DETERMINANTS OF BEGINNING TEACHER CAREER OUTCOMES: WHO STAYS AND WHO LEAVES?
Beginning teacher attrition is a problem that exacerbates the inequity of opportunities for all students, especially for those in schools that are already challenged by poverty. This study makes use of the Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Survey (covering the period between 2008 and 2012) and U.S. Census data to identify which teachers leave and to explain why. Beyond that, it also offers a look into the characteristics of those teachers who stay at the same school for five years. The empirical investigation is embedded in a conceptual framework that draws from motivation and identity theories, and brings in insight about the importance of geography and of neighborhood effects from works on poverty and education.
The study utilizes a dataset with survey responses from approximately 1,800 full-time teachers from a sample designed to represent the overall population of beginning teachers in the United States. By combining individual-level longitudinal data with information about communities, this dissertation makes an important contribution to the study of new teacher placement, attrition, and retention. The evidence is presented using a variety of descriptive and inferential statistics, and the analysis includes factor analysis and logistic regression models.
The results show that indicators of leaving the profession before the fifth year become apparent early on, as factors measured at the end of year one have significant effects on early career outcomes. Most prominently, higher degrees of burnout reported by teachers, which includes factors such as decreased enthusiasm and increased fatigue, are associated with increased risk for leaving the profession without the prospect to return to it and with transferring to a different school district. Several other factors on the individual- and school-level emerge as relevant to career outcomes. Teachers who have Highly Qualified Teacher credentials and report a supportive school climate are at less risk to leave the profession. On the other hand, teachers with alternative certifications and master’s degrees are more likely to move to a different school or districts in the first five years.
In terms of socio-geographic factors that help explain teacher retention and attrition, the only significant variable in the regression models used in the analysis is the percentage of White residents at the Census tract of the Year 1 school. When everything else is held constant, decreasing this percentage from 100 to 0 increases the predicted probability of leaving the profession by approximately 20%. Considering that the vast majority of beginning teachers both in the sample and in the overall population are White, this finding fits in with theories about “the pull of home” and cultural habitus. The magnitude and significance of this finding suggest that it warrants further exploration, as racial composition of the communities is likely a measurement proxy for complex processes of inequality.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT…………………………………………………..iii
DEDICATION………………………………………………….v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………….vi
LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………….x
LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………….xiii
CHAPTER
Purpose of Study……………………………………………3
Research Questions…………………………………………5
Conceptual Framework………………………………………5
Significance of Study……………………………………….10
The Effects of Individual-Level Factor…………………………..12
Burnout and Career Outcomes………………………………..14
The Effects of School and Student Characteristics……………………16
The Role of Supportive School Climate…………………………..17
The Effects of Professional Autonomy and Control Over Teaching……….20
Relating Teachers’ Characteristics and Career Outcomes to Socio-Geographic Patterns 22
The Poverty Gap…………………………………………..28
Good Teachers in Good Schools in Good Neighborhoods: A Classic Sociological View 30
The Appeal of Home……………………………………….32
Importance of Geography…………………………………….35
Teacher Dataset…………………………………………..39
Using Weights for Correct Variance Estimation for BTLS……………..40
Defining the Analytical Sample………………………………..42
Dependent Variables: Career Outcomes of Beginning Teachers………….45
Demographic Characteristics of Teachers in the Analytical Sample……….54
Teachers Excluded from Analysis………………………………60
Opinions, Perceptions, and Attitudes of Teachers in the Analytical Sample….63
Preparation, Support and Professional Development of Teachers…………70
Characteristics of Schools in the Analytic Sample……………………74
Linking Schools to External Data……………………………….80
Neighborhood Variables……………………………………..82
Analytic Procedures………………………………………..87
Differences in Teacher Characteristics by Career Outcomes…………….93
Differences on the Classroom and School Levels…………………..100
Differences on the Level of Census Tract of Year 1 School……………102
Factor Analysis…………………………………………..105
Multinomial Logit Model of Categorical Career Outcome…………….112
Logit Models of Binary Career Outcomes………………………..119
The Effects of Teachers’ Race and Community Racial Composition……..124
Answering the Research Questions…………………………….129
Implications for Policy…………………………………….137
Implications for Future Research………………………………140
REFERENCES CITED………………………………………….142
APPENDIX
Teacher Questionnaire School and Staffing Survey, 2007-2008 School Year..152
LIST OF TABLES
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Staffing schools with qualified teachers and motivating well-prepared novice educators to stay and thrive in their chosen profession, often under difficult work conditions, is one of the most complex and persistent educational problems. State and district educational leaders, principals, policy makers, and academics alike have interest in building and sustaining a teacher labor force that is well-quipped to meet the needs of an ever-changing American and global context. Scholars in the field of education have long acknowledged that one of the main difficulties for struggling schools in impoverished city neighborhoods is attracting and retaining well-qualified and motivated personnel—principals, district superintendents, supporting staff, and teachers (for a succinct review of the literature between 1999 and 2010, see Schaefer, Long, and Clandinin, 2012). Even outside cities, turnover rates during the early years in the profession are high; some scholars estimate that between 40 and 50% of new teachers leave within the first five years and that attrition rates of first-year teachers have increased by one-third in the past decade (Ingersoll, 2012).
The first year of teaching is particularly taxing, and many teachers experience “burnout” and decreased interest in the profession even after only a few months (Kolbe, 2014). This, in turn, is likely to affect the short-term career decisions that teachers make during the first five years of their professional experience, which is the period with the highest rates of attrition. These high rates of exiting the profession have led some scholars to theorize that perhaps teaching is “once again returning to its historical roots as a temporary occupation” and that an increasing number of beginning teachers approach the start of their professional career as a tentative exploration (Rinke, 2014, p. 1).
The costs of this problem are tremendous: both in terms of finances, and in terms of providing students with high-quality instruction and stable school environments. High-poverty schools and students that are already at risk are particularly vulnerable to the problems caused by teacher attrition (Barnes, Crowe, & Schaefer, 2007).
Ample literature addresses the many dimensions of the problem, as well as some of the reasons for it that span the range of organizational and personal factors: from a late and cumbersome hiring process at the district level (Levin & Quinn, 2003), to inadequate pre-service preparation (Stoddart, 1993), to a lack of specific supports such as induction programs and mentoring (Ingersoll & Smith, 2004), to personal reasons such as school proximity to home (Boyd, Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2005). Borman and Darling (2008) suggest there are five important “constellations of variables” that affect teacher retention and likely most other facets of the teachers’ professional experience: (1) teacher characteristics, (2) teacher qualifications, (3) school characteristics, (4) school resources, and (5) student characteristics (p. 400).
The complex challenges that beginning teachers face affect their experience and career choices as novice professionals, regardless of their school setting. However, the problems are only exacerbated if a teacher joins a school and community affected by the presence of pervasive poverty and racial discrimination. Poverty and racial segregation have shown to seriously affect all aspects of life, including student learning, and individual and family resilience (Hopson & Lee, 2001; Okech, Howard, Mauldin, Mimura, & Kim, 2012). This phenomenon undoubtedly translates into additional workplace pressures for teachers in environments of poverty (Loeb, Darling-Hammond, & Luczak, 2005). In turn, the challenges in student learning and work conditions affect teacher career outcomes (Sass et al., 2012; Scafidi & Sjoquist, 2007).
