I wrote earlier this week about how a belief in removing poor teachers as a way to improve schools was misplaced. My post was a response to the debate prompted by an article in Time magazine about tech entrepreneurs who want to make it easier to fire bad teachers.
While it may excite conservative commentators, this proposal is doomed to fail, not least because firing teachers requires finding replacements, and there is no guarantee they will be any better, if they exist at all.
But there is another side to this debate, and that is the difficulty of keeping teachers in the classroom. Not just good teachers, but any teachers.
I was reminded of this by a comment on my post from a teacher in his 25th year in education. He highlighted the need to “attract and keep good people,” adding that in this semester alone three teachers had resigned at his middle school.
Teacher retention is a problem familiar to school leaders across education systems. In the U.S. an estimated 40-50% of teachers leave within the first five years and the attrition rates of first year teachers have increased by about a third in the last two decades.
A report by the House of Commons education committee found similar retention levels in England, while in Australia research suggests almost half of new teachers leave within five years.
Why are they leaving? The obvious answer might be low pay and student behaviour, but studies in all three countries suggest this is not the case. Instead, the main culprits are lack of support and workload issues.
The latter is tied into growing levels of accountability in public education. While taxpayers quite rightly want to see that they are getting value for money from schools, this has translated into an increasingly heavy burden on teachers in terms of paperwork.
Far from being a profession of short days and long holidays, teaching is becoming more onerous, with lesson preparation and marking taking over evenings and weekends, with the average teacher in England working nearly 50 hours a week.
In the U.K. the government has recognized the problem and this autumn launched a workload challenge, asking teachers to detail the tasks that made their day-to-day lives more onerous.
This is still some way from coming up with ways of reducing the workload, however. For a long-term solution, it is hard to see beyond some redressing of the balance between accountability and letting teachers get on with their jobs.
And surely there is another factor that contributes towards teacher disillusion, and that is the constant denigration of the profession, including through emphasizing the need to get rid of the “bad apples”.
This incessant sniping will inevitably have an effect on teachers who already feel they are at the sharp-end. Who would want to stay in a profession that is constantly being reminded of its own shortcomings?
As one reader emailed after my article on removing poor teachers was published: “I am constantly trying to improve my practice, and the anti-bad teacher witch-hunt is not helpful. It demoralizes all teachers.”
It is easy to lay the blame for a struggling education system onto teachers, but by making teachers the scapegoats we not only miss the target, but we risk driving more people out of the profession and making the problem worse.
