Wheary: How to keep teachers teaching

Jennifer Wheary is a senior fellow at Demos, a public policy organization in Manhattan.

May and June are a bonanza for substitute teachers. One substituting friend said, "I work nonstop. . . . There are no long vacations left, and teacher absences go up. It's time to trudge through to the end of school, and many just can't take it."

In low-performing schools, however, teacher absenteeism is a problem all year long. These schools are also plagued with high teacher turnover. As New York and the rest of the nation grapple with how to bridge the achievement gap and open doors for lower-income students, figuring out how to keep qualified teachers -- particularly those certified in science, math and technology -- in the classrooms of struggling schools should be a top concern.

Teaching is a hard job, even in the best, most supportive environments. There are a lot of things that affect a teacher's desire to go to work or to work at a particular school: salary, characteristics of the students and fellow faculty, class size, school culture, facilities, quality of management and safety are just some of them. And in their effect on teachers, these working conditions also affect schools' ability to be engines of opportunity for their students -- the future workers they are instructing.

It's no secret that solid skills in science, technology, engineering and math -- often called STEM subjects by educators -- lead to more job offers and higher earnings. Experts estimate that 70 percent of all jobs created in the next decade, and not just those in technical fields, will require STEM competency. The road to competency in STEM subjects begins with early childhood and elementary education, and proceeds through high school and college.

Unfortunately, our academically poorest performing schools are also often those in the economically poorest neighborhoods. So students who could benefit the most from the financial opportunities afforded by strong STEM skills, are less likely to acquire them.

Research has shown that students in the poorest performing schools on the fourth-grade science exams are most likely to be taught by teachers with lower qualifications and less experience than students in the better performing schools.

In fact, when you look at the lowest 5 percent of New York schools with respect to science scores, you find that one in three teachers there has failed a general knowledge certification exam. That figure is one in 10 teachers in the schools where scores were in the top 25 percent.

And 21 percent of teachers in the lowest 5 percent schools aren't certified in the subject they're teaching, compared with just 1 percent in the top-performing schools. These numbers for New York State represent a trend that researchers see nationwide.

SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher made an excellent observation in an interview recently published in the New York Academy of Sciences Magazine: "It's not unusual for teachers to be teaching out of their depth and out of their discipline, often certified on some emergency basis to teach in some of the most challenging environments. This indicates that the supply chain is quite broken."

The obvious reaction is to assume that the key to improving fourth-grade science scores is to make sure that teachers are of "higher quality," or are trained better. But, as Zimpher observes, that overlooks the fundamentals of the problem. The crux of the issue is addressing the factors that lead less-qualified teachers to end up in lower-achieving schools. And that has to do with why teachers choose to teach at one school over another, and how schools attract and retain their staff.

The same issues about salaries, student and faculty characteristics, class size, culture, quality of facilities, management, and school safety that influence educator absentee rates have a large impact on where teachers choose to teach in the first place.

There's no shortage of practical solutions to encourage better teachers to go and stay at underachieving schools. Making a concerted effort to improve working conditions and school culture in traditionally hard-to-staff schools is one of them. In taking this step, we'll also move forward in improving science and math skills for the students who need them most.