Understanding the complexity of teacher retention and attrition, and the context within which they occur, is key for improving teaching and learning. Researchers and educational leaders agree that teachers are the most important school-based factor affecting student achievement (Laine, Behrstock-Sherratt, & Lasagna, 2011). Of course, teachers do not exist in a vacuum, but instead in a system of components and individuals that make up their workspace—leaders, students, parents, buildings, material resources, infrastructure, and environmental and neighborhood characteristics. In fact, a central epistemological belief that underlies this dissertation is that contextual variables matter when we talk about teacher-level outcomes. This assumption is in line with what Linda Darling-Hammond (2013) describes as systemic thinking about teacher quality. In a way, looking for explanations without accounting for larger social, political, and economic factors that surround American teachers limit the scope of possible explanations. Therefore, the investigation of key outcomes will be conducted with an understanding that individual teachers are only one of the levels in a complex and interdependent system.
Purpose of Study
The purpose of this study is to add to explanations of the problems of beginning teacher retention and attrition by taking advantage of newly available longitudinal individual-level data and merging it with information about the environments (both school and socio-geographic) in which the teachers work. Thus, it extends our current understanding by viewing teachers not simply as individual agents of their career outcomes, but considers them to be deeply embedded in the socio-cultural reality of American education, which shapes their resilience, and in turn, their professional decisions.
Schools and classrooms have never been isolated microclimates, and they contain in themselves the same problems and tensions that exist in society at large, such as poverty, inequality, and racism. By placing individual teachers at the center, and accounting for the way in which they experience their working environments and the characteristics of their surrounding communities, this study aims to arrive at a more comprehensive picture of the correlates of teacher career outcomes.
As it focuses on the first five years in teachers’ professional lives, the study also specifically sheds light on contemporary trends in teachers’ qualifications, placement, and perceptions of themselves as beginning professionals. Additionally, the focus on these early years enriches our understanding of the critical phase of the teachers’ career cycle that some have called “the apprentice teacher” stage (Steffy, Wolfe, Pasch, & Enz, 2000) or the “induction” and “competency building” stages (Fessler & Christensen, 1992; Lynn, 2002). These formative years are so critical that many of the policy efforts to strengthen the teacher labor force concentrate on them. This study aims to guide educational leaders toward the most significant factors that determine the teachers’ career outcomes at this stage.
Research Questions
This dissertation study examines the variation of teacher experiences in the first three years of their careers and the associated professional outcomes. It focuses on individual-level variation and its correlates, but also places an important emphasis on schools and the novice teachers in them as parts of larger communities that often suffer from widespread and pervasive social and economic inequity and adversity. In order to better understand the career outcomes of beginning teachers across a variety of school and neighborhood settings, this research poses the following questions:
Conceptual Framework
The conceptual framework for this study rests on an understanding that the teachers’ beginning years are a critical time point in their professional lives—a time of identity-formation that affects the rest of their careers. It draws from prior work in the field of identity by Flores and Day (2006), who conceptualize teacher identity “as an ongoing and dynamic process which entails the making sense and (re)interpretation of one’s own values and experiences” (p. 220). In their study, Flores and Day (2006) pose that teachers’ identity in their first two years of teaching gets continually shaped and reshaped under the influence of personal, professional, and contextual factors (p. 221). They categorize three main kinds of factors: (1) prior influences such as the teacher’s experiences as former students, (2) initial training and practice, and (3) teaching context such as the culture of their school and the effects of leadership (Flores & Day, 2006, p. 223). The appeal of this framework is that it acknowledges the multiple sources of influence that teachers are subjected to when they first begin working in the field. It allows for individual-level factors and background characteristics to be important, but it also emphasizes the importance of context.
It is similar, to a degree, to the ecological model proposed by Bronfenbrenner (1979). According to the model, people—much like all other living organisms—live in a constant state of interaction with their environment. The interactions occur at four levels surrounding the person, each successive one being more comprehensive: the microsystem, the mesosystem, the exosystem, and the macrosystem. One example that illustrates the use of these concepts in educational research comes from Tissington (2008), who applied the Bronfenbrenner model to the study of new teachers who have gone through alternative certification programs and are transitioning to the classroom. She conceptualized the four levels as follows: (1) the microsystem are activities and practices in the candidate’s classroom, (2) the mesosystem is the professional collaboration with peers and other colleagues at the school site or in learning communities that the candidate belongs to, (3) the exosystem is the organizational structural and policies, and (4) the macrosystem is not a specific context, but rather the larger cultural value and laws that affect the candidate (Tissington, 2008, pp. 107–109).
The socio-ecological model has been applied in many other social scientific investigations; some, while seemingly unrelated, tackled similar phenomena of individual actions and outcomes as the ones of interest in this study. For example, one recent study from the field of behavioral nutrition used it as a framework in an empirical study of the predictors of dropping out of organized sports in early adolescence (Vella, Cliff, & Okely, 2014), and found that the theory allows for nuanced explanations that take into account individual, family, and community characteristics.
The present dissertation draws partially from this theory to posit that beginning teachers are at the center of a complicated, multi-layered system of relationships and interactions. Their students, peers, administrators, and the overall “ecosystem” around them, including factors within and beyond the school walls, affect them, their perceptions, experiences, and choices.
The theoretical framework underlying this study, however, moves beyond the work of Bronfenbrenner by incorporating insight from the field of psychology, particularly work on resilience (or resiliency) of teachers in their professional life. The concept has been studied by scholars of human development and behavior for over half a century; Prince-Embury (2008) offers for a good overview of the evolution of thinking and research on the subject. In educational studies, resilience has often been explored as an attribute of students, which is often done in the context of those who are considered “at risk” of adverse educational and life outcomes; a classic study by Garmezy, Masten, and Tellegen (1984) used the term “stress resistance” to denote this attribute of students.
However, newer work has re-conceptualized resilience as ordinary and developmentally normative even outside the context of adversity (Masten, 2001). It has also been applied as a framework for understanding the behavior of professional adults and has been widened to include more factors than immutable personal characteristics. Day and Gu (2014) have systematized work in this vein and have proposed that teacher resilience is a “relative, multidimensional and developmental construct” that is dynamic and exists within a “social system of interrelationships”:
Thus, we may all be born with a biological or early life experience basis for resilient capacity, “by which are able to develop social competence, problem-solving skills, a critical consciousness, autonomy, and a sense of purpose” (Benard, 1995:1) However, the capacity to be resilient in different negative circumstances, whether or not these are connected to personal or professional factors, can be enhanced or inhibited by the nature of the settings in which we work, the people with whom we work and the strength of our beliefs and aspirations (Benard, 1991; Luthar, 1996; Henderson and Milstein, 2003; Oswald et al., 2003, Day et al., 2006). (Day & Gu, 2014, p.7)
Day and Gu (2014) use this multi-dimensional, socially constructed concept of resilience to discuss its relevance to teacher development, retention, overall commitment, and effectiveness, as well as factors in the workplace that promote it. They conclude that “during their professional lives teachers’ capacity to be resilient may fluctuate, depending on their cognitive and emotional management of the effects of different combinations of policy, socio-cultural, workplace-based, and personal challenges” (Day & Gu, 2014, p. 141). Such variations in resilience are closely tied to teachers’ sense of identity, commitment, and moral purpose as well, and they help us understand and explain variations in career trajectories. Using this framework of resilience as a relational concept, scholars and leaders are encouraged to consider complex, interwoven factors on the individual, school, and social levels that foster resilience, which in turn increases efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and retention.
