Netting an elusive breed: disadvantaged schools need better teachers. Here's how to attract and retain them

Education Next, Fall, 2004 by Mark Warner

If there is one lesson I learned before being elected governor of Virginia in 2001, it is that the most important asset of any enterprise is the talent and enthusiasm of its workforce. In operating a successful business, there is no greater challenge than to attract and retain the best-qualified, hardest-working employees.

To accomplish this, businesses must offer competitive compensation and benefit packages, positive working environments, and opportunities for employees to gain more responsibility and to upgrade their skills.

However, perhaps the most important factors in keeping the best people are providing workers with the tools to succeed at what they do and ensuring that they feel a sense of respect and empowerment about their work. Businesses that fail to offer these things will lose their brightest employees to competitors that do.

Having learned these lessons firsthand as a business owner, I am determined as a governor to apply them to the single greatest challenge facing our public schools today--the challenge of providing the best possible teachers to students in our lowest-achieving schools.

Learning from Success

Teachers are by far the most important factor in a school's success. On this point the research is clear. For instance, a 1991 study conducted in Texas found that the quality of a school's teachers exerted the single greatest influence on achievement outside of students' family background. A 1996 study conducted in Tennessee found that students who had three good teachers in a row improved their performance markedly. By contrast, those who had the misfortune to be placed in classrooms with three bad teachers in a row saw their achievement levels plummet. In a review of the research literature, University of Washington scholar Dan Goldhaber concluded, "It appears that the most important thing a school can do is to provide its students with good teachers" (see "The Mystery of Good Teaching" in the Spring 2002 issue).

In designing policies aimed at attracting and retaining the good teachers, what policymakers must not forget is that teachers are no different from employees in the private sector. They want to succeed in their jobs and they demand the tools, the respect, and the sense of empowerment necessary to reach this goal. If a school does not provide these elements, the best teachers will find one that does.

In this regard, it is important to recognize that among teachers, money is not always the main concern in deciding where to teach. In a Public Agenda survey, more than 85 percent of teachers indicated that they would choose a school with well-behaved students and supportive parents over one where they would earn a significantly higher salary.

Unfortunately, schools serving low-income and minority students are often at a competitive disadvantage in trying to meet their employees' needs. For instance, just 35 percent of teachers in schools with large minority student populations say their school is "very good" when it comes to having a safe and respectful atmosphere, compared with 68 percent of teachers in schools with few minority students.

The result is that children who attend high-poverty and/or high-minority schools are:

* More likely than other children to be taught by an inexperienced teacher (see Figure 1);

* More likely to be taught by teachers who were low achievers in college;

* More likely--in every single subject area--to be taught by teachers who did not major or even minor in the subjects they are teaching (see Figure 2);

* Considerably less likely to be taught by a fully certified teacher;

* Far more likely to be in a school that suffers from extremely high rates (30 to 50 percent a year) of teacher turnover.

The consequences--scandalously low achievement levels and high dropout rates among disadvantaged youth--are well known. But what can be done?

To begin, we must learn from success. Organizations such as the Education Trust have identified hundreds of schools across the country where disadvantaged kids routinely buck the trend of underperformance. For instance, the student body at Samuel W. Tucker Elementary in Alexandria, Virginia, is 68 percent minority and 53 percent low income. Yet in 2002 the school outperformed 92 percent of all elementary schools in Virginia in reading and 86 percent of all elementary schools in math. Likewise, the 7th and 8th graders at Hambrick Middle School in Aldine, Texas, have placed in the top fifth of all Texas middle schools in reading and math over a three-year period, despite being 94 percent minority and 85 percent low income.

The key question for policymakers is therefore not whether it is possible to bring dramatic improvement to hard-to-staff schools. The question is how to learn from the existing success stories and from effective private-sector employment practices, and how to bring these lessons to scale for schools across the country.

Creating Innovative Policies

Shortages of qualified teachers in subjects like math, science, special education, and foreign languages, along with the impending retirements of an entire generation of teachers, make recruiting teachers to hard-to-staff schools even more challenging. Improving salaries is one important option, but many states still have fiscal problems that prevent them from approving costly new expenditures.