We Have Created a Teacher Turnover System Whether We Like It or Not
Imagine the size of the number 760,000. This number equates to the population of Seattle, Washington. In miles, this number equates to 31 times around the earth or 310 trips between Los Angeles and New York. If you wanted to speak 760,000 words, it would take the average person 3.8 days of nonstop speaking.
Now imagine replacing that number of teachers across the United States yearly (Bieber & Kraft, 2022). This number equates to around 20-22% of the entire teacher workforce replaced yearly and compares very poorly to other fields like the information industry at 6.5%, finance at 8.3%, or sales at 10%. The only industry with higher turnover is healthcare, with a 27.1% turnover rate in 2023 (IMercer, 2023).
Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it does, and we have inadvertently established a turnover system in the US, with each school operating its own version of the system that functions seamlessly but little seems to be done to stop it. Take the latest findings from the Pew Research Center's 2024 Teacher Survey. Administered annually, this survey shows 77% of teachers say their job is frequently stressful, 68% say it is overwhelming, 70% say their school is understaffed, and teachers are less satisfied with their jobs than all other US workers. Too often we overlook the systemic nature of this issue.
Systems Thinking
Educational leaders who have gone through university training programs in the last 20 years have more than likely been exposed to systems thinking, yet traditional linear thinking still exists as the default mode (Allen, et al. 2009). As a quick reminder, a system is an interconnected set of elements that coherently organize to achieve something with an emergent purpose that is typically out of our awareness until something big happens. For example, a tornado is a system as is the human body or even something like the transportation system for a school district.
So, what are the interconnected set of elements in the turnover system of a school?
First, every job has specific risk factors associated with energy depletion and stress that can be labeled as job demands. Job demands are those "physical, psychological, social, or organizational aspects of a job that require sustained physical and psychological (cognitive and emotional) effort or skill, and are therefore associated with certain physiological or psychological costs" (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007).These demands can be located at the personal, interpersonal, or organizational levels. With regard to schools, we might more specifically identify these demands as personal demands, classroom demands, and/or workplace demands. Job demands are a constant drain on your energy..
Second, every job also has a certain level of job resources which are “the physical, psychological, social, or organizational elements of the job that either help to achieve work goals, reduce the demands associated with the physiological or psychological costs from demands, or stimulate personal growth, learning and development” (Granziera et al., 2021). Like demands, job resources can be located at the personal, interpersonal or organizational level and can be defined by their use to increase energy (Quinn et al., 2012). Job resources are like constantly having your cell-phone plugged into a power source, so energy is constantly enhanced.
The third element is social-emotional leadership skills which teachers can experience and use as a powerful stress-mitigating resource. Extensive research ( Ford, et al., 2019; Gui, 2019; Tran, 2022) shows school leaders’ social-emotional competencies, skills and demonstrated support for teachers emerge as the most salient resource for teachers and are highly associated with teachers’ decision to stay in a school or leave. Part of the convergence point between the leader’s SEL skills and job resources is to recognize the role school leaders play in developing and sustaining teacher commitment, developing feelings of individual and collective efficacy among teachers, and helping to provide emotional support along the way (Price, 2021; Gomez-Leal et al., 2022) all requiring increased social-emotional skills.
Much research has been done on these elements, but we believe the complex interplay over the past 20 years of demands (like workload, student behavior, change, technology, accountability, etc.) and resources (like colleagues, instructional supports, materials, leadership support, etc.) plus a negation of the emotional environment for adults has created a system that negatively influences US educators’ job satisfaction and well-being. When demands are high, resources are low, and emotional support is not forthcoming, stress and burnout are the natural results of this system. Systems are perfectly designed to get the results they achieve.
Demands, resources and emotional support have always been a part of our school system, but recent imbalances in these elements have created different systemic effects. These systemic effects snuck up on us during the Covid-19 pandemic until an exponential explosion brought them into sight, like 760,000 teachers needing replacement yearly. While we want systems to act in the way we want them to, they often take on a life of their own with a different purpose for no apparent reason. We want our educators to feel connected and satisfied in their work with students, and we may work to respect and honor our educators, yet we still see high levels of turnover. Our turnover system is alive and working well.
