In the last year, Commonwealth Charter Academy (the 800 pound gorilla of cyber schooling in PA) has poached an assortment of teachers from the public schools in my area. I'm not a fan of the choice, and I fear they may live to regret it, but I understand why they did it.
Why would excellent public school teachers leave for a profiteering edu-flavored business. You may think the answer is money, and money was certainly involved, but the answer seems to be much simpler; it was respect. Many of those teachers felt disrespected, and not just once, but systematically and repeatedly over time; CCA treated them like valued professionals, and that made a huge impression.
It reminds me that teacher exodus is largely fueled by local issues, and that old saying that people don't quit jobs--they quit bosses.
Disrespect has always been endemic in education. Teachers are too often treated like children. Teachers are too often treated as a management problem to be solved rather than valued professionals to be supported. Teachers can feed into the dynamic themselves. Teachers tend to be rules-followers, especially compliant in buildings that can be built, top to bottom, on compliance culture. But that doesn't absolve those administrators who are bad managers. And bad management, I'm quite certain, is at the heart of many teacher shortages around the nation.
Administration's main job in school is to A) hire the best people they can find and B) provide the conditions that allow those people to do the best teaching they can. Failing to do so leads to many of the problems facing schools.
You can look through stories about our knowledge of why teachers leave or why they stay (try here, here, here, and here). Let's take a look at the list.
Low pay looms large, particularly in some states. I'll give administration a pass on that one.
Lack of support from administration and the community. Yes, there is a steady background hum of accusations ranging "teachers stink" all the way to claims that, somehow, vast numbers of teachers are secretly engaged in criminal activities. Administrators don't create that buzz (mostly), but they are the folks who should be dealing with it.
We don't need more cowardly admins who fold every time a cranky community member complains. Should admins be responsive to the public? Absolutely. Should they base district policy on the goal of avoiding any conflict with any parent ever? No. If admins policy is "Don't ever mention anything in any way related to gender or race or sex, because if you do, I will throw you under the bus so fast you won't have time to cover your face," they are part of the problem.
There are plenty of lists that talk about "empowering teachers" or "elevating teacher voices," but it can all be simplified to "Treat teachers with respect. Treat them like trusted professionals."
Working conditions: other staff. You know who hates that one terrible teacher in the building almost as the parents of that teacher's students? The teachers who have to work with her--particularly those who have to clean up after her the following year.
That terrible teacher is not a union-caused problem. It's an administration problem. It may be that the hiring process is broken. It may be that the admins have failed to support that teacher into a better place. Edward Deming had a saying to the effect that if there is dead wood in your organization, then either A) it was dead when you hired it or B) you killed it. Behind every teacher who's failing at her job, there's an administrator who isn't doing his.
Working conditions: student behavior. Blame the parents if you wish, but the front office has so much to do with this. Students know whether "getting in trouble" means minor inconvenience, free break time, or an actual reason to make better choices. The employment of empathy and understanding does not mean there shouldn't be consequences.
And if the teacher is botching the job, then an admin should be right there helping her do better.
Long, long hours and heavy workload. Yeah, a problem forever, but admins have the power to help. Cut administrative burden on teachers (does that new computer program save work, or transfer the work from your secretary to the classroom teacher). Cut class size. Cut timewasting baloney (do you really want to pay someone with a Masters degree professional level money to watch children eat). Reject the notion that teachers are only doing Important Work if they are in front of students.
Respect, respect, respect. This drives everything else. Do not subject your teachers to treatment that you would not tolerate were it directed at you. And do not let them be subject to treatment by others that you would not tolerate for yourself.
And that includes listening to them when they have something to say about how the school is run, how classrooms are managed, or how education will be delivered. And when they run into the bumps of life happen, you can step up with empathy, or you can treat the teacher's problem as if it is an inconvenience for you ("Why did your father's funeral have to be held on a busy Friday at the end of the grading period!")
Nor can we blame individual weaknesses for all of it. There are systemic contributors to bad school management. The reform movement of the past few decades has dumped a ton of responsibility on administrators while stripping them of ability to deal with it. Our regime of bad high stakes testing created an almost impossible challenge, hog tying many better administrators and chasing others out of the building, to be replaced by people whose grasp of the job is, well, limited.
I'm not saying a great administrator cures all ills and solve all problems. And, like teachers, there are administrators who may be great at one part of their job and terrible at others (there are so many ways to be a bad administrator). But bad management is grievously under-discussed as a contributing factor in education problems in general and teacher retention in particular. State leaders aren't having the discussion, and the feds certainly aren't going to, but that doesn't mean you couldn't be talking about it in your local district.
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