Preventing teacher turnover, part 3: Which schools have the best teachers, and can retain them?

How can we keep good teachers from leaving DC schools? As part of the Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellowship (TPF) program, a group of DCPS and charter teachers has been meeting for the past year to formulate recommendations. Part one of this series looked at ways to give teachers a greater voice in decision making at their schools, and part two urged that teachers have more opportunities to take on leadership roles in their schools. Today we present part 3. Teach Plus aims to improve outcomes for urban children by ensuring that more students have access to effective, experienced teachers.

DCPS has figured out how to identify effective teachers through its IMPACT evaluation system, but it needs to continue to shift its focus to figuring out how to keep them in the classroom. One way to do that is to provide more information about where its best teachers are and how long they stay there.

Teachers deserve the ability to make informed decisions about where to teach. Top teachers may want to be able to collaborate with others like them, and a new teacher may want to be surrounded by as many effective teachers as possible in hopes of finding mentors. DCPS releases some information that could help them, but not enough to be truly useful.

Under the IMPACT system, every year each teacher receives one of 5 ratings, ranging from “ineffective” to “highly effective.” The top rating indicates outstanding performance, and the rating just below that, “effective,” signifies solid performance. The ratings are based primarily on classroom observations and, for some teachers, growth in students’ scores on standardized tests.

The only information DCPS provides to the public about the retention of effective and highly effective teachers at the school level appears on the school’s profile page. There I found the percentage of effective and highly effective teachers retained at each school from the previous school year (click on “Scorecard,” and then “Safe and Effective Schools”). This was helpful, but I wanted to know more.

I wanted to know, for example, how teachers at each school are distributed across the 5 IMPACT categories: ineffective, minimally effective, developing, effective, and highly effective. It is possible that some schools are full of top-performing teachers and others don’t have any.

We need to identify the schools with few or no top performers and target them for additional support and teacher development. It’s also important to identify schools with lots of high-performing teachers, especially the ones that serve a high number of disadvantaged students. We need to learn what they are doing to develop and keep their teachers so we can share these strategies citywide.

Highly effective vs. effective teachers

Another problem with the teacher retention data in the school profiles is that it doesn’t distinguish between highly effective teachers and those who are effective.

It’s possible that in certain schools the good teachers are staying, but the great teachers are leaving. We need to identify these schools, if they exist, and figure out how we can encourage the great teachers to stay. How can good teachers become great without mentors or expert teachers in the building?

The TPF cohort has recommended that DCPS track both kinds of data at the school level, if it isn’t doing that already, and make it publicly available. It would also be helpful to have access to this information over multiple years, so that the public can identify schools that have been improving.

I understand the district’s hesitation in publishing this data. The information is sensitive and the ratings are tied to teachers’ formal evaluations, which need to be kept private.

However, publishing the data for the school as a whole, rather than grade-by-grade, should be enough to protect teachers’ privacy. And it would allow teachers, parents, and members of the community access to important information about our schools.

It’s important to have access to this kind of school-by-school information so that we can have a clearer picture of where DC’s best teachers are and how likely they are to stay in the classroom. But beyond that, making this data publicly available can also help DCPS attract top teachers to its schools, and to retain them.