Linear thinking like only focusing on increased salaries, or promoting self-care that teachers need to do on their own is often used with a problem like teacher turnover, yet it may not be suited to address a complex, chronic problem like this. These solutions, while necessary, assume a simple linear cause and effect relationship. Pay teachers more and they will stay. Give teachers a free gym membership and they will relieve their own stress. Instead, systems thinking may be required. System thinking differs from traditional linear thinking in numerous ways. For example, concerning the turnover issue:
Cause and effect are indirect and not obvious. A litany of demands, causing ongoing stress and burnout, may not be obvious to leaders, or they cannot see the multiplicative impact of all the demands when positioned together. These demands affect individuals differently, but we try and use a single-shot intervention assuming it will cure the problem.
We often unknowingly create our own problems and can only fix them by fixing our behavior. Although leadership support is a primary retention factor for teachers, leader bandwidth is often used up by other demands, such as compliance. With the decades-long emphasis on instructional leadership, other aspects of leadership, such as providing emotional support to buffer the stress inherent in teaching, may have been neglected that could have helped teachers feel differently about their workplaces.
Simple solutions and quick fixes create unintended consequences and often worsen matters in the long run. While necessary, focusing on pay and benefits does little to decrease the excessive demands in some schools. Teachers who stay because of pay and benefits and who are burned out create other issues like less emotional support for students.
We often focus on the parts of the turnover system but need to improve the relationships between them. Collective forms of work done by humans require individual and organizational energy, and teaching and leading schools is an energy-intensive profession.All work comprises demands (energy drainers) and resources (energy sources), but we often fail to recognize when one or the other gets out of balance. This balance needs constant attention, as does the emotional environment in a school.
We over-fixate on multiple initiatives at once instead of choosing a few key leverage points that will produce large system changes. Schools’ primary focus on achievement produces its own laundry list of demands, and these demands can inhibit or eliminate a need to understand and acknowledge the needs of adults and children in the system. In one sense, we overemphasize the rational aspects of education to meet some performance indicators but negate the emotional side, making students and educators feel undervalued (Stroh, 2015).
A Deliberate Teacher Retention System
Instead of letting the teacher turnover system run on its own, we need an intentionall designed and deliberate teacher retention system designed to intervene in the current turnover system. This intervention can be designed to improve a school's culture and working conditions and provide the necessary support to mitigate stress and burnout. A teacher retention system, like the turnover system, focuses on the same set of interrelated components (demands, resources, and emotional support) with the explicit purpose of retaining teachers. The teacher retention system, however, is much more intentional about attending to the elements to influence a different purpose and uses the following tools and processes:
An understandable framework of work and working conditions (demands, resources and emotional supports) to help frame your understanding of what is happening in your school.
A set of tools to help you efficiently collect leading and lagging indicators on what is happening with demands, resources, and emotional support to pinpoint problems more rapidly
Professional learning opportunities (training, consultative meetings, and coaching) to support educators in making sense of the school context and decrease demands, increase resources, and develop necessary emotional supports.
Good processes and tools to help you start small in nudging the retention system into a different purpose and to learn from these efforts
Conclusion
Teacher turnover is an intractable problem that demands much more than piecemeal, disconnected solutions borne from linear thinking. Rather, it is a complex problem that requires systems thinking. What is more, each school is its own system in which demands, resources, and the emotional climate interact differently, making the wish to find "the one right way" nearly impossible.
Instead, by using more formal systems thinking to grapple with complexity, educators can better understand their work system and begin using small tests of ideas to make retention possible. According to Stroh (2015), systems thinking can help people achieve the changes they want by:
Discovering their role in exacerbating the problems they want to solve
Learning how they collectively create the unsatisfying results they experience
Working on a few high-leverage changes over time to achieve system-wide impacts
Stimulating continuous learning to help with constant adaptations needed
In short, 760,000 is a large number of teachers to replace, especially with growing shortages and 52% of current teachers saying they would not advise a young person to become a teacher. Preferably, we start now to create teacher retention systems that, if not fully implemented, at least dramatically reduce the number of teachers who turnover yearly. Our students are depending on us.
If these ideas interest you and you would like to see how we could support you in developing a teacher retention system, email us at info@brasstacksinnovations.com