{"id":1438,"date":"2020-03-16T05:05:14","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T10:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/?p=1438"},"modified":"2020-02-04T09:19:15","modified_gmt":"2020-02-04T15:19:15","slug":"recruiting-and-retaining-teachers-an-economists-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/blog\/2020\/03\/16\/recruiting-and-retaining-teachers-an-economists-approach\/","title":{"rendered":"Recruiting and Retaining Teachers: An Economist’s Approach"},"content":{"rendered":"

“We should be doing everything we can to try to have the best teachers in American classrooms….the systems we\u00a0 currently\u00a0 have in place, for various reasons, don’t really achieve that goal.”\u00a0 Raj Chetty, William A. Ackman Professor of Economics, Harvard University<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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image via pbahealth.com<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Last time I wrote about some intriguing research being done by Raj Chetty measuring the long-term impact of Kindergarten placement on low-income children.\u00a0 \u00a0He’s doing some other interesting work on how neighborhood or city may affect economic mobility, which is a fun rabbit hole to go down if you have some time.\u00a0 But most interesting to me is his take on what we need to do to recruit and keep quality teachers.\u00a0 His ideas are both sensible and timely in light of the number of teachers leaving the field (Spoiler:\u00a0 he mentions Finland).<\/p>\n

Many, many groups have proposed running education like a business.\u00a0 Teachers, in this model, must offer value to the company by improving test scores and for those scores they receive merit pay.\u00a0 The argument against this has always been that children are not like machine parts; you can’t simply input information and automatically get out good test scores.\u00a0 No one actually in education would argue with this:\u00a0 any number of factors mitigate against student success at any given time, many of which are outside the control of the teacher.<\/p>\n

Chetty cites the reputation teaching has in the U.S. as a major issue with school success.\u00a0 He notes that in high-achieving countries (Finland!), students doing well in school aspire to be teachers — it’s a high status, desirable job. Contrast that with the U.S., where teaching is sometimes the ‘last resort’ job,\u00a0 reserved for when other avenues don’t pan out.<\/p>\n

Chetty draws a distinction between artificial boosting of test scores in a single year and actual, persistent learning.\u00a0 Scores in a single year aren’t necessarily meaningful; more important is long term impact on learning.\u00a0 That’s when teachers should be rewarded.\u00a0 Here I would interject a question:\u00a0 how can you measure long term impact from a single teacher if the student has a strong, experienced teacher one year and a substandard teacher the next?\u00a0 To combat the less-than-desirable tendency to teach to the test, Chetty says test scores are useful information but have to be incorporated with other factors when making decisions.<\/p>\n

He offers one comparison with the business model that I find particularly interesting:\u00a0 districts should function more like businesses when trying to retain good teachers.\u00a0 In business, when an employee is particularly valuable there are many ways the company can sweeten the deal to retain that talent:\u00a0 promotion, raise, expanded autonomy, perks like cars and phones.\u00a0 This is where the business model in education is more stick than carrot:\u00a0 if it exists at all, the pool of rewards is small and difficult to attain.\u00a0 If a teacher decides to leave education for the private sector, no one, not even his colleagues, will fault his decision.\u00a0 When I was still teaching, a member of my department (high school English) left education to drive a beer delivery truck, the kind that goes around to big box stores and replenishes their stock.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 More money and better hours.\u00a0 Seriously.\u00a0 I’ve not witnessed many districts that go out of their way to try to keep people who decide to leave.\u00a0 In some cases, people should leave, but in others the system loses a talented teacher who is capable of the kind of long-term impacts on student learning that are so critical.\u00a0 My kids’ high school is losing their Computer Science teacher at the end of this year — a man who has demonstrably reached kids and influenced their career paths — and the only response to his resignation has been a kind of fatalistic “what can you do?” shrug by school administrators.<\/p>\n

What Chetty is calling for represents a paradigm shift for U.S. education, one in which we don’t just say<\/em> we value teachers, we put our money where our mouth is and pay them commensurate with their importance to our society and our children’s futures. And we institute policies and protocols that demonstrably increase the prestige and desirability of teaching as a career path.\u00a0 And we do all in our power to retain those individuals who are making a difference in kids’ ability to learn.<\/p>\n

You\u00a0 can listen to\u00a0 Hidden Brain’s<\/em> interview with Chetty and hear more of his ideas on how we can take action to solve this and other issues here: Zipcode Destiny<\/a>.\u00a0 For some other ideas on how to retain good teachers, check out Education Week’s Special Report on Teacher Retention for 2018<\/a>.\u00a0 Some really interesting ideas, ranging from provided childcare to expanded PD.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“We should be doing everything we can to try to have the best teachers in American classrooms….the systems we\u00a0 currently\u00a0 have in place, for various reasons, don’t really achieve that goal.”\u00a0 Raj Chetty, William A. Ackman Professor of Economics, Harvard University Last time I wrote about some intriguing research being done by Raj Chetty measuring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1438"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1471,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438\/revisions\/1471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}