Charter Schools’ Latest Innovation: Keeping Teachers Happy
Eighty- and 90-hour work weeks are all too familiar to some charter school teachers.
NEW ORLEANS—One Wednesday afternoon last fall, teachers at Success Preparatory Academy gathered for a professional-development session on an unlikely subject: their grocery lists.
Principal and co-founder Niloy Gangopadhyay had enlisted a nutritionist to talk about healthy eating. On the agenda: healthy, easy-to-make dishes; coping mechanisms for work stress, like going for a walk instead of opening a bottle of wine; and how to shop for protein- and fiber-rich foods, like Louisiana crawfish or flame-grilled meatless burgers. The information was designed to send two important messages to the twenty- and thirtysomething teachers, many of whom work more than 60 hours a week: Take care of yourself. And we want you to stay.
As charter schools have proliferated New Orleans and the country, many schools, including Success Prep, have largely relied on young, inexperienced teachers who tend to leave the classroom sooner than their peers at traditional public schools—an approach to hiring sometimes described as “churn and burn.” Charter supporters like Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp have even insisted that strong schools with an emphasis on good training can survive the constant loss of teachers.
But as the charter school movement comes of age, school leaders are realizing that stability and consistency matter, and that good teachers aren’t widgets that can easily be replaced. As a result, schools are offering new perks designed to build sustainable staffs, like retirement plans, on-site childcare, and nutrition advice. They face an uphill battle, however, in countering the deeply ingrained perception that many charter jobs are high-velocity detours for young people on the way to something else. In part, they’re hoping to rebrand charter-school teaching as a viable long-term career option with the job security we associate with traditional public schools—at least up to a point.
While these changes can’t match the pensions, union protections, and tenure provisions teachers have at many traditional schools, they mark a significant shift for charters. Long-term teacher retention wasn’t a priority at Success Prep when the school opened in 2009, part of a radical reconstruction of the city’s long-troubled school system after Hurricane Katrina that involved opening dozens of new charter schools. The plan was to “constantly replace teachers with new teachers,” says Gangopadhyay, 35, while focusing on providing the staff with strong curricular professional development. Most of the founding teachers had just a couple years of experience in the classroom. (Although three had more than 10 years of experience teaching.) The average age was 29. First-year teachers at Success Prep make $44,295.
Because of the demanding nature of the job, departures were expected. Most teachers, Gangopadhyay then believed, had “a shelf life” at his school.
Throughout the charter sector, that’s largely been true. At the end of the 2008-2009 school year, almost a quarter of charter school teachers left their schools or the profession, compared to 15.5 percent in traditional public schools, according to asurvey by the National Center for Education Statistics.
The transiency can be attributed to a few main causes: At urban charters like Success, which frequently serve mostly low-income, underprepared students of color, teachers are expected to work considerably longer hours than is typical—sometimes as much as 80 or 90 hours a week. Such charters, often referred to as “no excuses” schools, rely heavily on programs like Teach for America, which import young teachers for two-year commitments. And charter school teachers are far less likelyto belong to unions, and have less job security as a result. While charter school leaders don’t necessarily plan on high turnover, it might be “a necessary byproduct” of an intense, results-driven approach, says Andy Rotherham, a co-founder of Bellwether Education, a nonprofit consulting organization that works with charter schools.
At Success Prep, teacher attrition has worsened over the years. In 2012 the school lost just three out of 24 teachers, but the following year, six more departed. As a result, all but one of the eighth-grade teachers were new last fall. The instability led to student misbehavior and classroom management problems early on in the school year according to John Gonzalez, a first-year eighth-grade math teacher. Students didn’t have relationships with most of their teachers, which made enforcing strict rules—already tough to sell to the young teens—even more difficult.
Gangopadhyay admits that Success Prep hired more new teachers than the school’s teacher-coaching staff could handle this year. Success Prep has struggled, he said, to train so many novice teachers while also recruiting virtually year-round to fill next year’s expected vacancies. Ten teachers—more than 20 percent of the school’sCharter schools and “churn and burn”: How they’re trying to hold on to teachers by making them happier: