a public school in Kansas who now works for a music education non-profit. “It stems from this sense that teachers aren’t real people, and the only thing that came close to [making me stay] was the kids.”

In my interviews with teachers, the same issues continued to surface. In theory, the classroom hours aren’t bad and the summers are free. But, many young teachers soon realize they must do overwhelming amounts of after-hours work. They pour out emotional energy into their work, which breeds quick exhaustion. And they experience the frustrating uphill battle that comes along with teaching—particularly in low-performing schools.

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School levies up nearly 30% under Kasich

A new study by Innovation Ohio reveals that school levies are up nearly 30% under Gov. Kasich

• 72 new operating levies raising $260 million will be on local ballots in November;
• This brings the total number of new “operating money” requests between May of 2011 and November of 2013 to 475, and the total amount requested to $1.59 billion;
• Both figures (number of levies and amounts requested) are significantly higher than those occurring before Gov. Kasich took office. Compared to May, 2007 through November, 2009, under Kasich there have been 27.7% more requests (up from 372) for 39.1% more money (up from $1.15 billion) on Ohio ballots.

The full study is here. Innovation Ohio's Janetta King had this to say

“This analysis is proof positive that the school funding cuts enacted by Gov. Kasich and his legislative allies have simply shifted the burden to local taxpayers. Until now, the Administration has claimed that state funding cuts haven’t had an impact on local schools or local taxpayers. And they’ve preposterously asserted that despite their cuts, the number of new money levies for operations haven’t risen since they took office.

“Even now, we fully expect that they will try to confuse the issue by lumping school construction levies in with school operating levies and claim that the number of levies has held constant. But as Charlie Wilson, President of the Ohio School Boards Association, says:

‘….if you are trying to measure the impact of state funding cuts on the (schools’) main operating budget, Innovation Ohio’s measurement is better because it effectively measures the local operational impact of cuts made in the state’s operating budget.’ (emphases in the original)

“In short, the Kasich administration and its allies have played a giant shell game. They’ve cut school funding to pay for income tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthiest Ohioans. This, of course, has only pushed the need for tax increases down to the local level where middle and low income Ohioans are being asked to hike their own property taxes in order to make up the shortfall.”'

Like no other profession

Like no other profession

Imagine an experienced surgeon in the middle of a delicate six-hour procedure where the surgeon responds to a series of unexpected emergencies being evaluated by a computer based on data gathered from a fifteen-minute snapshot visit by a general practitioner who has never performed an operation.

Imagine evaluating a baseball player who goes three for four with a couple of home runs and five or six runs batted in based on the one time during the game when he struck out badly.

Imagine a driver with a clean record for thirty years who has his or her license suspended because a car they owned was photographed going through a red light, when perhaps there was an emergency, perhaps he or she was not even driving the car, or perhaps there was a mechanical glitch with the light, camera, or computer.

Now imagine a teacher who adjusts instruction because of important questions introduced by students who is told the lesson is unsatisfactory because it did not follow the prescribed scripted lesson plan and because during the fifteen minutes the observer was in the room they failed to see what they were looking for but what might have actually happened before they arrived or after they left.

“Right to Work” a Creatively Worded Catchphrase

Social Studies teacher William Wyss writes, via the OEA blog

Whenever I hear phrases such as “right to work’ repeated loudly and frequently, I know that organizations are trying to convince me to react rather than think. Who doesn’t want the right to work? It appears to logically flow from Thomas Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” concept. However, the use of other catchphrases has made me very skeptical.

Shortly after President George H. W. Bush’s famous “Read My Lips, No New Taxes” pledge during the 1988 campaign, his administration unveiled a wide range of “revenue enhancements” as a method to obscure the implementation of new taxes. From the automobile marketing arena, I have often marveled at the transformation of “used cars” to “pre-owned cars.” This creative wording has swept the industry to the point that my students stare at me strangely when I refer to “used car salesmen.”

“Right to Work,” I think, is the same kind of sugarcoated misnomer for policies intended to dismantle unions, effectually giving workers nothing more than the right to workplace conditions once referred to as wage-slavery.

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Wall St: Charter schools are hurting urban public schools

Few states have seen an explosion of charter school growth as rapid as Ohio. Now this growth is coming with a warning from Moody's, one of the financial industry's leading risk analysts, that it will damage traditional school district finances.

The dramatic rise in charter school enrollments over the past decade is likely to create negative credit pressure on school districts in economically weak urban areas, says Moody's Investors Service in a new report. Charter schools tend to proliferate in areas where school districts already show a degree of underlying economic and demographic stress, says Moody's in the report "Charter Schools Pose Growing Risks for Urban Public Schools."

"While the vast majority of traditional public districts are managing through the rise of charter schools without a negative credit impact, a small but growing number face financial stress due to the movement of students to charters," says Michael D'Arcy, one of two authors of the report.

Charter schools can pull students and revenues away from districts faster than the districts can reduce their costs, says Moody's. As some of these districts trim costs to balance out declining revenues, cuts in programs and services will further drive students to seek alternative institutions including charter schools.

Many older, urban areas that have experienced population and tax base losses, creating stress for their local school districts, have also been areas where charter schools have proliferated, says Moody's. Among the cities where over a fifth of the students are enrolled in charter schools are Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. Nationwide about one in 20 students is in a charter school.

One of the four risk factors Moody's identifies as making a school district vulnerable to charter school growth is that the school district is already financially pressured and grappling with weak demographics.

A second factor is having a limited ability to adjust operations in response to a loss of enrolment to charter schools.

