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Attracting and Retaining High-Quality Professionals In Science Education | |||
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By Jeffrey Weld Heather Knapp has been in pharmaceutical sales for eight years now and has achieved considerable financial success. Yet she recently told Mr. Weld that she sorely misses teaching -- a profession where her efforts "made a difference." Illustration © 1998 by Joe Lee | ||
HEATHER Knapp was an outstanding teacher. We met during her sixth year as chemistry instructor and cheerleading sponsor at a suburban St. Louis high school where I had landed a job as a biology teacher. She was equally adept at inspiring her students in stoichiometry by day and choreography by evening, having won accolades for doing both. I relished our lunches together, when Heather's insights about young people, knowledge of our craft, and reflections about schooling nourished my own growth as a teacher. It was over one of those lunches in the spring of the year that Heather announced that she had accepted a job in pharmaceutical sales and was leaving teaching.
Heather had actually surpassed the mean survival time for chemistry teachers. The average number of years in the classroom that beginning chemistry teachers endure is an alarmingly short four years, according to a 1993 RAND Corporation study, and the average is only slightly better for physics and biology teachers.1 Teacher attrition across the disciplines is a serious problem, but it is particularly acute in the sciences, and it is particularly disturbing when the teachers who leave are talented and reflective people. Any teacher can tell stories about "the good ones" who have left the classroom -- whether to "move up" to administration or to leave education altogether. A study of 13,000 teachers who began their careers in Michigan during the 1970s revealed that only 56% were still teaching after six years. For chemistry teachers, the figure was 49%.2 Furthermore, an older study showed that those with higher scores on the National Teacher Exam had stayed in teaching less time than those with low scores.3
The 'Boil Over' Effect
The institutional factors that led to Heather's difficult decision are malleable ones, which makes the loss particularly acute for future learners deprived of her talents. And the reasons are basically the same as those cited by teachers surveyed in a 1994 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) study, in which some common reasons teachers mentioned for leaving the profession were a lack of influence over school policy, a sense of collegial isolation, and a host of factors that diminish the professionalism of teaching.4 But Heather, like many exemplary teachers, did not seem to be "ground down" by the system. Indeed, she was at peak performance after six years of honing her craft. To call her story one more case of teacher burnout would be a disservice to a professional with plenty of fire remaining. When good teachers leave teaching, "burnout" is a convenient label that removes from school administrations and parents any responsibility for their departure. It implies that a weakness within the individual led to the decision. But it might be more fruitful to consider a "burned-out" set of expectations as the reason a teacher "boiled over."
Heather had "boiled over" because of the inherent limitations of the school system. When she'd first begun teaching, it took all her considerable acumen to plan lessons, stay abreast of the subject matter, develop rapport with students, and learn all the nuances of daily life in teaching. After two or three years, she had grown into her role and had started to reflect more on systemic issues that she felt needed action. When reflective teachers turn their intellectual attention toward the school system, the frustration they feel can lead to disenchantment with the profession.
In the latter half of Heather's brief career, she worked hard to promote teaching strategies in accord with sound pedagogical research. She had partially dismantled tracking in chemistry by incorporating the honors section with her regular classes, while offering an independent contract for students who wished to earn honors credit. She had successfully transformed her courses into inquiry-based explorations using various forms of authentic assessments. She trimmed down the content of her courses in exchange for more depth, as called for in the standards of national reform initiatives. She had pushed hard for, but never succeeded in establishing, a block schedule at her school. Heather's efforts had won her national recognition from her professional peers, but, locally, much of her agenda met resistance and suspicion from colleagues, administrators, and even parents. Ultimately, a myopic institutional resistance to change had bumped head-on into Heather's insatiable desire to grow and improve her profession. A "burned-out" system had caused a teacher to "boil over" and find a new career.
Among teachers who leave the profession, there is an almost universal perception of a lack of control over how the school is run.5 Yet it is just such reflective professionals that schools -- or any institution, for that matter -- so badly need. They are the people who create the competitive edge in business or dream up strategic innovations in law or medicine. In education, they're driven out, suffocating under a blanket of inertia.