While Day and Gu (2014) acknowledge the important role of social factors, they do not focus on them in detail; therefore, completing the framework for my study relies on other scholarly work. In a seminal 1995 article, two Urban Institute scholars, George Galster and Sean Kilen, introduced the concept of geography of opportunity: a conceptual framework that stipulates that there are objective spatial variations in the social structures, markets, and institutions available to individuals in different parts of the metropolis (p. 7). If we situate the problem of high teacher turnover in the highest-poverty schools in cities, we can talk about good teachers being a part of the institutional makeup of neighborhoods. Their availability, or lack thereof, directly affects the educational opportunities for individual students.
Such a view is consistent with that presented in the classic work on neighborhood effects by Jencks and Mayer (1990), who write about the institutional models of neighborhood effects as one of the theorized mechanisms through which neighborhoods affect students:
Institutional models also focus on the way adults affect children, but they focus primarily on adults from outside the community who work in the schools, the police force, and other neighborhood institutions. Almost everyone assumes, for example, that elementary schools in affluent neighborhoods get better teachers than those in poor neighborhoods and this affects how much students learn. (Jencks & Mayer, 1990, p. 115)
Significance of Study
This dissertation adds to the extant literature by contributing to our knowledge of two things: (1) the effects of individual-level factors and perceptions on teachers’ career trajectories, and (2) the relevance of key socio-economic characteristics of their schools and communities. It does so from a framework of teacher identity and resilience formation as a result of personal, organizational, and larger socio-geographic factors. It extends our understanding in several important ways.
First, it uses a more detailed and longitudinal measure that tracks the first five years in the profession of a sizable sample of teachers’ career trajectories. Existing studies most frequently include either a large number of teachers from diverse backgrounds, but an analytic period of only one to three years (Luekens, Lyter, & Fox, 2004; Ingersoll, Merril, & May, 2014), or offer longer temporal views on the problem by focusing on a smaller, specific subcategory of teachers, such as urban science teachers tracked for seven years (Rinke, 2014). Smaller scale qualitative studies that have been rich in their in-depth insight have also been quite limited in the number of teachers that they follow and the length of time that they span. Rinke (2011), for example, studied a sample of eight teachers over ten months, spanning two school years. Such studies have established some fundamental findings about the factors that are associated with the professional choices and outcomes of teachers. The data and methodology used in this dissertation will allow me to test how previous findings hold up when using recent longitudinal data.
Secondly, it combines the detailed individual-level data with school characteristics and even more importantly, situates individuals within a geographic community. Studies have documented the uneven distribution of teaching talent across school and community settings, but only a few have actually dug deeper into the effects of location on the phenomena of teacher turnover, attrition, and retention. This dissertation advances a claim that socio-geographic context matters and puts it to the test. The study makes use of measures of concentrated poverty and racial segregation statistics from beyond the confines of the school environment, and connects them to the characteristics, perceptions, and career outcomes of teachers. Using information about the schools’ locations and linking it to individual teachers’ backgrounds, opinions, and decisions about their work is an innovative way to explore the connection between poverty, racially-based inequity, and school staffing.
CHAPTER 2
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
This chapter presents the conceptual framework first and elaborates on its major components. Next, a review of what the scholarly community currently knows about the determinants and correlates of teacher career outcomes is presented, which helps demonstrate how the contributions that this study aims to make are situated within the field.
The Effects of Individual-Level Factors
First, this dissertation extends the line of work of scholars who have posed questions about teachers’ career trajectories and have explored individual factors associated with choices to leave or stay in the profession. Borman and Dowling (2008) provide an extensive meta-analytic review of the literature on teacher attrition that includes 34 quantitative studies of 63 variables (or moderators) related to attrition; some of them are personal, such as gender, race, and subject taught, and some are structural and related to the characteristics of schools and students, such as concentrations of economically-disadvantaged, or special needs students, or high staff turnover.
Among the individual-level demographic and preparation variables that Borman and Dowling (2008) identify as often significant in predicting outcomes in teacher retention and attrition are the following: gender, race, age, marital status, whether or not the individual has a child (and the number of children he or she has), teacher training, experience, teacher ability or performance, teacher specialty area, and others. The authors conclude, however, that while many of the studies do use large national datasets, they are quite limited in the fact that they capture only two time points and measure career trajectories from one year to the next; they argue that we need “truly longitudinal data” (Borman & Dowling, 2008, p. 399).
Simon and Johnson (2013) also offer a useful summary of what they call early explanations for teacher turnover that focus on the characteristics of teachers, such as age, gender, teaching experience, race/ethnicity, and the characteristics of their students as driving factors. Numerous studies they cite found that teachers with stronger academic background, better accreditations and certifications, and specialized subjects tend to prefer Whiter, wealthier schools (if they don’t quit teaching), whereas the most novice teachers with less preparation are the ones least likely to leave the high-poverty, high-minority schools. One exception to this tendency seems to be the case of Black and Latino teachers, who are more likely to stay in high-minority schools and have motivation to teach in student populations of their own racial and ethnic background (Simon & Johnson, 2013, p. 9). The evidence for this, however, is mixed and as Whipp and Geronime (2015) note, some studies show that minority teachers have higher rates of turnover (p. 4). Additionally, in their review of the literature, Whipp and Geronime (2015) conclude that a general finding across studies seems to be that young, unmarried female teachers with no dependents have a particularly high rate of turnover in urban schools (p. 4).
As Ingersoll, Merrill, and May (2014) point out in the literature review for their research report on effects of teacher education and preparation on beginning teacher attrition, “empirical assessment of teachers’ qualifications is a well-worn path” (p. 3). Factors such as the level and type of education of teacher, their performance on certifying and licensing exams, and their possession of credentials signifying professional expertise in content knowledge or pedagogy have been linked to student achievement and have shown mixed results. Unsurprisingly, scholars have also investigated the effects of these factors on teacher retention and attrition.
Burnout and Career Outcomes
The concept of teacher burnout was first introduced by Freudenberger (1974) to describe the “wearing out” of those in the human service and care—or helping—professions. It was brought to educational studies in the late 1970s by McGuire (1979), who speculated that teachers also suffered from high degrees of emotional and mental exhaustion related to the challenging demands of the job. In a classical book on the subject, Dworkin (1986) used extensive survey data from the Houston Independent School Districts between 1977 and 1982. He offers the following conceptualization:
My assumption is that stresses associated with the teaching role reduce enthusiasm and heighten the desire to quit. The desire to quit in turn heightens the likelihood that the teacher will quit. Teacher burnout becomes the conceptual mechanism which translates work experiences into behavioral intentions and actual behavior. In addition, burnout becomes the social-psychological element linking job experience with job commitment, given that the desire to quit and actual quitting behavior represent dimensions of occupational commitment. (Dworkin, 1986, p. 21)
Dworkin also draws parallels between the concepts of burnout and alienation, speculating that the latter is a specific form of the former. After an extensive empirical investigation, he concluded that a set of factors increased the likelihood that a teacher would suffer from burnout: being a newer teacher, having a more external locus of control, being more racially isolated from the student composition of the school, having greater disparity between the principal’s role as seen by the teacher and by the principal, and reporting experiences of racial discrimination (Dworkin, 1986, p. 155). Conversely, some factors decreased the risk of burnout, namely being a Black teacher in the Houston Independent School District, having tenure, reporting supportive norms of interracial relations at the school, and having greater support for assigning teachers to schools based on their race (Dworkin, 1986, p. 153). However, burnout in and of itself, was not particularly strongly associated with what Dworkin (1986) called “quitting behavior”; in fact, he found that “individual variables which indicated greater career alternatives were the strongest predictors of quitting behavior” (p. 154).
