Supporting Beginning Teachers. Tina H. Boogren
America’s Future [NCTAF], 2007). In some schools and districts, teachers drop out at an even higher rate than students (NCTAF, 2007). Compared to other professions such as law, architecture, and nursing, teacher turnover is relatively high (Ingersoll, 2003; Ingersoll & Perda, 2010)—almost 4 percent higher than in all other fields (NCTAF, 2003). Every year, schools in the United States hire more than two hundred thousand new teachers for the first day of school; however, by the end of the academic year, at least twenty-two thousand have already quit teaching (Graziano, 2005). Michael B. Allen (2005) reported that roughly half of new teachers leave within five years, although Annette L. Breaux and Harry K. Wong (2003) found that between 40 and 50 percent leave during the first seven years. Impending teacher retirements add another dimension to the problem of teacher turnover. Thirty-seven percent of current teachers are over age fifty (Allen, 2005). Therefore, by 2035, it is likely that the education community will also lose many of its experienced teachers.
Statistics like these give weight to the suggestions of scholars like Sharon Feiman-Nemser (2010), who called for researchers to “redefine teacher shortages as a problem of retention and not as a matter of insufficient supply” (p. 23). Richard M. Ingersoll (2003) stated:
Contemporary educational thought holds that one of the pivotal causes of inadequate school performance is the inability of schools to adequately staff classrooms with qualified teachers. It is widely believed that schools are plagued by shortages of teachers, primarily due to recent increases in teacher retirement and student enrollments…. These data indicate that school staffing problems are not primarily due to teacher shortages, in the sense of an insufficient supply of qualified teachers. Rather, the data indicate that school staffing problems are primarily due to a “revolving door”—where large numbers of qualified teachers depart their jobs for reasons other than retirement. (p. 3)
As seen here, the problem has less to do with finding enough teachers and more to do with keeping effective teachers in schools. Richard M. Ingersoll and Michael Strong (2011) pointed out that the number of new teachers in the United States has increased since the mid-1980s:
This upsurge in hiring has resulted in an equally dramatic growth in the number of newly hired, first-year teachers the past two decades—from 50,000 in 1987–88 to 200,000 in 2007–08. In the late 1980s the modal teacher had 15 years of teaching experience; by 2008, the modal teacher was a beginner in his or her first year of teaching. (p. 204)
Thus, the average teacher is now in the first few years of teaching and has yet to gain the necessary experience to develop expertise within the classroom. This trend has serious implications for the field of education.
The Implications of Teacher Attrition
The phrase teacher attrition refers to the practice of classroom teachers choosing to quit teaching. Since 1992, teacher attrition in the United States has grown by 50 percent (NCTAF, 2007). This rate of teacher attrition has educational implications in at least three areas: (1) student achievement, (2) education finance, and (3) the widening achievement gap.
Implications for Student Achievement
The negative implications of teacher attrition on student achievement result from two important demographic details. First, the most effective teachers tend to quit teaching in the highest numbers. In a study from the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL), a majority of superintendents classified between 75 and 100 percent of quitting teachers as either effective or very effective (Hare & Heap, 2001). In 2012, the New Teacher Project studied a group of high-achieving, highly engaging teachers they called irreplaceables. The authors described these teachers as so effective that they were “nearly impossible to replace” but added that they “too often vanish from schools as the result of neglect and inattention” (p. 2). Across the districts studied, only about 20 percent of teachers fell into this high-quality category. Consequently, whenever an irreplaceable left a low-performing school, that school had to hire an average of eleven different teachers before finding one of comparable quality. This study reinforced the idea that “the real teacher retention crisis is not simply the failure to retain enough teachers; it is the failure to retain the right teachers” (p. 4).
Second, most working teachers have less experience than they did in previous years. Figure 1.1 compares the number of teachers with various levels of experience in 1987–1988 to teachers in the 2007–2008 and 2011–2012 school years.
As shown in figure 1.1, the number of teachers with one to fifteen years of experience increased dramatically between 1988 and 2012. In the 2007–2008 school year, teachers with only one year of experience made up the single largest group of educators. Although this drift has slowed somewhat—the average teacher in 2014 had about five years of experience—the teaching force has expanded to accommodate many more inexperienced teachers than in previous decades:
Despite the slowing of this trend, the teaching force remains very green. There are, of course, still large numbers of veteran teachers; in 2011–12 about a quarter of all school teachers had 20 years or more of teaching experience. But these percentages do not take into account the ballooning of the teaching force. Because the teaching force has dramatically grown, numerically there are far more beginners than before. (Ingersoll, Merrill, & Stuckey, 2014, pp. 11–12)
Source: Ingersoll et al., 2014, p. 12. Used with permission.
Figure 1.1: Teaching experience of school teachers, 1987–1988, 2007–2008, and 2011–2012.
While it would be a mistake to undervalue the effect that new teachers can have in the classroom, it is important to remember that a teacher does not reach his or her full professional potential within the first year. By contrast, teachers who remain in the profession for several years develop expertise and are likely to see higher rates of achievement among their students. As Robert J. Marzano and his colleagues (2011) pointed out, students with highly skilled teachers achieve at higher rates than students with less-skilled teachers. Table 1.1 (page 6) displays the variations in student achievement associated with different degrees of teacher competence (for students beginning at the 50th percentile).
As shown in table 1.1, “A student at the 50th percentile will not be expected to gain at all in percentile rank in the classroom of a teacher of the 50th percentile in terms of his or her pedagogical skill” (Marzano et al., 2011, p. 2). As the teacher’s skill increases, however, student achievement also increases. If a teacher’s pedagogical skill lies within the 70th percentile, for instance, a student can be expected to grow from the 50th percentile to the 58th percentile. A student at the 50th percentile whose teacher is between the 90th and 98th percentiles in regard to skill could be expected to gain 18 to 27 percentile points as a result of being in that teacher’s class. Although not all teachers will necessarily reach the 90th or 98th percentile, all teachers can make incremental gains in expertise from year to year. As Marzano and colleagues (2011) asserted, “Even a modest increase [in teacher expertise] would yield impressive results” (p. 2).
Table 1.1: Teacher Expertise and Student Achievements
| Teacher Skill Percentile Rank | Predicted Percentile Gain for Student at the 50th Percentile | Predicted Percentile Rank for Student |
| 50th | 0 | 50th |
| 70th | 8 | 58th |