Contrary to public perceptions, the decision to leave teaching seldom has to do with money. Of 11,731 former teachers surveyed by the NCES in 1991, fewer than 10% cited poor salary as their main area of dissatisfaction.6 However, science teachers can expect to make more elsewhere. Starting salaries for graduates majoring in the sciences who opt to work in industry or business are higher than the starting salaries for other graduates. And when the salaries of graduates in the sciences who work in industry are compared with their teaching counterparts, the discrepancy is dramatic. A physics major can expect to earn 39% more in business or industry than a physics major who becomes a teacher; chemistry majors earn 37% more; biology majors earn 12% more.7 Not surprisingly, the rate of attrition among science teachers is as much as 60% higher than among those who teach in other fields, and the income chasm could well be part of the reason.8 The salary discrepancy might be considered a "last straw" for exemplary teachers (of any discipline) who are frustrated by isolation, who "look down the hall at others who might not be doing as good a job but are getting the same pay."9
Roadblocks to Curbing Attrition
Any effort to slow significantly the exodus of good science teachers must be prepared for battles with school hierarchies resistant to site-based management, with protectors of the status quo in teaching, with the testing and textbook publishing industries, and with those who favor a salary structure based largely on longevity rather than on field of expertise or on performance. Such a complex and deeply nested set of issues does not lend itself to simple fixes. Rather, systemic reforms must approach the attrition of science teachers from all angles, thereby building up an eroded foundation of professionalism.
To attract and retain high-quality teachers, the education system must address four key areas: 1) the sense of isolation experienced by science teachers, particularly those at smaller schools in which the entire chemistry or biology faculty resides in one individual; 2) the lack of receptivity to the ideas and innovations of thoughtful teachers by school administrators; 3) the egalitarian compensation schemes that prevail in public schools; and 4) the lack of recognition of good teachers as professionals. As daunting as this challenge may appear, none of it requires invention. Isolated programs exist for addressing each one of these shortcomings. What's called for now is a visionary synergism.
Successful Strategies
The Internet has proved to be a potent tool for diminishing the isolation of science teachers. In a survey conducted by the National Science Teachers Association in 1993, 90% of respondents considered isolation from peers to be a limitation to professional growth. This finding has been taken to heart by a number of organizations intent on enhancing science education. Two highly successful programs, LabNet and Access Excellence, hold great promise for bringing science teachers together.
LabNet is an Internet Web site designed for and operated by science teachers nationwide. Sponsored initially by funding from the National Science Foundation, LabNet features opportunities for dialogue between science teachers over the Internet, a system for exchanging curricular ideas and innovative labs, and search features for scientific papers and news. LabNet is a science generalist service that addresses the needs of elementary, middle school, and high school specialty instructors.10
Access Excellence is an Internet Web site sponsored by the Genentech Corporation of San Francisco. This $10 million venture has as its stated goal to "link up" the nation's 50,000 biology teachers through free access to its site. Launched in 1994 by selected teachers from across the country, Access Excellence features an idea exchange, monthly on-line discussions of science issues and pedagogy, access to scientific expertise in biology, and an ongoing array of collaborative interstate classroom projects. School administrators committed to reducing the isolation faced by science teachers need only provide modems and Internet access.
Science teachers who operate in a professional community of their peers generate ideas to which administrators must be prepared to pay heed. The undeniable merits of block scheduling, inquiry-based science, labs without walls, community-oriented investigations, and action research take on the same urgency for science teachers as matters of discipline, grading, and the location of rest rooms do for first-year teachers. Making the new ideas of science teachers fit within the structures of schooling requires flexible scheduling that allows individuals the freedom to think, reflect, and plan. When ideas bear fruit, administrators must assume the role of facilitators, asking how to help garner funds or free up students' time, rather than citing budgetary or scheduling constraints in denying an innovation.
Moreover, teachers should be legitimized as researchers and implementers of reform, rather than cast as passive receivers of inservice monologues that are too often "conducted reluctantly, attended unwillingly, and soon forgotten."11 Though schools are not often viewed as "places of inquiry," teachers who are encouraged to conduct their own action research report a greater sense of fulfillment and satisfaction with their jobs.12 School administrators who hope to attract and retain exemplary science teachers must relinquish any antiquated notions of leading by mandate and opt instead for leading through facilitation.