In the decades following Dworkin’s extensive study, the concept of burnout as a determinant of teachers’ career trajectories has been continuously re-investigated and some scholars have reached quite the opposite conclusions. Currently in educational studies, teacher burnout is often understood by contemporary scholars to consist of three related, but distinct components—emotional exhaustion, depersonalizing behavior, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment—and is often measured by the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), which has a specific educator version (Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1996).
In a mixed-methods study of 84 recent teaching program graduates from an American university, Hong (2010) conceptualized teacher professional identity as having six dimensions: values, commitment, self-efficacy, emotions, knowledge and beliefs, and micropolitics (p. 1531). Weakening any of these factors negatively impacted the retention of teachers in the workforce, but burnout (measured by a scale of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization) was the key cause that explained dropping out of the profession.
The Effects of School and Student Characteristics
The other big set of factors that has a substantial influence on teacher turnover is at the school level. Factors such as the size and type of school, the numbers of students and teachers and their socio-demographic characteristics, and the poverty levels among students have all been shown by research to be related to retention and attrition.
For example, Jackson (2009) shows that as the percentage of Black students in schools increases (in his sample from a North Carolina school district), the percentages of experienced teachers, teachers with higher scores on licensing exams, and high “teacher value added” effects on student achievement decreases. Whipp and Geronime (2015) show that the general consensus is as follows:
Collectively, these studies show that teachers tend to continue teaching in schools and school districts with higher numbers of White students who perform well on standardized tests (Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2002; Sass et al., 2012); where they perceive that they have access to adequate resources (Ingersoll, 2004; Loeb, Darling-Hammond, & Luczak, 2005); where they sense that they have support from administrators and colleagues (Allensworth, Ponisciak, & Mazzeo, 2009; Boyd et al., 2011; Ingersoll, 2004; Ladd, 2011; Loeb et al., 2005); where they have access to mentors and professional networks (DeAngelis, Wall, & Che, 2013); and where their students are showing gains in achievement (Boyd et al., 2012). (Whipp & Geronime, 2015, pp. 2–3)
As this summary shows, student demographic characteristics and organizational-level factors often get grouped together in the same category of “school-level effects.” There is a lot of debate, however, on which factors are most influential and what the relative sizes of their effects are. As Simon and Johnson (2013) explain, the mechanisms through which these influences manifest in teacher turnover are also a point of contention. Jackson (2009), writing about variations in teacher quality, explains:
On the basis of previous studies, one cannot say whether the observed differences are caused by (a) school attributes that are correlated with student characteristics, (b) neighborhood attributes that are correlated with student characteristics, or (c) mobility of teachers toward their residences that happens to move them out of inner-city schools. (Jackson, 2009, p. 214)
The Role of Supportive School Climate
While some scholars focus on the effects socio-demographic composition of the student body, and related problems with academic performance and behavior, others concentrate on organizational theory. Richard Ingersoll at the University of Pennsylvania is perhaps the most well-known scholar that has worked in the organizational theory of teacher turnover vein of research and has authored multiple studies within this framework. Ingersoll and May (2012) write that the processes of retention, attrition, and turnover can be well-explained if scholars adopt an organizational-level perspective that moves beyond demographic characteristics on the teachers’ and the students’ levels, and look at the impact of schools as organizations. Ingersoll (2001) posits: “Schools are not simply victims of large-scale, inexorable demographic trends, and there is a significant role for the management of schools in both the genesis and solution of school staffing problems” (p. 525). From a similar vantage point, Susan Moore Johnson connects teachers’ career outcomes to the working conditions at the schools with evidence from interviews with 115 teachers in her 1990 book, Teachers at Work: Achieving Success in Our Schools.
Some scholars argue that while schools serving low-income, non-White students tend to have higher rates of turnover and attrition, it is not student demographics that drives this. Johnson, Kraft, and Papay (2012) examine information from statewide teacher surveys, and data on student demographic and achievement data in Massachusetts to conclude that “measures of the school environment explain away much of the apparent relationship between teacher satisfaction and student demographic characteristics” (p. 2). The authors interpret this to mean that high turnover rates at struggling schools do not mean that the departing teachers reject their students, but rather the “dysfunctional contexts in which they work” (Johnson et al., 2012, p. 4). In earlier work, Johnson, Kardos, Kauffman, Liu, and Donaldson (2004) coined the term the “support gap” as a counter to the “achievement gap”; they argue that “new teachers in low-income schools receive significantly less assistance in the key areas of hiring, mentoring, and curriculum than their counterparts working in schools with high-income students” (p. 2).
Just like neighborhood residents and students, teachers form perceptions about their school environments, which likely affect their career choices (Weiss, 1999). Factors such as their perception of student apathy and unpreparedness, family poverty, and lack of parental support can increase the levels of stress and alienation that a teacher experiences in their everyday environment at school. Conversely, when those problems are minimized, schools might be seen as more stable, predictable, and engaging environments for teachers to work in. In addition, if teachers feel that they have structural support from the school or district, this can be instrumental to their professionalization and development, as well as their social and emotional well-being.
Hopson and Lee (2011) borrow on ecological theory and stipulate that school climate can significantly affect learning and behavioral outcomes: “A positive school climate is not only a protective factor, but also provides a broader context in which vulnerable students can develop the social supports that are the foundation for resilience” (p. 2223). Most important for a positive school climate, they argue, are the relationships among participants: students, teachers, and administrators.
Support can take the form of providing a structured induction program, a reduced teaching schedule, common planning time with other teachers, seminars or classes for beginning teachers, classroom assistance, regular communication, and working with a coach or a mentor (Ingersoll & Smith, 2004). Such factors have been shown to have a positive effect on the well-being and success of teachers, as well as their attitudes and perceptions. However, the empirical evidence about the direct effectiveness of mentoring programs, broadly defined, is inconclusive, partially perhaps due to the non-linear relationship between induction and mentoring processes and retention (Waterman & He, 2011).
Researchers have provided empirical support for many of these speculations. Kolbe (2014), for example, conducted a study of 353 K–12 teachers with two to four years of experience that completed a survey with 47 items aimed at uncovering the relationship between teachers’ career decisions and motivation, and their perceptions of various dimensions of their experience. His findings show that teachers’ intent to move schools, districts, or to exit the profession are related to their perceptions of workload, workplace stability, school leadership, professional support, and school climate.
The Effects of Professional Autonomy and Control over Teaching
Having an institution with supportive climate entails granting a significant degree of professional autonomy to individuals within it. Although teachers seek and desire help and recognition from their peers, leaders, and professional communities, they also shy away from regimentation and value the freedom to implement personal solutions to problems (Crocco & Costigan, 2007). According to Skaalvik and Skaalvik (2014), school context and climate are strong predictors of job satisfaction, because the extent to which teachers experience individual professional discretion and autonomy (which are critical to well-being and motivation) is decided at the school level. As Crocco and Costigan (2007) write in their review of the literature, this positive relationship between autonomy and job satisfaction is well-documented by social psychologists and is valid for most well-educated professionals (p. 522).
A study of mathematics and science teachers’ mobility patterns by Ingersoll and May (2012) found that in a sample of teachers from the 2003–2004 School and Staffing Survey and the 2004–2005 Teacher Follow-Up Survey, the strongest predicting factor for differences in turnover patters for mathematics teachers was the degree of classroom autonomy experienced by individual teachers. The effects were even more evident when considering the level of autonomy experiences by teachers across classrooms: “A one unit difference in reported teacher autonomy between schools (on a four-unit scale) was associated with a 37% difference in the odds of a teacher departing. This school-level association was much larger than the individual association of autonomy, suggesting a very large contextual relationship” (Ingersoll & May, 2012, p. 453). In fact, the 70% decrease in the odds of a teacher departing that was associated with one-unit increase of school-wide autonomy was “by far the single largest relationship” (Ingersoll & May, 2012, p. 453).
