Recently, I published a paper with a former graduate student in the Journal of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies on the topic of teacher retention. Teacher retention, teacher shortages, and teacher turnover have dominated education policy discussions in recent years. Fears surrounding teacher staffing were a primary driver of the salary increases and other provisions in Missouri’s recent, sweeping education bill (Senate Bill 727). While most discussions on the topic focus on out-of-school factors, such as pay, our paper focused on in-school factors. We were interested in exploring what school leaders themselves can do to improve teacher retention.
This is not to say that salary, benefits, and other factors are not important in keeping people in a job. Rather, we simply recognized that work conditions also matter. Generally, people are much more willing to stay at a job when they feel supported, they like their work, and they see opportunities for growth. The same is true in education.
In prior research, we identified five in-school factors that influence teacher retention: positive school culture, supportive administration, strong professional development, mentoring programs, and classroom autonomy. Through interviews with school principals, we explored how school leaders can leverage these five factors to improve teacher retention.
While our paper does not delve into the broader policy debates regarding the teacher labor force, it does raise an important idea that policymakers must keep in mind—government action is often limited in what it can accomplish. Let me explain.
The state can mandate higher teacher salaries, as it did in Senate Bill 727, but it cannot mandate better school culture. The culture must be established locally, by the leaders, the teachers, and the community of parents and students in the school. At best, government policies set the playing field for individual human action to take place, but the policies themselves cannot make a leader more supportive of faculty or improve personal relationships.
Given this reality, we must ask what conditions best promote positive school communities. What can legislators do to improve school culture? As I’ve suggested before, you do not drive excellence in academics, or school culture, via top-down policies. The best way to do this is through creating opportunities for excellence and for community to thrive. This is through choice. Through choice, leaders, teachers, parents, and students can choose the schools where they feel most accepted, supported, and encouraged to grow. Choice, of course, is not a silver bullet. There are no silver bullets. But it is the best mechanism we have that allows unique, happy, and successful school communities to flourish.
