Supporting and Retaining the Next Generation of Teachers

Presenter: Susan Moore Johnson, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

Part One

MARY ELLEN FREELY: I am Mary Ellen Freely. I am a member of the Executive Council of ASCD, and it is my pleasure to preside at this afternoon's session. We have with us a very, very distinguished speaker, and it is really my delight to be able to introduce her to you this afternoon.

Susan Moore Johnson is the Carl Pforzheimer Jr. Professor of Education in Learning and Teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she served as the Academic Dean from 1993 to 1999. A former high school teacher and administrator, Susan Moore Johnson, studies school organization, educational policy, leadership, and change in school systems.

She received her A.B. degree in English literature from Mount Holyoke College and her MAT degree in English and her Ed.D. degree in administration, planning and social policy from Harvard Graduate School. She is a member of the National Academy of Education and a recipient of a Senior Scholar grant from the Spencer Foundation.

Susan Moore Johnson is the author of many published articles and three books, Teacher Unions in Schools, Teachers at Work and Leading to Change: The Challenge of the New Superintendency. Recently, she has published articles about charter schools, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and teachers’ professional careers.

She is currently heading up a multi-year research program at Harvard on the next generation of teachers. Reports about that work can be found at her Web site. I am certain she will share that with us at the conclusion of her presentation.

We are very, very honored to have you with us Susan Moore Johnson and we look forward to hearing your remarks. Thank you.

[Applause]

SUSAN MOORE JOHNSON: Thank you very much. Thank you all for coming on this sunny day.

I come to you from Boston, and I can tell you, if we are having any conference in Boston and we had this weather right now, there would be no one in this room because we have had such horrific weather. So, I have really enjoyed being here and appreciate being invited.

I want to talk today about some research that I have been working on for the last five or six years, but I want to start by telling you how I got there. Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, who is a local political hero in Boston, is famous for having observed that all politics is local. And the corollary of that, I think, is that all research is personal. That, finally, if you scratch researchers and find out why they are studying what they are studying, there is a personal explanation for it.

Some of that research is more personal than others. And this particular piece of work for me has very important personal connections. So, I thought I would start with a brief explanation of what is behind this research for me.

I grew up in a family where the family business was education. My dad was a teacher. My grandma was a teacher. My great aunt was a teacher. I entered teaching. My brother is in education. He started as a teacher and now is an activist in education. So, when my daughter, Erica, was a senior in college in 1988, she thought that she might want to teach — maybe. But she was not really ready to commit the time and the money to something that she thought might be a waste of her time.

At her college, there were recruiters waving enormous signing bonuses to her classmates for work in technology, in investment banking and consulting — a wide array of options. And many of her classmates were going to law school, going to medical school, and she was interested in teaching. And notably, there was only one recruiter for teaching at that time, and that was Teach For America, a program that you may well know offers uncertified teachers a pathway to the classroom. It allows young people who are interested in teaching but not quite certain about what commitment they want to make the opportunity to explore their interests at little costs, and so she joined up.

And I like to say that this is the way that children of education professors rebel. And she found her way. Though she would not have regarded it as rebellion, she would have regarded it as giving my line of work a chance.

As I watched her decide to teach, even for the short commitment of two years, I was really struck by the generational differences between Erica's peers and mine, when I began to teach in 1967. Thirty-five years ago, when I graduated from college and chose to become a teacher, there were few career alternatives for women and for people of color.

I had always wanted to be a teacher. I had played school when I was little. I would grade papers for my dad when it was multiple choice. And for me it was not a difficult decision. But it also was not a decision that I had to defend against people saying, well, you really want to be a teacher? Why would you want to be a teacher? Because for me at that time that is what women did and that was a perfectly respectable and admirable thing to do.

It also was a time when public service was very respectable. And I cannot see many of you, but I am sure there are those of you who also started teaching at that time and remember the words of JFK, urging us to serve our country. And as a consequence, many people chose a lifetime career in teaching. Notably, it was the first time in history when a cohort of teachers entered teaching and stayed in public education for their entire careers. Obviously, there are individual differences but, overall, it is a cohort that stayed with teaching.

Now, today the context for new teachers is quite different. We are in the midst of a crazy time, as you probably know right now, as budgets are uncertain and the shortage that we thought was going to be upon us right at this moment is suddenly a surplus, and young people who have entered teaching are getting layoff notices. But, ultimately, if you look broadly at the context of public education and teaching now as opposed to 35 years ago, it is quite different.

