Teachers form the backbone of a school community, and every teacher who leaves makes it that much harder to move forward.
High-profile school improvement initiatives, such as the interventions for schools in the federal No Child Left Behind Act or in the Obama-era School Improvement Grants program actively encouraged replacing teachers and principals in low-performing schools with presumably more effective ones as a means to reinvent struggling schools.
But a new longitudinal study of Texas high schools suggests struggling schools already face high staffing instability, which can erode school culture and hinder reforms.
“A lot of educational reformers today have viewed teacher retention and turnover as more of a human capital problem: We replace ineffective teachers with teachers who are more effective, and that’s going to lead to school improvement,” said Jennifer Holme, a professor of educational policy and planning at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study. “But this perspective really fails to consider the social impacts of turnover on schools.”
For the study, Holme and researchers at the Universities of Texas at Austin and San Antonio, and the University of Southern California, tracked student achievement, staffing turnover, and improvement efforts at four large, high-poverty comprehensive Texas high schools implementing reforms from 2019-23, before and during the pandemic.
They also interviewed teachers and observed meetings and teams during a time of severe staffing instability. On average, individual schools saw anywhere from 13 percent to 61 percent teacher turnover in a given year, but over the length of the study, even relatively lower annual turnover added up for schools. Cumulatively, the schools lost more than 4 in 10 to nearly 9 in 10 of their teachers over the four years.
“We know that some turnover is healthy for organizations, but too much can have a negative impact on student achievement,” said Huriya Jabbar, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of education policy at the University of Southern California. “We think this is one of the hidden ways in which racially and economically segregated and stratified schools can reproduce inequality, and why it can be difficult to engage in deep and meaningful reform in these sites.
"[High turnover] affects the social fabric of organizations. It breaks up social networks, erodes trust, and diminishes institutional knowledge within organizations,” she continued.
Staffing instability doesn’t have to disrupt school improvement. The researchers identified several ways school leaders can get a better handle on the dual challenge.
1. Get a clearer picture of staffing instability.
Yearly turnover rates can undersell the effect of teachers leaving.
In a separate analysis of a decade of Texas school accountability data, Holme and Jabbar found that schools were most likely to see falling student achievement and declining accountability ratings when they had longer-term staffing instability, including spells of high teacher turnover or spikes of turnover higher than those in the rest of the state.
Well-intentioned efforts, meanwhile, can have unexpected consequences.
Darin Brawley, the superintendent of the Compton Unified school district in California for 13 years, recalled that the state’s pandemic-elief aid, intended to stabilize school staffing, instead spurred teacher mobility at three top-performing Los Angeles schools—Anderson, Jefferson, and McKinley elementaries.
“ESSER funds were pumped into schools to spawn a hiring spree, which took a lot of great talent away from the district, and we’ve been paying ever since,” Brawley said in a briefing on the study. “We lost a lot of individuals that were key to the culture of accountability within our school sites, and we witnessed firsthand a results-driven culture that was in place at many of our schools dissipate as a result of that.”
2. Consider teachers as social professionals.
While professional learning communities and teaching teams have gained popularity in schools, administrators often do not consider teachers’ roles in these networks when deciding to move a teacher to a new grade, subject, or campus, Jabbar said.
Brawley also noted that teachers need more ways to progress as professionals that don’t require them to leave their schools.
“We actively promote opportunities for teachers to develop into teacher-leaders and school site specialists with a goal of developing them to lead our schools when turnover occurs via promotions, retirement, or individuals seeking other opportunities,” he said.
King agreed. “We really need to think about making our teachers as much a part of our decision-making process as school leaders,” she said. It’s important to give teachers a voice “when thinking about how can we create teams that are really cohesive, that people want to stay with throughout time.”
3. Develop partnerships to bolster connections for students and families.
School leaders may also underestimate the effect of leaving teachers on students and the larger community. The researchers found individual clubs or activities that were run by a particularly interested teacher might dissolve when that teacher left. And high turnover undercut students’ engagement in school.
Shana King, principal of Rocket Early College High School in the Austin school district in Texas said at the briefing that she’s watched students’ upset expressions when they return for the first day of a new school year to find their prior teachers gone.
“They were expecting to see these people that they built these really strong relationships with again, and with [teachers] not being there anymore, they’ve lost some of their connections, their trust,” King said. “It also permeates to the parents and community. I have definitely seen where it builds this mistrust or it sends the message maybe things aren’t going well ... and can impact people’s perceptions of what’s happening in the building.”
Understanding these school connections can help leaders protect them during periods of staffing instability. It can be helpful to ask teachers in exit interviews about any activities and working groups under their purview, as well as students and families the teacher has worked closely with, and reach out to them quickly.
School leaders also should work to maintain positive relationships with outgoing teachers, King said—particularly those who leave because they retire or have been promoted. “They’re often the ones out there recruiting on our behalf and sharing the positive things that they can about our school,” she said.
4. Don’t add more to remaining teachers’ plates.
The researchers observed monthly improvement meetings among teachers at all of the schools. They found teaching teams became significantly less productive when turnover rose, because of the constant need to bring new teachers up to speed.
As vacancies increased, the teachers that remained steadily took on more responsibilities: covering classes during their planning periods, handling additional paperwork, and training new colleagues. Reforms that required thoughtful planning and collaboration, such as choosing a new curriculum or looking for trends in student achievement data, often got delayed.
“It was a really unrecognized burden upon those teachers,” Holme said. “In really high-turnover teams, these leaders would feel very exhausted and it could really lead to burnout when they were constantly answering questions, helping support [new members] ... and trying to educate long-term substitutes about what’s going on.”
Schools weathered the turnover better, researchers found, when they had processes in place to preserve the institutional memory of teaching teams, such as keeping written meeting notes, lesson plans and practices, and setting aside more time for teacher collaboration.
And sometimes, it’s better to formally delay implementation of school reform initiatives during unstable staffing periods rather than let implementation limp along via overburdened teachers.
“In schools where there is a lot of turnover, it’s best to hold other things constant to the extent possible,” Jabbar said, “not trying out new curriculum or new practices and reforms in schools when there’s so much turmoil in the teaching staff.”