The authors, who also analyzed similar earlier data, note that autonomy appeared to emerge in relevance around the mid-2000s. Autonomy was also more important for mathematics teachers than for science teachers. One possible explanation that the authors provide for was the increase in standardized testing requirements that affected mathematics teachers (whose subject was more frequently tested as of 2014) more than science teachers. This could have increased the desire for mathematics teachers to be allowed more freedom than that present in “high-stakes” testing environments, in which teaching frequently follows a rigid schedule tied to tests.
Crocco and Costigan (2007) also reach this conclusion about the effects of the No Child Left Behind mandates on curriculum, instruction, and testing in their qualitative investigation of new teachers in urban schools in New York City. They studied the phenomenon of “narrowing the curriculum” and discovered that it has a negative effect on teachers’ creativity, autonomy, and relationship with students, and thus indirectly increased attrition. A common theme in the interviews of beginning teachers was “the ‘shrinking space’ for their classroom decision-making” (Crocco & Costigan, 2007, p. 521), which resulted in feelings of being de-professionalized and deprived of the chance to build meaningful relationships with their students though individualized teaching practice. The effects of this on teacher retention were moderated by the teachers’ preparation and route into teaching, grade level, and school leadership. Traditionally-prepared teachers seem to be able to counter the negative impacts and remain in teaching. However, teachers who held alternative certification, taught at middle schools, and faced pressure from principals and school leaders to follow a scripted curriculum were more likely to leave urban schools or the profession altogether (Crocco & Costigan, 2007, p. 527).
Relating Teachers’ Characteristics and Career Outcomes to Socio-Geographic Patterns
Poverty and racial isolation have been shown to seriously affect all aspects of life, including student learning, and individual and family resilience (Hopson & Lee, 2001; Okech et al., 2012). This phenomenon undoubtedly translates into additional workplace pressures for teachers in environments of poverty (Darling-Hammond, 2000). Borman and Dowling (2008) write, “the research evidence has continued to suggest that poor and minority students have less access to qualified teachers than do more affluent and nonminority children (Borman & Kimball, 2005; Ferguson, 1998; Kain & Singleton, 1996)” (p. 398). A recent report published by Educational Testing Service (ETS) opens as follows: “As citizens, we should concern ourselves with the question of whether the current levels of poverty and inequality really matter. The answer is they matter a great deal” (The ETS Center for Research on Human Capital and Education, 2013, p. 2).
Scholars in the field of urban education have long believed in the importance of context and there is some intriguing new work that pushes the frontier of our understanding of the effects of socio-geographic context on educational outcomes. As Lipman (2013) writes:
Space is not simply a container, but a social process whose meaning is constituted by those who live and work there. It is both “the ‘perceived space’ of material spatial practices and the ‘conceived space’ of symbolic representations and epistemologies” (Soja, 1999, p. 74). (Lipman, 2013, p. 94)
One article that tackles such questions is “The Geography of Exclusion: Race, Segregation, and Concentrated Poverty” by Lichter, Parisi, and Taquino (2012). They acknowledge that in recent years, there has been a surge of interest toward understanding the changes inside metropolitan cities and focus on the distribution of poverty “between rather than within places and municipalities, while emphasizing an emerging pattern of heightened place stratification among America’s hierarchy of big cities, suburban places, and small towns” (Lichter et al., 2012, p. 365). According to Lichter, Parisi, and Taquino (2012), the level of geography that matter most is places and communities, because that is where local political and economic decisions are made, and places create both opportunities and barriers that define “the spatial separation of winners and losers” (p. 368).
Lichter, Parisi, and Taquino (2012) demonstrate that there has been a 31% increase in the number of poor places during the post-2000 period. Not only did pockets of poverty grow in number, but they also fell along new patterns of isolation and led to increased segregation of the poor from the non-poor, associated with crippling outcomes: “Poor people living in poor places are doubly disadvantaged: they are both poor and exposed disproportionately to declining employment opportunities, low-wage jobs, poor schools, and inadequate public services (including transportation)” (Lichter et al., 2012, p. 384).
This conceptualization and operationalization pushes us to consider that many crucial educational processes and outcomes also occur on this level, but are overlooked because of a focus on either larger or smaller units of analysis—for example, counties and states, or schools and classrooms. If places are “the new battleground of inclusionary and exclusionary policies that sort poor and nonpoor people” (Lichter et al., 2012, p. 382), would similar patterns of unequal distribution of teachers’ human capital emerge when we map the characteristics of beginning teachers and their outcomes, and the poverty of the places where they teach?
Undoubtedly, educational opportunities for children are highly affected by these trends. In Whither Opportunity: Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances[1]by education researchers and professors, Greg Duncan at UC Irvine and Richard Murnane, the authors compile a variety of evidence-based studies to show that economic gaps have translated into opportunity and attainment gaps for youths and their families. They selected pieces concentrating on the peer effects of having more classmates with behavioral and learning disadvantages, as well as on the effects of teachers leaving poorer neighborhoods at higher rates than elsewhere.
Mapping out poverty and racial segregation is not new, as evidenced by a growing number of projects that make use of the spatial data on poverty and provide striking visualizations. Examples include:
The connections likely are more than superficial and there is prior research, which suggests underlying causality. Small and Newman (2011), for example, provide a thorough review of a mechanism behind the so-called “neighborhood effects.” They can be divided broadly into two categories: socialization mechanisms (focused on how neighborhoods socialize those who grow up or live in them) and instrumental mechanisms (describing how individual agency is affected by neighborhood) (Small & Newman, 2011, p. 32). The authors point out that despite some fruitful “and in some ways most sophisticated” (Small & Newman, 2011, p. 34) methodological work in urban poverty, much more conceptual work remains to be done to test and demonstrate (empirically and philosophically) causality between neighborhood poverty and various outcomes in human lives.
One mechanism behind the emergency of neighborhood effects is provided by the theory of collective neighborhood efficacy. Mennis, Dayanim, and Grunwald (2013) provide a comprehensive review of the theory, as well as an empirical application of it. According to their summary definition, collective efficacy “captures the willingness of neighbors to work together on community issues as well as the degree of social interaction among neighbors and the sense of belonging a resident feels towards his or her community (Sampson et al, 1997)” (Mennis et al., 2013, p. 2176).
As their definition indicates, the theory and concept were popularized through the work of sociologist Robert Sampson and his collaborators in the late 1990s. Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earl (1997) speculated that collective efficacy—the degree of social cohesion of neighbors—was linked to violent crime in the neighborhood. They tested the proposition using survey data gathered in 1995 from 8,782 residents of 343 neighborhoods in Chicago. Using multi-level statistical models to situate the individuals within their communities, they tested for the effects of person-level factors (including race, ethnicity, gender, age, marital and socio-economic status, home ownership, and years in the neighborhood) and neighborhood-level indicators (concentrated disadvantage, immigrant concentration, residential stability, and collective efficacy). On the basis of their results, they concluded that:
Together, three dimensions of neighbor- hood stratification-concentrated disadvantage, immigration concentration, and residential stability-explained 70% of the neighborhood variation in collective efficacy. Collective efficacy in turn mediated a substantial portion of the association of residential stability and disadvantage with multiple measures of violence, which is consistent with a major theme in neighborhood theories of social organization (1-5). (Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earl, 1997, p. 923)
The study drew attention to the importance of collective efficacy, whose statistical significance proved consistence across a variety of models. A subsequent study by Sampson established a connection between social efficacy and inequality for children (Sampson, Morenoff, & Earls, 1999).
