In June of 2007, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTF) issued a policy brief entitled, "The High Cost of Teacher Turnover". The following is an excerpt from that report*. Download the entire report here.

The Teacher Turnover Crisis: Costing more than $7.3 Billion per year.

America's schools are struggling with a growing teacher dropout problem that is costing the nation over $7 billion a year. It is draining resources, diminishing teaching quality, and undermining our ability to close the student achievement gap. Teacher attrition has gown by 50% over the past 15 years. The national teacher turnover rate is 16.8% and over 20% in urban schools. In some schools the teacher dropout rate is higher than the student dropout rate!

The consequences of high teacher turnover are particularly dire for our nation's low-performing, high poverty schools. High-need urban and rural schools are frequently staffed with inequitable concentrations of under-prepared, inexperienced teachers who are left to labor on their own to meet the needs of their students. This isolation has a crippling effect on many new teachers who feel overwhelmed by the challenges they face. They leave after several years of working with a frustrating lack of support - perhaps they find a better school, but in too many cases they abandon teaching altogether.

Until we recognize that we have a retention problem we will continue to engage in a costly annual recruitment and hiring cycle, pouring more and more teachers into our nation's classrooms only to lose them at a faster and faster rate. This will continue to drain our public tax dollars, it will undermine teacher quality, and it will most certainly hinder our ability to close student achievement gaps.

It does not have to be this way. NCTAF has found that school leaders can reduce teacher turnover and control their costs with coherent human resource policies that begin with measuring teacher turnover and understanding its consequences.

Click here to calculate how much teacher turnover is costing your school district each year.

The NCTAF completed a pilot study of teacher turnover and its costs in five school districts. In both small and large districts, the study found that when a teacher leaves, the costs of recruiting, hiring, and training a replacement teacher are substantial. The cost per teacher leaver ranged from $4,366 in rural Jemez Valley to $17,872 in Chicago. The total cost of turnover in the Chicago Public Schools is over $86 million per year.

Solving the problem of high teacher turnover with effective induction programs

It is essential to give new teachers a strong start with the support they need to succeed. A recent national study of support for new teachers found that comprehensive approaches to teacher induction can reduce teacher turnover by more than 50 percent. In some well-designed programs, such as those conducted by the New Teacher Center, or in Las Vegas and Chattanooga, the gains can be significantly greater.

But in contrast to these comprehensive approaches, too many districts use a minimal approach to teacher induction that relies on an untrained mentor or buddy who makes occasional visits to new teachers. This buddy system has a negligible effect, reducing new teacher turnover by just two percentage points. Because comprehensive induction programs reduce teacher turnover and increase teacher effectiveness, they have been found to be very cost effective. In California, a recent study of a district induction program by the New Teacher Center found that "an investment in an intensive model of teacher induction pays $1.66 for every $1 spent."

IRIS Connect enables effective induction programs

Comprehensive induction programs are based on four defining principles: (1) building and deepening teacher knowledge; (2) integrating new practitioners into a teaching community and school culture that support the continuous professional growth of all teachers; (3) supporting the constant development of the teaching community in the school; and (4) encouraging a professional dialogue that articulates the goals, values, and best practices of a community. IRIS Connect supports each of these principles by enabling teachers, coaches, and mentors to observe each other and to provide immediate performance feedback in a community of practice.

Comprehensive induction programs provide a package of support systems for a new teacher that includes: (1) a mentor; (2) supportive communication from the principal, other administrators, and department chairs; (3) common planning or collaboration time with other teachers in the field; (4) reduced preparations (course load) and help from a teacher's aide; and (5) participation in an external network of teachers. IRIS Connect connects mentors with teachers in the authentic context of their classrooms. Teachers, principals, administrators, and department chairs can observe, record, and share best teaching practices in professional learning communities.

Observation is critical to comprehensive induction programs

During the induction process, district administrators and school principals observe new teachers as frequently as possible. Until they earn tenure, new teachers are provisional employees of the district and must prove that they are able to teach effectively in order to keep their positions. Further, new laws in many states require that school districts provide mentors for all new teachers. Observation is the best way for mentors discover how new teachers are performing and what they may still need to learn to meet district and state performance expectation. Under Utah's Entry Years Enhancement for Quality Teaching (EYE) legislation (Utah Code, R 277-522), for example, mentor teachers are required to "arrange for opportunities for [new teachers] to observe teachers who use various models of teaching."

Why don't teacher preparation administrators observe teachers as much as they would prefer? For two principle reasons: distance and obtrusiveness.

Without IRIS Connect, distance is an obstacle to observations

The district administrators and mentors who observe new teachers during the induction process face similar obstacles. Teacher turnover is rampant, meaning that districts must hire many new teachers each year. One large district in Utah, for example, inducts about 700 new teachers annually-almost 20% of its teacher-force. Observing so many new teachers is a daunting task. Further, many school districts are geographically quite large.

New teachers are usually scattered across the district at schools that are miles apart, meaning that observing each teacher can involve significant travel time between schools (and related travel expenses). Again, this means that observations must be few in number and carefully scheduled.

Because IRIS Connect enables observation over the Internet, distance is irrelevant.

Observation without IRIS Connect is obtrusive

Observation in a classroom is obtrusive, and it causes understandable problems; an observer changes many things about a classroom simply by their presence:

• Students behave differently when an observer is present. Depending on who the observer is, they may behave better or worse than they might have otherwise. Either way, the observer distracts some part of their attention from the teacher.
• Teachers teach differently in front of an observer. Their reactions to observation may be conscious or unconscious or both, but the net result is that their observed performance will differ from their ordinary performance. In the psychology literature, this phenomenon is referred to as the Hawthorne Effect.
• When observations must be scheduled teachers often have to rearrange their schedules to fit the observer's. A given observer may want to watch the teacher presenting instruction on a specific topic or using a certain teaching approach. While rearranging the instructional schedule may not have negative impacts on students' learning, it is certainly an imposition on teachers.

So even when distance, time, and money are no issue (and they usually are), administrators of teacher preparation programs may limit observations for fear of disrupting teachers' classrooms.

* The Cost of Teacher Turnover in Five School Districts:A Pilot Study by The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future