One difference is of course that there are many career options for college graduates, and there is open access. In fact, the very people who were excluded from certain lines of work 35 years ago are now actively and aggressively recruited in some cases, and so there are a lot of choices. Another feature of the career environment is that there is great pay potential. Today it does not seem like it, but, again, if you consider teaching versus other lines of work, you see an incredible pay gap between what teachers can expect to make over a career and what an engineer can expect to make or a lawyer can expect to make. So, these other lines of work have a lot of pull as far as income is concerned.

In addition to that, the other lines of work offer this array of resource-rich environments. There are plenty of resources. If you work in a law office, you do not have to wonder whether there is a copy machine that will work and whether you have access to that copy machine and whether there will be more than one ream of paper available for a semester for your students. It is the kind of thing that we have, who have been in schools for a long time, tend to forget, that if someone is considering other options, that this environment in which people work matters a lot.

And fourth, there is the prospect for early career advancement. The current cohort of people who are considering teaching are looking eagerly for opportunities to advance, not necessarily to boss other people but to have variety and differentiation in their roles and responsibilities.

And finally, there is the fact that serial careers are common in this context that new teachers are entering. As I mentioned, my peers committed themselves to lifelong careers in teaching or in education. Erica's peers make these tentative, often temporary, commitments to a career in teaching or to a career in anything in fact. Many of them anticipate serial careers, with different roles and responsibilities over a lifetime.

I know that for people who are 28, having had three other jobs in different parts of the country, is a kind of sign of vitality and vigor and an investment in opportunity. Whereas, for my generation, and certainly for my parents, that would be evidence of a kind of lack of stability and lack of certainty.

So, this is a very different set of circumstances that these people are considering as they are thinking about teaching. So, what I would argue is that this next generation of teachers is not simply a younger version of the retiring generation. That it is profoundly different. And unless we understand those differences, we are going to miss a very, very important period of attracting and supporting those teachers in ways that will strengthen the schools.

So, that is the personal side of this. And I began this research project on the next generation of teachers, which is a set of studies about how you attract, support and retain new teachers within this decade. At the time that we started it, we were all quoting this 2.2 million teachers who will be needed in the decade to staff the schools. And there was a lot of energy and concern about the teacher shortage and how we really all had to pay attention to it or we would not have enough teachers.

And now, in the midst of budget cuts and layoffs, it is very easy to imagine that this is no longer a problem. But what I think is very important for people to understand is that it is really a profoundly important issue. Because who staffs the schools in the next 10 years will really determine the future of the schools for the next 30 years. I happen to believe this is a much more important topic even than accountability and standards, though I recognize the importance of that.

Unless my generation somehow finds the means to eternal life and never has to retire, we are in fact going to leave the schools. And we are going to be replaced by a new generation of people who will either teach well or teach poorly, either stay for a short time, stay for a long time, serve children well, or serve children badly. So, we really have to pay attention to that.

So, I want to tell you about one of our studies. We have a bunch of different studies going on at the project, but the one I want to tell you about today is a study of 50 Massachusetts teachers that was started four years ago. And we chose a sample of 50 teachers to look at closely. And I just want to show you a little bit about the sample of teachers. It is a diverse sample that was deliberately chosen. We tried to find people who came from different kinds of programs, entered teaching in different ways, and had different characteristics.

So, it is a sample that is 66 percent female and 34 percent male. And that is a little bit more male than the national statistics would suggest. Seventy percent are white. Thirty percent are persons of color. Again, a little bit more diversity than in fact is there, regrettably. They were teaching at elementary, middle and high schools, in predominantly urban in our sample and suburban school settings. And then there were 74 percent of the teachers who were teaching in conventional schools and 26 percent in charter schools.

We were particularly interested in charter schools, first, because of the way they there are structured and the way that they are often start-up schools, but also because at that time in Massachusetts you could begin teaching in a charter school without being certified. That has been changed at this point. So, this was a group of people who were entering teaching with no certification and no preparation at all.

So, I want to emphasize that this sample is deliberate and not random, though we are doing some large-scale random survey work with teachers as well.