Over a decade later, and following a vein of research inspired by Sampson’s work in the late 1990s, Mennis, Dayanim, and Grunwald (2013) tested propositions that social efficacy is associated with several different manifestations of neighborhood diversity (not just ethnic diversity, but also diversity in age and wealth). They found that “neighborhood churning, characterized by high levels of diversity in ethnic and other cultural characteristics, and coupled with residential mobility, plays an important role in neighborhood collective efficacy” (Mennis et al., 2013, p. 2190). This finding provided a deeper understanding of how social efficacy amongst neighbors increases or decreases, and what its implications are for outcomes at both the community and the individual levels.
Thus, collective efficacy emerges from the sociological and geographic literature as yet another potential mechanism that connects people to the spaces they inhabit, and weaves persons and communities in a complex web of relationships. However, despite strong theoretical considerations and plentiful empirical investigation of neighborhood effects on individual outcomes, few studies investigating associations between concepts such as collective efficacy, and outcomes for students and teachers in schools exist. Even less work has been conducted that moves beyond associations and investigates causality.
This is a legitimate gap in educational research that this dissertation does not address. Yet, even without ambitious claims to establish causality between neighborhood effects and outcomes in teachers’ careers, this study still constitutes a contribution to our current understanding of the problem and will be a step toward causal analyses. It attempts to link an individual-level outcome, such as a teacher’s decision on whether to stay at the same school, transfer, or leave the profession to neighborhood characteristics. Specifically, it investigates various manifestations of poverty, and their connection to teacher attrition and retention.
The Poverty Gap
One of the central issues in educational research today is the so-called educational gap—the disparities between educational outcomes that exist in contemporary American society. The differences in achievement can take on many manifestations: it is evident when comparing White children to minorities, girls to boys. One of the most striking contrasts is between students from middle class or affluent families, and those who live in poverty. The poverty gap is already wide on the first day of kindergarten; according to a 2012 report by the Brookings Institution, only 48% of poor children (living in families with income below 100% of poverty) are deemed ready for school at age five, compared to 75% of children from families with moderate or high income (starting above 185% of poverty) (Isaacs, 2012). Reardon (2012) found that this poverty gap is now twice as big as the racial gap in academic achievement between White and Black students; it is also 30 to 40% larger for children born in 2001 than for those born 25 years earlier. It is pervasive and has lasting effects over the full life span of individuals.
Many factors and complicated causal mechanisms contribute to the existence of the poverty gap in educational achievement. In a 2014 research report, researchers from the Alliance for Excellent Education systematized recent data on the magnitude of the problems caused in education by poverty. According to the report, the teacher turnover rate in high poverty schools is approximately 20% annually, which is roughly 50% more than the rate in more affluent schools. Additionally, the estimated percentage of new teachers leaving the profession within five years can be as high as 40 or 50%, and a disproportionately large number of them hail from high-poverty and high-minority urban or rural schools (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2014, p. 3).
A picture of a vicious cycle emerges out of the extant research. Poor students enter school at a disadvantage, often into schools that lack resources and good quality teachers, widening the gap between them and their more privileged counterparts. Teachers, on the other hand, lack incentives and/or the required preparation to work in high-poverty schools where chronic underperformance and low resources pose a multitude of challenges for them. What is the way to break this chain? I argue that a crucial step is to understand exactly how and why high-poverty schools end up with the problems of high teacher turnover and a shortage of well-qualified teachers, so that better policies can be put in place to prevent them.
Is the importance of this understanding supported by empirical evidence? If so, what factors and mechanisms beyond personal characteristics of teachers and school-level variables might explain this unequal spatial distribution of teachers? In the following section, I examine in greater detail several studies that draw attention to geographic factors contributing to teachers’ career decisions.
Good Teachers in Good Schools in Good Neighborhoods:
A Classic Sociological View
Are there factors beyond the personal and school characteristics that affect teachers’ career decisions and progressions? This question has garnered a lot of attention. Sociologist Howard Becker published one study that explores the phenomenon of teacher attrition in high poverty schools in 1952. He interviewed 60 teachers in Chicago and discovered that there is a certain pattern to how public school teachers begin and develop their careers:
Movement in the system, then, tends to be from the ‘slums’ to the ‘better’ neighborhoods, primarily in terms of the characteristics of the pupils. Since there are few or no requests for transfer to “slum” schools, the need for teachers is filled by the assignment to such schools of teachers beginning careers in the Chicago system. Thus, the new teacher typically begins her career in the least desirable kind of school. (Becker, 1952, p. 472)
Starting in these kinds of schools, teachers then follow one of two most prevalent routes: (1) “an immediate attempt to move to a ‘better’ school in a ‘better’ neighborhood,” which characterized the majority of his 60 interviewees or (2) the path of adjusting to the conditions in the “slum” schools, which 13 teachers described. Fundamentally, both career paths are an attempt at establishing a predictable, stable work environment where the teacher knows the expectations and rules; any disruptions to it such as a changed school composition (he calls this an ecological change) or new leadership (which he calls an administrative event), are likely to result in career moves.
In a sense, Becker’s argument incorporates elements of accounting for both student body characteristics and schools’ organizational structures. However, he also explicitly places the students within neighborhoods and ties changes to the student body composition to larger changes on the neighborhood level. What he calls ecological changes are, in essence, dynamic neighborhood processes:
Ecological invasion of a neighborhood produces changes in the social-class group from which pupils and parents of a given school are recruited. This, in turn, changes the nature and intensity of the teacher’s work problems and upsets the teacher who has been accustomed to working with a higher status group than the one to which she thus falls heir. The total effect is the destruction of what was once a satisfying place in which to work, a position from which no move was intended. […] Ecological and demographic processes may likewise create a change in the age structure of a population which causes a decrease in the number of teachers needed in a particular school and a consequent loss of the position in that school for the person last added to the staff. The effect of neighborhood invasion may be to turn the career in the direction of adjustment to the new group, while the change in local age structure may turn the career back to the earlier phase, in which transfer to a “nicer” school was sought. (Becker, 1952, p. 475)
As a representative of the Chicago school of sociology, Becker brought the importance of the urban environment and urban sociological processes to the attention of educational scholars. For him, however, neighborhoods are important “primarily in terms of the characteristics of the students” (Becker, 1952, p. 472). More recent research provides a more nuanced understanding of neighborhood effects and extends beyond population demographics. The next section provides an overview of current studies about the importance of cultural and physical proximity as neighborhood effects.
The Appeal of Home
The first kind of study looks at distance between the home location of teachers and that of the schools they choose to work in, both literally in terms of miles and figuratively in terms of habitus, broadly defined as the way in which individuals interact with their social surroundings. An example of the latter is a comparative study of student teachers conducted in four institutions in Denmark and the United States (Steensen, 2009). The author uses Bourdieu’s framework and his concepts of habitus and dispositions to investigate, through interviews, the formation of a teaching identity of novice teaching professionals (or, in this case, students about to join the profession). According to Steensen (2009), “One of the main findings of the study is that, irrespective of institutional context, most student teachers want to ‘go home’ to teach in familiar surroundings” (p. 85). The meaning of this finding is not merely geographical; it also refers to a return to familiarity in the “habitual sense,” which serves as a form of social and cultural replication. For example, one of the participants in the study comes from a mixed urban environment, but she herself has a middle-class background and went to private school for her education; she expressed a strong preference for teaching in a private school and considered many of the public schools that she could teach at to be of “inferior quality” (Steensen, 2009, p. 91).