"Shifts in student enrollment from district schools to charters, while resulting in a transfer of a portion of district revenues to charter schools, do not typically result in a full shift of operating costs away from district public schools," says Moody's Tiphany Lee-Allen, the Moody's Associate Analyst who co-authored the report. "Districts may face institutional barriers to cutting staff levels, capital footprints and benefit costs over the short term given the intricacies of collective bargaining contracts - leaving them with underutilized buildings and ongoing growth in personnel costs."

A third risk factor for a school district is being in a state with a statutory framework promoting a high degree of educational choice and has a relatively liberal approval process for new charters and few limits on their growth, as well as generous funding.

For example in Michigan, the statutory framework emphasizes educational choice, and there are multiple charter authorizers to help promote charter school growth. In Michigan, Detroit Public Schools (B2 negative), Clintondale Community Schools (Ba3 negative), Mount Clemens Community School District (Ba3 negative) and Ypsilanti School District (Ba3) have all experienced significant fiscal strain related to charter enrollment growth, which has also been a contributing factor to their speculative grade status.

A final risk factor is when a school district is not integrated into a healthier local government, as such integration can lead to greater diversity in revenues and more flexibility in balance sheets, positioning the district to better handle operating and financial changes.

Testing More, Teaching Less

A new study titled "Testing More, Teaching Less" has found some not too surprising results, America’s obsession with student testing is costings huge sums of money and causing significant lost instructional time.

Based on a detailed grade-by-grade analysis of the testing calendars for two mid-size urban school districts, and the applied research from other studies of state mandated testing, our study found that the time students spend taking tests ranged from 20 to 50 hours per year in heavily tested grades. In addition, students can spend 60 to more than 110 hours per year in test prep in high-stakes testing grades. Including the cost of lost instructional time (at $6.15 per hour, equivalent to the per-student cost of adding one hour to the school day), the estimated annual testing cost per pupil ranged from $700 to more than $1,000 per pupil in several grades that had the most testing. If testing were abandoned altogether, one school district in this study could add from 20 to 40 minutes of instruction to each school day for most grades. The other school district would be able to add almost an entire class period to the school day for grades 6-11. Additionally, in most grades, more than $100 per test-taker could be reallocated to purchase instructional programs, technology or to buy better tests. Cutting testing time and costs in half still would yield significant gains to the instructional day, and free up enough dollars in the budget that could fund tests that are better aligned to the standards and produce useful information for teachers, students and parents

Based on a detailed grade-by-grade analysis of the direct costs and the time costs of testing in the two school districts’ assessment inventories, our study found:

• Pervasive testing.

One of the districts in our study had 14 different assessments given to all students at least once a year in at least one grade. Some assessments are administered for several subjects multiple times a year resulting in 34 different test administrations. The other district’s testing inventory had 12 different assessments but 47 separate administrations over the course of the year.


• Test-taking time.

Students in one district in grades 3-10 spent approximately 15 hours or more per year (about three full school days) taking state-mandated tests, interim/bench- marking tests and other district academic assessments. Students in the other district in grades 6-11 devoted up to 55 hours per year to taking tests (about two full weeks of the school year).


• Time for administrative tasks with students.

This includes giving directions, passing out test booklets and answer sheets, reading directions on the computer, etc., before and after each testing session. These administrative tasks with students took more than five hours annually— one full school day—in one of the districts. In the other district, administrative tasks with students used up more than 10 hours of the school year—two full school days—in the most highly tested grades.


• Direct budgetary costs.

Several national studies show that the direct cost of purchasing, licensing and scoring state-mandated tests is around $25 per test-taker, and the annual cost of interim/benchmark testing is about $20 per test-taker. But when considering the cost of all the tests in a school district’s inventory, the direct budgetary costs of the district testing program ranged from $50 per test-taker in one district to over $100 per test-taker in the other for grades 2-11. The direct budgetary cost of state testing represents less than 1 percent of K-12 per-pupil education spending. Nationally, education spending averages about $11,000 per pupil and reaches $20,000 per pupil in the highest-spending states.


• Logistics and administrative costs.

Estimated at $2 per student per hour of testing (up to $80 per year for students in several grades in one district), these are costs associated with man- aging pallets of testing boxes; verifying and affixing data labels to test booklets, which could include three versions of the test at each grade level; and placing testing materials in secure locations before and after each round of testing to prevent cheating. After testing is completed, each school has to collect booklets, pack them and ship them off for scoring.


• Test preparation time.

The detailed researched-based rubric narrowly defined “test preparation” to include giving practice tests and teaching test-taking strategies, but does not count review, reteaching or tutoring. Students in grades 3-8 in one district spent at least 80 hours per year (approximately 16 full school days) preparing for state-mandated tests, the associated interim/benchmarking tests and all of the other district assessments. In the other district, students in grades 6-11 devoted 100 hours or more per year on test prep (approximately one full month of the school year).


• The cost of testing and lost instructional time.

If school districts lengthen the school day or the school year to regain the instructional time lost to testing, the direct budget costs of testing are far from inconsequential. Adding one hour to the school day costs about $6.15 per student. In one district, the annual cost of testing per pupil in grades 3-8, including the cost of lost instructional time, was about $700—approximately 7 percent of per-pupil expenditures in the typical state. In the other district, the cost of testing in grades 6-11 exceeded $1,100 per student—about 11 percent of per-pupil expenditures in the typical state.


• Alternate uses of testing time and costs.

Redirecting time and money devoted to testing to other uses would provide a lot more time for instruction—possibly including partial restoration of art, music and PE programs, during the existing school day. Cutting test prep and testing time in half could still restore significant minutes for instruction and would free up funding that could be used to purchase better tests, such as the Common Core assessments.