There is some very interesting characteristics about this cohort of people entering. One of the first is that they include new entrants, as in first-career entrants, and mid-career entrants. We were surprised to find in fact how many mid-career entrants there were, and I will tell you about that in a minute. It also includes entrants who come through traditional paths of preparation and entrants through alternative paths.

There is a raging battle among academics and educators about whether traditional certification is somehow better than alternative and whether we would be better off just to junk the whole teacher ed thing and let smart people who know their subject matter get in the classroom. While that debate is going on, in fact, there are an amazing number of alternative preparation programs that are moving people into schools. And so the new cohort includes people coming in who have had two years of preparation and a full-year internship as well as people who have had a couple of months, six weeks in the summer, with a summer school placement, and begin teaching. And there are also what we have come to call short-termers and long-termers. And I will explain that a little bit.

I wanted to show you the career entry stage in our sample. We had 52 percent of the 50 coming in as first career with an average age of 24 and 48 percent were coming in mid-career with an average age of 36. And when we first saw those numbers, we thought, well, that is weird. We have selected these people and this is a really odd sample and it is unrepresentative. Then we did a random sample survey in New Jersey and found a 46 percent mid-career entrance. And we thought, well, maybe that is strange, because New Jersey has had alternative certification for a long time and so maybe that explains it.

We have just gotten the data back from a four-State survey that includes Michigan, California, Florida, and Massachusetts, and the numbers across the sample are almost entirely the same. And we are picking this up from other large-scale data surveys that in fact there is a very high proportion of new people entering who come from other lines of work, who have had a substantial period of work in some other sector.

And that of course changes who these new teachers are. If you have raised a child and worked in three different organizations before you become a teacher, you have a different set of needs and you bring a different set of strengths than you otherwise might.

And I mentioned that we had in this group different conceptions of career. One of the group, 33 of the people we interviewed, and we thought this was a surprising number, talked about their career in teaching as being a kind of short-term commitment. And this was a typical quote: “I am a career changer. I figured why not explore a new field. My guess is that I will need to have a sense of success in order to stay. And if I feel that way, then I will probably stick with it.”

This was a software designer who could move back at any time and made that clear. And that is the other thing you get from the mid-career entrants, they have moved to education for meaningful work. It is a very purposeful move for the most part, and they plan to stay, but they also have this alternative. And they also expect a kind of work setting that is quite different than what they often encounter.

Then there were 17 that we called long-termers and they are more typical of my generation. The people who say they always wanted to be a teacher: “I just always knew that I was going to be a teacher. I assume that this will be my career for life. People change careers so many times, or the average person does, but I do not expect to.”

Unlike 30 years ago, when a principal with a new group of teachers could expect they had gone through a pretty standard teacher ed program, that they were for the most part first-career entrants, and that they would for the most part expect to stay over the long term, now there is this very heterogeneous group of people coming in with different expectations, different kinds of training, different sorts of needs, and also different opportunities and strengths to contribute to the school.

Today I am going to focus on three of the 50 teachers just to give you a little feel for some of the range of people here and what they encountered.

One of them is Brenda. Brenda left her job in a nonprofit health care organization. She thought she wanted to be in education, and she thought that probably she did not want to go through a regular teacher ed program. So, she finished a general master's program in education that did not include teacher prep. Then she entered an alternative certification program to gain access to the classroom.

She is a native Spanish speaker, and so she thought that she would not have any trouble getting a job teaching Spanish or teaching in a bilingual setting. So, she took a job as a Spanish teacher in an urban middle school and in her first assignment, each week she was assigned to teach 210 students in 10 different classes, in grades six, seven and eight.

The second person is Mary. And Mary left social work to become a teacher. She was in her mid-thirties and, rather than entering an alternative certification program as many of our mid-career entrants did, she prepared to teach in a master's level certification program and that included student teaching. She took a job, as many people do, at the site of her student teaching. And she began in what was a startup charter school that featured project-based learning. So, there was not a curriculum and teachers had to create their own projects as they went. During her first year, she taught 60 middle school students humanities, English, and social studies combined.

And the third person is Fred. Fred considered several other careers, including criminal justice, when he was finishing his undergraduate work and then, all of a sudden, decided to become a teacher. He completed a master's degree in education and spent one year as an intern in a school where he now teaches. It is a professional development school in an urban setting and he is a first-career entrant there.

