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Principals' impact on teacher retention.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

The No Child Left Behind legislation of 2002 reshaped teacher recruitment by requiring the nation's schools have highly qualified teachers in every classroom. Principals play a pivotal role in the attainment of this objective. They exert a powerful influence on the recruitment, retention, and professional development of new teachers. This article examines strategies that principals can employ to influence teacher retention.

Introduction

This article reports on a qualitative study that describes my experiences as a mentor principal to eight newly appointed school administrators. I collected quantitative data over a five-year period on student demographics, achievement, teacher stability, and qualitative data derived from an informal survey on school climate administered to school staffs. I also conducted interviews with all principals and a sample of teachers at each school. My job was to visit these eight schools and help principals improve their leadership skills in everything from professional development to budget to establishing collaborative learning environments.

The schools were located in generally the same New York City community. The schools shared many of the same characteristics including: new leadership, students of similar socio-economic background, same average class size, same curriculum, same budget, same level of parent involvement. I classified the schools I visited into two categories: achieving schools and struggling schools. For purposes of this review, the achieving schools are defined as those with meaningful channels of involvement for staff in the decision process, effective induction practices, little teacher turnover, and a record of consistent student achievement. Struggling schools are defined as those with few opportunities for staff involvement in school decision-making, a paucity of sound induction practices, heavy teacher turnover exceeding 25% over a two-year period, and a pattern of poor student achievement. Of the eight schools that I serviced, five were classified as struggling schools using the above criteria. Three were classified as achieving schools. Although the schools existed within the same New York City community, the results were markedly different between the achieving schools and the struggling schools. A higher degree of teacher stability and a more consistent pattern of student achievement characterized the achieving schools more so than the struggling schools. In this study, I examined four particular strategies (support for teachers, induction practices, collaboration, and principal leadership) and the impact of these variables on teacher retention.

Teacher Support

Principals of the achieving schools with whom I worked knew that the best leadership model was an approach that emphasized working cooperatively with staff as a professional team. One principal offered the insight, "Individuals play the game but only teams win championships." Decision-making was a joint effort, and supervision of staff emphasized support...

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