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Teacher quality gap persists across District
Experienced, certified teachers are not equally distributed in Philadelphia
by Beandrea Davis
"If you don't have a qualified teacher, you're not going to learn."
Debbie Russell Brown, of the community organizing group Pennsylvania ACORN, made this remark early this fall to a crowd of about twenty ACORN members and supporters standing in front of FitzSimons Middle School – notable for its 70 percent teacher turnover rate last year.
ACORN was there to raise awareness about inequities in how qualified teachers are distributed in the School District of Philadelphia.
The group recently released a study that reported that in one year alone, nearly one-quarter of the teachers had left the 70 mostly high-poverty schools in the neighborhoods where ACORN is active.
Staffing the highest-poverty schools with well-qualified teachers, said ACORN Pennsylvania president Carol Hemingway, is ultimately about the need for additional funds in the fiscally strained District.
"We need more commitment of resources in our community," Hemingway said after an October ACORN-organized public meeting with District CEO Paul Vallas.
Numbers reflect gap
Philadelphia, like many large urban districts across the country, continues to struggle with hiring and retaining qualified teachers in all of its schools, but especially those with the greatest need for them.
A September 2003 report by the nonprofit research group Research for Action (RFA)–which is researching Philadelphia school reform since the state takeover–offered several revealing statistics (see Chart) about the inequitable distribution of qualified and experienced teachers along economic and racial lines:
- "The least qualified teachers are assigned to the highest-poverty schools.... In 2002-03, only 83 percent of the teachers at schools serving 90 percent or more low-income students were certified, compared to 92 percent in schools with less than 80 percent low-income students."
- "At the highest-poverty middle and K-8th grade schools, less than half of the original 1999-00 staff were still teaching in those schools three years later," the RFA study reports. Districtwide, schools had a three-year retention rate of 64 percent.
- "The percentage of certified teachers at a school declines as the percentage of minority students increases. In 2002-03, 96 percent of the teachers were certified at schools with less than 50 percent minority enrollment, compared to 86 percent at schools with at least 90 percent minority students."
RFA researchers also noted that half of new teachers hired in Philadelphia last year were emergency-certified and criticized the widespread hiring of emergency-certified teachers in high-poverty, high-turnover schools.
"Such teachers often have weak academic backgrounds or college majors unrelated to the subject they are assigned to teach," the report stated, pointing out that many emergency-certified teachers teaching in Philadelphia last year had failed the state licensure exam in basic mathematics, reading, or writing.
They observed that some of the highest-poverty schools were taken over by outside managers last fall and experienced elevated rates of teacher turnover.
One acute example of that problem is FitzSimons, the site of the ACORN protest. Managed by Victory Schools, FitzSimons lost more than half its staff for the second consecutive year this past summer.
Staffing instability hinders learning
Chronic teacher turnover in "high-poverty" schools serving mostly students of color -where the most inexperienced teachers are most likely to be placed-is troubling, say RFA researchers, not only because it nets a loss on the District's investment in professional development and training, but also because it creates major barriers to student achievement.
"Teachers take away with them vital information about the students in their classes, knowledge that could have helped students' future teachers determine placement and solve behavior problems," the report states.
Just since September, Alexis Monroe, a seventh grader at Barratt Middle School, has already seen a steady stream of teachers come and go in three of her classes.
"We have no starting point. It seems almost impossible for us to be able to learn all the stuff we need to learn because [of] all the teachers [that] have left. It's really like [there's] no consistency," Monroe said.
At the school level, high turnover also makes it very difficult to establish and run a clear academic program and to enable staff to work together effectively over time.
One explanation for high turnover rates among new teachers, said Kathy Schultz, a University of Pennsylvania professor who helps train new teachers through the university's teacher education program, is that programs at colleges and universities rarely prepare students well enough for urban classrooms.
She noted that while new teachers often need increased support during the first few months of teaching, teacher preparation programs "end before teachers enter the classroom."
Easing new teachers into the challenges of teaching in an urban district like Philadelphia, however, could go a long way toward retaining them, Schultz added.
"Protecting new teachers from huge classes and from classes that have kids who have special needs that are too great for new teachers to handle would make a huge difference," she said.
Districtwide effort necessary
While the ambitious set of new initiatives the District has rolled out to improve teacher quality is an important step in the right direction, RFA researchers say, more still needs to be done, particularly about remedying the staffing inequities in the highest-need schools.
"There [are] going to have to be some more dramatic changes to attract teachers into the schools which a lot of teachers have historically shunned," said Ruth Curran Neild, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania and lead author of the RFA teacher quality report.
Tomás Hanna, the District's top teacher recruitment and retention official, recognized the difficulties that schools, particularly those with the largest numbers of low-income students of color, face in both attracting and retaining qualified teachers.
Negative perceptions of these schools come into play when new teachers are selecting their schools, Hanna said.
"That's why we invite principals to come down to sessions and sell their schools," Hanna explained.
On the retention side, he said one sign the District was doing a better job overall at supporting new teachers this year is that only 60 of the new teachers–about six percent–have left so far, less than half the attrition rate last fall.
Guided by its Campaign for Human Capital-a committee formed to expand the District's teacher recruitment and retention strategies-the District has put several supports in place for the first time this year, including a paid summer training program for new teachers, twice-monthly professional development about how to implement the new standardized K-9 Core Curriculum, and new teacher coaches so that every new teacher will have a mentor.
But Hanna acknowledged some lapses in the support system.
"Where we haven't gotten the supports in place for new teachers, it's a systemic issue we still have to deal with," he said.
Stepped-up recruiting
The District has also boosted its teacher recruitment efforts, which include a nationwide advertising campaign, a new "Teach In Philly" website, listing teacher vacancies online, and open houses for prospective new teachers.
"If we're going to be successful, we've got to recruit year-round," District CEO Paul Vallas commented, noting that the District wants to reduce class size in the upper elementary and middle grades next year, which would require hiring an estimated 1,000 more teachers.
But even with successful recruitment, School Reform Commission member Sandra Dungee Glenn, who co-chairs the Campaign for Human Capital, said ensuring that every school in the District has a stable, high quality teaching staff really means asking, "How do you build a climate in a school that makes teachers want to stay?"
She added, "If you can build those kinds of climates in all of our schools, then you're better able to hold on to the staff."