July 2007 — News
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Can IT Turn Around Teacher Turnover?
Teacher turnover (also known to some as "teachers quitting their jobs") is becoming a critical concern for school and district administrators. Not only can it have a negative impact on student learning, especially in troubled districts, but it's emerging as a fairly major financial drain on districts in all regions, according to findings released last month by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF). So is there anything school and district technology leaders can do about it? According to the NCTAF report, there is.
NCTAF's 18-month pilot study examined five individual districts to explore the costs of losing teachers incurred by schools and districts. These districts included Chicago Public Schools, Granville County Schools (North Carolina), Jemez Valley Public Schools (New Mexico), Milwaukee Public Schools (Wisconsin), and Santa Rosa Public Schools (New Mexico). What it found was that the costs associated with teachers leaving in these districts ranged from a low of $4,366 per teacher in Jemez Valley to a high of $17,872 per teacher in Chicago, with a total annual cost to Chicago Public Schools at about $86 million. This is just the money thrown away on teachers who leave (recruitment, training, incentives, processing, etc.).
Besides the financial costs, there are, of course, costs to students as well. According to the report, "Low-performing schools rarely close the student achievement gap because they never close the teaching quality gap--they are constantly rebuilding their staff. An inordinate amount of their capital--both human and financial--is consumed by the constant process of hiring and replacing beginning teachers who leave before they have mastered the ability to create a successful learning culture for their students."
While the actual reasons for teachers leaving are many and varied and very likely have nothing to do with IT (unless your IT department is like some of those I've worked with in the past whose chief aim seemed to be to suck the life out of me), there do seem to be some viable remedies for alleviating at least some of the problems across the board. And of these remedies, a small number impact IT.
The first of this involves data systems. According to the NCTAF report, the actual figures for the costs associated with teacher turnover are generally unavailable in any immediate way. That is, they're buried in with other cost data and not separated out. Taking this as a fact, administrators therefore are flying blind in the best-case scenario or are unaware of the costs at all in the worst-case scenario.
According to the report, "Most districts have huge collections of data on the cost elements associated with teacher turnover, but the current data systems stand in the way of accurate and timely analysis. Coherent data systems should be created to house cost data in a way that is easily accessible and analyzable. Teacher turnover data should be added to current systems and should be included in the design of new systems. With easily accessible data, districts could begin to analyze and manage teacher turnover and its costs."
