Retention

The increasing urgency to design schools the help students better achieve combined with budget reductions have made it increasingly important to make smart and efficient investments. This Education Resource Strategies report, however, finds that the opposite is occurring. Multiple school districts have practices that perpetuate existing school structures that don’t work and are creating barriers to the development of excellent schools. This guide offers guidance for school districts to fix these severe misalignments so that effective school designs may be implemented. 

This RAND report examines the actions and working conditions experienced by first-year principals and connects these factors to subsequent school achievement and principal retention. By researching the experiences of first-year principals in six districts, the report seeks to understand relationships among student achievement outcomes, new principals’ likelihood of staying at their schools and their reports about school conditions, attitudes, and their own practices.

New Leaders assembled a guide to the state’s role in each of the policy areas that affect school leadership—specifically principals. The paper identifies opportunities available for state leaders to improve policies designed to attract and ultimately retain and empower the best school leaders who will drive students toward success. The document advocates for the adoption of high-quality principal performance standards, which would align the vision across the entire human capital system from pipeline development to reward or dismissal. 

The New Teacher Project’s case study provides an in-depth look at retention strategies that it first examined in The Irreplaceables and specifically examines how these strategies are being executed in District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). The paper illustrates how DCPS, by raising expectations and removing consistently low-performing teachers, has progressed toward more effective teacher retention.

This study by The New Teacher Project, which looks at 1.4 million students across four urban school districts, directs its focus on the experiences of some of the highest performing teachers. That is, teachers who have had so much success in boosting student learning that they are essentially “irreplaceable.” The study found that the most successful and unsuccessful teachers exit urban schools at similar rates, as schools rarely make a strong effort to keep the best ones. This leads to about 10,000 “irreplaceables” in the 50 largest districts leaving each year. 

This research and policy brief, by the National Comprehensive Center for TeacherQuality, seeks to help state, district and school-level leaders more fully understand the Generation Y workforce, or those born between 1977 and 1995, so that they can better create a system of management and support for the ultimate goal of improvement in teaching and learning. This publication provides an overview of research on Gen Y, and, through this research, offers strategies that will help leaders ensure that they can provide support to the benefit of all teachers – Generation Y teachers especially.