Exemplary teachers will devote a great deal of time to on-line interchange, reflective research, and the refinement of their craft. If such talented and conscientious people are valued by schools and parents, then a scheme for their recognition must be promoted -- a compensation system that at least approximates their value in the private sector. Otherwise, schools are destined to face continuing shortages of talented science teachers, "shortages [that] can be traced directly to salary policies that do not consider the teachers' area of specialization."13 The issue of pay is probably more important in attracting new teachers to science education than it is in keeping successful veterans in the field.14 Of those science teachers surveyed in the RAND study of attrition, two out of three said that even a 20% raise would not have influenced their decision to leave, while new teachers overwhelmingly cite pay as a major detriment to choosing a career in teaching.15 Still, the idea of a differential pay scale, even as a way of attracting those who would be good science teachers, has met with "tremendous resistance" from the teacher unions.16
Nevertheless, programs that have explored such an idea have been created. From 1982 to 1987 the Houston Independent School District implemented a program of incentive pay that provided a $1,500 stipend to science teachers, and the attrition rate among them was cut. When the Houston economy plunged, the program was eliminated. Boston teachers of science enter the pay schedule at a higher level -- often as much as $5,000 higher -- under a "Matching Salary Program." No evaluative data on the program are available. These programs and others like them recognize the urgent need to attract and retain qualified professionals in science -- particularly in chemistry and physics. Though the issue is a thorny one, an emerging tenet of compensation prevails: "If all teachers in a school district are paid on the same scale for similar teaching loads and working conditions, it will always be more difficult to find and keep a good physics teacher than a good history teacher."17
Finally, if teaching is to be viewed as a profession, it must measure up to societal definitions of a profession. In his distillation of the criteria for a profession, Allan Ornstein proposed four areas that distinguish law, medicine, and other professions from teaching. A profession, he wrote, has 1) a defined body of knowledge beyond the grasp of the lay public, 2) control over licensing or entry requirements, 3) autonomy in making decisions within one's own sphere of work, and 4) high prestige and economic standing.18
When seen within the framework of solutions discussed above, teaching closely matches Ornstein's definition. An empowered teacher -- one who takes an active role among a national body of science teachers, who develops an agenda and the expertise with which to implement it -- is seen to possess unique characteristics not shared by all of us. Hence, we admire such a professional. When science teachers are allowed to provide for the educational needs of students by altering the structure of the school, we can only marvel at the results. If teachers were duly compensated for talents and specialties within a differential pay scale designed by teachers, we would have an extrinsic measure of well-earned respect and professionalism. To be sure, there are pockets of professionalism in the nations' schools, and there are teachers who already merit the title "professional." But to anoint the practice of teaching as a profession -- and one that can attract and retain our best and brightest -- will require that we make these reforms commonplace.
Epilogue
Heather Knapp has been in pharmaceutical sales for eight years now and has achieved considerable financial success. Yet she told me in a recent Christmas card that she sorely misses teaching -- that she's missed a profession where her efforts "made a difference." I had considered answering her card with an invitation to come back to the classroom. But I hesitated. Heather would enter the salary schedule at the level of a bachelor's degree plus six years, and the odds are pretty good that the school that hired her would rather tell her than ask her what to do. The same parents who respect her knowledge of heparin and ibuprofen and her status in the pharmaceutical corporation would find less to respect about her as a teacher.
Ultimately, I answered Heather's card with an invitation to come back to teaching. But I added a qualifier: that she find a subversive strategy for seeking excellence and then hold on until the profession evolves.
1. Sheila N. Kirby and David Grissmer, Teacher Attrition: Theory, Evidence, and Suggested Policy Options (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1993).
2. Richard J. Murnane, "Understanding Teacher Attrition," Harvard Educational Review, vol. 57, 1987, pp. 177-82.
3. Victor S. Vance and Phillip C. Schlechty, "The Distribution of Academic Ability in the Teacher Force: Policy Implications," Phi Delta Kappan, September 1982, pp. 22-27.
4. Sharon A. Bobbitt et al., Characteristics of Stayers, Movers, and Leavers: Results from the Teacher Follow-Up Survey: 1991-92 (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, Report No. NCES-943-37, May 1994).
5. Jo Anna Natale, "Why Teachers Leave," Executive Educator, July 1993, pp. 14-18.
6. Bobbitt, op. cit.
7. Murnane, op. cit.
8. Rick Tetzeli, "Who's Afraid of a Teacher Shortage?," Fortune, 8 May 1993, p. 88.
9. Natale, p. 18.
10. Jeffrey Weld, "Science Online," Educational Leadership, March 1996, p. 86.
11. Mary Dunn Siedow, D. M. Memory, and P. S. Bristow, Inservice Education for Content Area Teachers (Newark, Del.: International Reading Association, 1985).
12. Gail Burnaford, "Supporting Teacher Research: Professional Development and the Reality of Schools," in idem, Joseph Fisher, and David Hobson, eds., Teachers Doing Research (Mahwah, N.J.: Earlbaum, 1996), pp. 137-50.
13. Henry M. Levin, "Solving the Shortage of Mathematics and Science Teachers," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, vol. 7, 1985, pp. 371-82.
14. Kirby and Grissmer, op. cit.
15. Bobbitt et al., op. cit.
16. Kirby and Grissmer, op. cit.
17. Murnane, p. 182.
18. Allan C. Ornstein, "The Trend Toward Increased Professionalism for Teachers," Phi Delta Kappan, November 1981, pp. 196-98.
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