It is not surprising that many teachers then take up their first job in close proximity to their hometowns. Boyd, Lankford, Loeb, and Wyckoff (2005) studied the job locations of teachers in New York during several points in their careers starting at the time when they were first hired, and found that geographically speaking, the labor market for teachers is very small, as the majority of teachers preferred areas with characteristics similar to their hometown. They found that 61% of beginning public school teachers in New York from 1999 to 2002 first taught in schools located within 15 miles of their hometown; 85% did so within 40 miles of their hometowns (Boyd et al., 2005, p. 117).
A finer-grained analysis revealed that this finding is not just a matter of proximity, but it is also a desire for familiar settings. Over 90% of teachers from New York City, for example, first taught there; whereas 60% of those who grew up in the suburbs took up first jobs in a suburban setting (the patterns were similar in other metropolitan areas in the state). With respect to cities specifically, 88% of those who grew up in urban areas also began teaching in cities, but only 60% of urban teachers grew up in cities (Boyd et al., 2005, p. 118). Boyd et al. (2005) summarize: “Although distance may play a role in these results, it is also the case that apart from distance, the culture of schools or communities may play some role in the segmentation of teacher labor markets” (p. 119). Geographic preference, in this case, is far more complicated than distance, as it is also a function of searching for similarity. It is important to note that these effects were not found to vary much based on other personal characteristics of the teachers.
The implications of this finding are that urban schools are a priori disadvantaged given these preferences, since the number of new teachers that come from urban areas is smaller than the number of positions that need to be filled in urban schools (Boyd et al., 2005, p. 127). Thus, urban schools must work hard to overcome the strong “hometown pull” for teachers of other backgrounds and even though they generally cannot offer more competitive salaries or working conditions. Additionally, the authors note, there is a secondary challenge:
If, historically, the graduates of urban high schools have not received adequate education, then the cities face a less-qualified pool of potential teachers even if they are not net importers. Preferences for proximity lead to the perpetuation of inequities in the qualifications of teachers. (Boyd et al., 2005, p. 127)
The finding that teachers prefer similarity, however, is not unique to urban schools. In a study of hiring decisions in rural Appalachian districts in Kentucky over a 20-year time span, Fowels et al. (2014) found that “extrinsic characteristics matter for teacher employment decisions: teachers are most likely to obtain first employment in districts close to and with cultural similarities to the location of their college” and that “the less privileged rural districts employ the new teachers of lowest observed aptitude, implying that the quality of education provided by these districts may differ in systematic ways that reinforce longstanding achievement gaps” (p. 504).
Another study that takes up questions about the distribution of teachers across places was conducted by Reininger (2012). She used a national sample from the National Longitudinal Educational Study and investigated teacher mobility patterns as compared to patterns of other professionals. Strikingly, she found that between the time they were in 10th grade and the year 2000, the median distance moved for teachers was 13 miles, much less than the median of 54 miles for other college graduates (Reininger, 2012, p. 133). This confirms that the New York City finding from the previous study is sustained on a national level; it seems that teachers’ labor markets are much smaller geographically than those for other professions. Reininger (2012) also finds that this “localness” has implications for hard-to-staff schools with high turnover rates: “The local nature of the labor force, the differential rates of graduation and production of teachers, and the lower academic performance of teachers from traditionally hard-to-staff schools are likely to reinforce existing deficits of local teacher labor supply” (p.140).
Importance of Geography
One important takeaway point from the literature on the geography of the teachers’ labor market is that teachers prefer to accept jobs in places that are familiar and similar to what they are used to. But what happens once teachers are at their new schools—how does geography affect that? The single comprehensive study on the topic comes from Boyd, Lankford, Loeb, Ronfeld, and Wyckoff (2010). They used data from the New York City Department of Education Transfer Request System and combined information about teachers, schools, and neighborhoods to investigate the relative importance of neighborhood characteristics on career outcomes. They defined a neighborhood as the 0.8 by 0.8 miles square, of which the school is at the center (as they speculated this is a reasonable walking distance in New York City), and they used aggregated U.S. Census tract data from all Census tracts that fall into it. They included the following neighborhood characteristics in their investigation: median family income, population density, percentage of population who are non-White, percentage of households of married couples with children under eighteen, percentage of vacant housing units, percentage of population living in the same house five years ago, percentage of population aged 25 years with a bachelor’s degree, distance from school to the nearest subway, high violent crime rate, and two different measures of general amenities. After controlling for select school factors such as school level, demographic composition of the student body, and eligibility for free and reduced lunch, the gist of the finding is:
Not surprisingly, neighborhood characteristics are more important to teachers in high-density areas. In lower-density areas, it is likely easier for teachers to travel, and thus the immediate surroundings of the school are less important. In applying to schools, teachers tend to favor neighborhoods with higher median income and less violent crime. In higher-density areas, teachers also favor neighborhoods with greater local amenities, particularly for practical (grocery, hardware drugstores) and leisure (bars, fitness centers, coffee shops, movie theaters) purposes. (Boyd et al., 2010, p. 393)
The authors admit that their study has several limitations. First and foremost is the danger of omitted variable bias: some of the neighborhood characteristics might reflect the importance of school-level factors that have not been measured and included in the analysis. Secondly, including the neighborhood characteristics does not explain away the teachers’ preference for schools with more White, better achieving students, which persists in all the models in the study. However, the important conclusion is that neighborhood effects—to the extent that they do matter—further disadvantage the population of students that is already suffering from shortage of well-qualified teachers.
The selected studies in this review show that geography matters, because teachers and teacher candidates have very strong geographic preferences; the vast majority of them highly prefer to stay close to home both distance-wise and setting-wise. Further, holding all other factors constant, teachers avoid poor, crime-ridden areas when making career decisions. Racial makeup of the community is also relevant. For example, Goyette, Farrie, and Freely (2012) argue that as neighborhood dynamics change to increase the percentage of more Black residents, residents begin to perceive school quality as declining, regardless of whether or not that is factually true. They show how that change affects parents’ choices about their children’s schooling; therefore, it is reasonable to expect that teachers making professional choices are also likely affected by race as a factor, independently of the makeup of the student body at their school.
These findings have important implications for staffing schools. Generally speaking, teachers are both products of their own community, and important agents of social and cultural reproduction. If they themselves lack in preparation, education, and motivation, they are likely to pass such disadvantages to their schools and students. As Boyd, Lankford, Loeb, and Wyckoff (2005) write: “Inadequate education is a cycle that is difficult to break” (p. 127).
The complex challenges that beginning teachers face may affect their experience and career choices as novice professionals, regardless of their school setting. However, they are exacerbated by pervasive poverty and racial discrimination in the schools and communities that teachers join. Poor places are on the rise in America and so are the important implications of that fact.
CHAPTER 3
This chapter presents data sources used in the study. First, it offers a detailed look into the main dataset: the Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study (BTLS) program and the criteria used to define the analytic sample of teachers. Next, the complex sampling procedures used by the developers of the survey are discussed, together with the appropriate techniques applied to take the sampling characteristics into account during the analysis. Special attention is dedicated to explaining the primary dependent variable—career outcome—and all of its categories as they pertain to the research questions at hand.