So, none of these three teachers was the traditional "I always wanted to be a teacher" teacher. None of them was certain that this would be a lifetime career. In fact, of the 50 teachers we interviewed, there were only 17 who said they were virtually sure that they would stay in education long term, and only three out of 50 said that they planned to remain classroom teachers for their entire careers. So, this is quite a stunning difference from that cohort of 35 years ago.

So, what I are argue is that if schools are to be effectively staffed during this next decade, whatever kinds of patterns the turnover takes, people have to recognize that the new teachers of today are not the new teachers of 1970. That they are not new, first-career entrants with traditional teacher ed and student teaching who plan to spend an entire career in a classroom. And this varied group, with all their special needs and special strengths, cannot succeed if they are isolated and expected to teach effectively from day one without deliberate and sustained support.

If you look at a chart showing the demographics of the teaching force today, it is U-shape. There is a very large number of teachers about to retire and a large number of teachers entering. There is this sort of flat place in between which creates the bottom of the U that really represents a period of declining enrollment in the eighties, when not many new teachers were hired. So, there is a huge hiring in the sixties and seventies, many fewer in the eighties, and then this new group coming in today.

As I say, the current economic pressures and layoffs may change the way in which this shifts, but that still is the reality of what we have ahead. And so the question is for me, who will teach? Who will teach over the long term? Will the schools be staffed with short-term recruits who enter a setting, do not encounter support and leave in exhaustion and dissatisfaction after a short time, so that the teaching force will always be L-shaped, with a lot of new people at the beginning, or will there be a new generation of professional teachers and a new differentiated career to sustain them?

As you all know, the national attrition rates for teachers are really stunning. Thirty percent leave in three years. Fifty percent leave in five years. And there is also a great deal of turnover from school to school and district to district within that, and all of that is very destabilizing for schools. So, the support and the retention challenges are really quite dramatic, but we have more than filling jobs ahead us. We really have this challenge of rebuilding the profession of teaching, and doing it is such a way that schools are stronger and serve students better as a result.

So, let me give you an overview. After three years, our Mass 50, as we call them, we have 11 who have left public school teaching. That is 22 percent. Eleven have moved to a different school. Eight of those were voluntary movers and three were involuntary movers. We have 18 stayers. I will come to that settled/unsettled in a minute.

What I would emphasize is that when you put together the 11 and 11, you have a total of 44 percent of the sample who have moved. And from the perspective of a school, whether someone has left teaching or just left the school for another school, the cost of rehiring, the kind of turmoil that is created when a teacher leaves the school with all his or her knowledge of about curriculum and parents and kids, it is very disruptive to the other people who are there.

So, we have 44 percent of this sample of 50 leaving their original schools within three years, and then 28 staying in the same school. But our interviews would suggest that these 28 are not all happy campers. Through the long interviews that we have had with these people, we found 40 of them seem settled. So, out of the 50 there are 14 people who say: “I like it here, this is the right place to teach, for the foreseeable future, this is where I am going to be.”

And we have 14 that we came to call unsettled. And that includes people who are unsettled about their career: “I love it here. I love the kids. I cannot ever live on this salary. I cannot get married. I could never send my kids to college on this salary.”

Or there are others who are unsettled about the school. They do not like their principal. They do not like their assignment. They are not quite happy with their colleagues, but it is okay for now. And my prediction is that in a few years more of them will be gone as well.

In our sample, Brenda is a leaver. She was a Spanish teacher with 10 classes. Mary is a mover. And Fred is a stayer. And we will hear a little bit more about them.

Some of the teachers left because of low pay and low prestige. And as you probably know, those go hand in hand for people. But most of the people who left or moved did so because they said they could not achieve a sense of success in their school. They did not feel that they were able to do and succeed in the way that they had hoped to when they entered teaching.

What I think is a very important thing that we have learned in this study is that the school is very important in what happens to teachers. And it is kind of obvious because, ultimately, all of you who know about research in education know that everything comes down to the school. But even though what the Federal Government does about new teachers matters, and No Child Left Behind certainly will affect who teaches, even though the State and its budget have tremendous implications for new teachers, even though the district may organize an induction program for new teachers that works or does not work, finally, from the perspective of new teachers, it is absolutely no question that what happens at the school site is the most important thing.

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