Love Grow Your Own (but not without the actual growth part)

The Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, recently announced a grow-your-own type of program for teachers. According to this piece:

On Monday, Governor Ralph Northam unveiled what he called a potential new solution to Virginia’s teacher shortage problem. Northam announced a proposed $1 million investment toward attracting STEM teachers from historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).  

It's called UTeach and it gives secondary teaching certificates to students who graduate university with degrees in things like biology or chemistry.

So, I am all for "Grow your Own," state-sponsored, and fully funded alternative teacher credentialing programs, and this one certainly will address three problems at once: low rates of teacher recruitment and retention, low numbers of teachers qualified to teach STEM subjects, and an insufficient number of Black teachers in our public schools. Furthermore, it won't cost the teacher candidates. And, we need more people of African descent in higher-level STEM positions, so having more Black STEM teachers should help with that.

That being said, I really hope the plan is not to just hand off teaching licenses to college graduates without giving them any sort of training/education, student teaching/apprenticeship experiences, mentoring, and support. Because that's a very bad idea. I'm afraid it will just perpetuate the cycle of high teacher turnover. Teachers in Virginia are already leaving the profession in high numbers, and unprepared teachers are even more likely to leave.

Fully funded, alternative programs for aspiring teachers of color are great; trying to to short cut our way to growing the profession and STEM fields in a much-needed direction is not.

Pre-doctoral program warm-up: A look at high school teacher turnover in Hanover County, Virginia

This past summer in conjunction with a local public education advocacy group, Friends of Hanover Schools, that I am a part of, I engaged in a little pre-doctoral program warm-up. 

At a Hanover County School Board forum in the spring, I had expressed concern about high school teacher turnover  and was told more or less that my concerns were unfounded. Other members of the FOHS leadership team had also been long concerned about high school teacher turnover, so after they and I spent some time gathering information from the division, I compiled a report of my findings. Other members of the leadership team gave feedback and provided edits for the final version. I may do something with this later or I may decide it is too J-V :)

Here is a summary with links to the documents I used:


In the 2013-2014 school year, Hanover County Public Schools increased high school teachers’ workload and they went from teaching five of seven classes a day to teaching six of eight. After teachers protested the policy, saying it would affect the quality of instruction and feedback they’d be able to give students, Friends of Hanover Schools began to hear reports of low morale, of higher than average teacher resignations and retirements, and of increasing numbers of teachers seeking positions elsewhere. I took a closer look at the data regarding teacher turnover in Hanover and compiled a report of my findings which was distributed to school division leadership.

According to budget and retirements and resignations data provided by Hanover County Public Schools, the combined turnover rates for all four of the comprehensive high schools are:

School year	Resign	Retire	Total	Total teachers	Percentage turnover
2004-2005	30	6	36	502.191	7.17%
2005-2006	56	5	61	480.73	12.69%
2006-2007	53	7	60	492.491	12.18%
2007-2008	55	14	69	500.491	13.79%
2008-2009	27	4	31	496.391	6.25%
2009-2010	33	10	43	487.191	8.83%
2010-2011	38	11	49	474.191	10.33%
2011-2012	31	7	38	465.991	8.15%
2012-2013	42	11	53	452.991	11.70%
2013-2014*	35	5	40	440.991	9.07%
10 year average	400	80	480	4795.649	10.01%

*The data for 2013-2014 is as of August 6, 2014.

Other than the schedule re-alignment, several factors may have influenced teacher turnover in Hanover County such as the economic recession after 2007-2008, retirement incentives offered in 2007 – 2008, and school-site specific issues such as administrative instability or transition.

According to studies of teacher turnover (compiled by Mary Levy), the national average for teachers who leave a school district system leavers is 8% with higher poverty systems yielding closer to 15 – 20%. Hanover County high school teachers leave, on average, at a consistently higher rate than the national average. Furthermore, for the past two years, the percentage of turnover that can be attributed to high school teachers has grown to 43.5% of all teachers. In all other years, with one exception, the percentage was roughly one-third. Finally, based on an assumption of a teacher corps of 1500 teachers, the system-wide attrition rate was 6.87% for 2012-2013 and thus far 5.05% for 2013-2014, but the four high schools consistently have rates higher than that, closer to 10% on average.

The data available are limited but do paint a picture of close to double-digit turnover rates at the high school level, Furthermore, the numbers spiked in 2012-2013, when a policy change to a six of eight teaching schedule was announced.

FOHS and I urge the school division to undertake a more qualitative study of teacher satisfaction rates by:

• Finding out more about the kind of teachers who are leaving. How much experience do they have? Are they National Board certified? Hanover Scholar Educators? STEM-area teachers? REB-award winners?

• Surveying all teachers such as has been done recently in Richmond Public Schools and ensuring that such surveys and that exit surveys are comprehensive, representative, and truly anonymous.

• Opening up channels for all teachers and staff to give positive feedback and constructive criticism. Healthy schools and school systems are ones that welcome informed feedback of its employees.