NEA: 50% Of New Teachers Will Leave in Under Five Years: Why?

Being a teacher for 36 years I can testify that society, kids and parents have dramatically changed and in large part, not for the good (especially over the last five years). For the most part, the teaching profession has a very small number of ineffective teachers just as you would expect any profession to be able to state. Most teachers work hard, long hours. I live in a small rural community away from urban influences. Yet, it is not uncommon for a small six year old to look up into the face of an adult and say, “F*** Y***”! Our students walk into the building hungry and with no school supplies. They have no one at home most of the evening to support them in their studies. A growing number are totally neglected by parents more interested in getting high on Meth or other drug of choice. What teacher can repair these damages? This is about more than teachers. Teachers are receiving kids unlike ones they have seen in two or three decades. They walk into the classroom broken and with an assortment of poverties. I would like to invite Supt. Tony Bennett, or Sec Arne Duncan to come in my classroom and to show me the way. I’m weary of my colleagues and profession being berated by all the pundits and talking heads that pretend to know the answers. Tony Bennett, Indiana’s Supt. Of Ed’s own school that he directed before he became State Leader could not make AYP under his direction.  Bennett said he was disappointed with the results and would be having “hard discussions” about how to improve if he were still superintendent there. Arne Duncan, The US Sec of Education left his post at the Chicago schools and left them with a $1,000,000,000 deficit! These are the men that have the answers for my classroom? They are guiding me in my instructional techniques. Interesting? If both of these men failed at their previous posts it begs the question, “How did they get promoted up the education ladder”? Who should take the fall for that blunder?

The statistics for teacher turnover among new teachers are startling. Some 20 percent of all new hires leave the classroom within three years. In urban districts, the numbers are worse. Close to 50 percent of newcomers leave the profession during their first five years of teaching. See The High Cost of Teacher Turnover (National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 2007)

NCLB and Pres. Obama’s Race to the Top are directly responsible for driving teachers out of the profession. We would like to know where they will find hundreds of thousands of new teachers WILLING to undergo the scrutiny and abuse in the classrooms? Teachers can not heal a sick society where ethics and morals have nearly disappeared. If you bring in an army of new teachers they will face the same challanges and will produce no change.

In addition to recruiting new teachers, schools will also need to look at the retention of teachers already in the workforce and understand the reasons teachers leave. Some sources estimate that 50 percent of the teachers currently in our classrooms will leave the profession over the next five years. Turnover (National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 2007)

The problem of a dwindling teacher population will be compounded by the growing student population as well as the movement toward progressively smaller class sizes.

Filling the ranks of teachers also will be extemely difficult if not impossible, require recruiting teachers for difficult-to-fill schools, particularly in urban and rural areas. Finding teachers for selected subject areas and for certain geographic regions. And encouraging more minorities to become teachers, as insufficient numbers of them are currently entering the profession.

With 40 percent minority students and 5 percent minority teachers predicted for 2010, a critical shortage of educators and role models who reflect their race and ethnicity may be at hand. This shortage could lead to a failure of all American students to acquire the academic, personal, and social skills they need in a multicultural society.

NEA believes that strong programs of teacher recruitment are necessary to maintain and enhance the teaching profession. These programs should emphasize the recruitment of underrepresented candidates and should include a policy of affirmative recruitment (NEA Handbook, 2008, Resolution D-2).