The next subsection presents the demographic characteristics of teachers in the analytic sample, as well as descriptive statistics of some key perceptions and opinions about their teaching experience. The inclusion criteria are specified and those who are left out from the analysis are discussed briefly as well.
In the second half of the chapter, the methodology for linking teacher and school data to socio-geographic data is discussed, and the characteristics of the communities where the Year 1 schools of teachers are located are discussed. After a review of the distribution of teachers across schools and schools across geographic locations, a rationale for the statistical methodology chosen for the study is presented.
BTLS was sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and executed by the U.S. Census. BTLS is a series of annual surveys designed to follow a cohort of beginning teachers for five years. It started in 2007–2008 as part of the School and Staffing Survey (SASS) program and ended in the 2011–2012 school year. In the baseline year, the SASS study included 1,990 beginning teachers, who were selected and tracked with follow-up surveys for the next five years of their careers as they continued to teach, moved schools, left teaching, or even re-entered the profession.
The dataset used for analysis, thus, consists of five waves of data. The first wave (school year 2007–2008) contains the subsample of beginning teachers from SASS, defined as those “who began teaching in 2007 or 2008 in a traditional public or public charter school that offered any of grades K–12 or comparable ungraded levels” (National Center for Education Statistics, 2015, p. 1). It contains a large number of demographic variables, certifications and preparation to teach, a variety of questions about the teachers’ attitudes toward their job, their perceptions of the working conditions, and their intended plans. The second wave (school year 2008–2009) is the Teacher Follow-Up Survey (TFS), which had two versions: one for those who were still teaching and one for those who had left. The Year 1 Questionnaire is attached as Appendix A, as all the independent variables used from the analysis are defined there.
Waves 3 through 5 (school years 2009–2010, 2010–2011, and 2011–2012, respectively) are separate from the SASS and TFS, and they include further information about teachers leaving, moving, re-entering the profession, as well as about their new careers if they left teaching. The surveys were administered online, and after screening the current status of the respondent through the initial questions, the instrument branched off into different versions for current and former teachers. Additionally, the instruments differed somewhat each year, as questions were revised or added.
According to the BTLS 2011–2012 User Manual, both SASS and BTLS are designed in several ways that violate the assumptions of random sampling “such as stratifying the school sample, oversampling new school teachers, and sampling with differential probabilities” (p. 28). Therefore, the teachers included in the final dataset were not selected independently and/or did not all have the same probability of being included in the sample as other teachers in the nation. To ensure that these complex sample design features do not result in incorrect variance estimations, both the design and the probability of being selected into the sample need to be reflected in the analysis (Natarajan, Lipsitz, Fitzmaurice, & Gonin, 2008). The recommended approach with SASS and BTLS data is replication, which means that multiple sub-samples of cases are drawn from the full sample and the statistic of interest is estimated for each sample using, in this case, a bootstrap variance estimator (Gray, Goldring, & Taie, 2015, p. 29).
Using the bootstrap variance methodology, school replicate weights were calculated for 88 sub-samples of the SASS using the same estimation procedures as the full sample. Each teacher record was then assigned a replicate weight, calculated by multiplying the school’s replicate weight by the teacher’s conditional probability of selection into the SASS sample. For BTLS, which is a subset of the 2007–2008 SASS, weights were taken directly from SASS for the first year (National Center for Education Statistics, 2015, p. 8). For the remaining four waves,
an initial basic weight (the inverse of the sampled teacher’s probability of selection in SASS) is used as the starting point. A weighting adjustment is then applied that reflects the impact of the SASS teacher weighting procedure. Next, a nonresponse adjustment factor is calculated and applied using information that is known about the respondents and nonrespondents from the sampling frame data. Finally, a ratio adjustment factor is calculated and applied to the sample to adjust the sample totals to the First Wave totals (excluding out-of-scopes found in the later waves) in order to reduce sampling variability. The products of these factors are the analysis weights for the second through fifth waves of BTLS. (National Center for Education Statistics, 2015, p. 8)
In addition to these analysis weights, BTLS includes sets of weights calculated for use in longitudinal analysis spanning multiple years. Since BTLS originated from SASS 2007–2008, everyone was a respondent to the first wave, and when estimating change from wave 1 to wave 2, the wave 2 analysis weights are used. However, when estimating change between waves 1 through 3, waves 1 through 4, or waves 1 through 5, appropriate longitudinal analysis weights need to be used. BTLS includes two sets of such weights: one for only those teachers who responded to all the waves in question and one that also includes teachers who were retrospective respondents, i.e., missed a wave of questions, but provided responses to them in the next one (National Center for Education Statistics, 2015, p. 8). Thus, there are 14 sets of weights included with BTLS, listed as follows:
Depending on the research question, the appropriate set of weights should be used for variance estimations to assure accuracy and account for non-response and oversampling of certain subgroups of schools and teachers (National Center for Education Statistics, 2015, p. 8). For the analysis used in this study, all calculations using the weights provided with the dataset were done with the svy commands in STATA SE 14.1 for Mac. Kelly and Northrop (2015) used the same software in their study using the first three waves of BTLS.
Defining the Analytic Sample
For the purposes of this study, the analytic sample was narrowed down from the full set of 1,990 teachers in several ways. Firstly, three of the initial respondents were deceased by the last survey year (two by Year 4 and one additional by Year 5), so their answers were excluded from the analysis as to not skew the results; this left 1,987 respondents. Secondly, only those teachers that held full-time positions during the first survey year became part of the main analysis. Each respondent was asked to select whether he or she was a regular full-time teacher, a regular part-time teacher, an itinerant teacher, a long-term substitute, a short-term substitute, a student teacher, a teacher aide, an administrator, a library media specialist or librarian, other professional staff (e.g., counselor, curriculum coordinator, social worker), or support staff (e.g., secretary). Everyone who chose the first option (regular full-time teacher) was included in the analytic sample; this included 1,763 teachers or 88.7% of the full set of respondents. All others were excluded from the main analytic sample.
The primary reason for this selection criterion was that research has established that the rates of attrition and job migration vary based between regular full-time teachers and those who hold part-time positions (Luekens, Lyter, & Fox, 2004). Given that these are the main outcome variables of interest, we can expect that the reasons and causal mechanisms behind these career decisions likely vary based on the type of teacher employment (regular full-time teacher vs. all other kind of arrangements); similarly, the working conditions and set-up are also likely different between the two groups.
Table 3.1 shows the differences in proportions of leavers (those who leave the teaching profession), stayers (those who have taught at the same school for all five years of the survey), movers (those who have changed schools), returners (those who leave teaching for some time after the first year, but end up returning to the profession within five years), and non-respondents by Year 5 across several different groups of teachers. There were fewer leavers (15.8%) and movers (5.4%) and more stayers (53.9%) in the group of 1,763 regular full-time teachers than amongst the remaining 224 other respondents, 22.8% of who were leavers, 7.6% were movers, and 46.9% were stayers. The highest proportions of leavers and movers were amongst the subsample of 46 teachers who were not holding regular teacher positions, yet still taught full-time in the first year of the survey. Those included 45 long-term substitutes and one itinerant teacher, who answered a question about how much time they spent teaching at the school where they received the survey with the option, “Full-Time.” Almost one-third of them (30.4%) left the teaching profession by Year 5 and about one-fifth (19.6%) moved to different schools. Only one-third (32.6%) reported still teaching during Year 5.
| Table 3.1 |
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