Iowa schools see turnover with teachers

DES MOINES - Children across Iowa will soon find themselves busy with summer camps, sports leagues, part-time jobs, work on the family business or any myriad ways they can find to pass the time over summer break.

Most of the state's 478,000 public school students will return to the classroom in fall.

But about 10 percent of the state's first-year public schoolteachers won't. Within the next five years - if averages first outlined in a 2010 Iowa Department of Education report hold - between 30 percent and 40 percent of the teachers who first entered the classroom for the 2013-14 school year will be gone.

It's a sizable turnover for a profession that makes up about 2 percent of the state's work force, according to Iowa Workforce Development projections.

'I don't think there's a magic number” for retentions, said Ryan Wise, deputy director at the Iowa Department of Education. 'I think we can do better than we are.”

Hard to compared

The most recent longitudinal study of first- and second-year teacher retention in Iowa found that by the 2006-07 school year, about 64 percent of the teachers who went on the job in 2001-02 were still there.

By 2011-12, that percentage dropped to just less than 54 percent.

Still, it's difficult to say if Iowa does better or worse at keeping teachers than other states.

Some states, such as Texas, track retention very closely. Other states, such as Arizona, don't.

National studies generally are done by universities or interest groups, but they're not always comparing the same things.

'Certainly, turnover is an issue,” said Kathy Christie, vice president of knowledge/information management and dissemination at the Education Commission for the States, based in Denver, Colo. 'It's a topic that gets a lot of discussion, but the studies out there really emphasize best practices in keeping your best teachers.”

She said the 'general consensus” is five years as a cutoff point, in that most teachers who are going to leave do so in the first five years. It's also generally accepted that schools in rural areas have more trouble keeping staff than their urban and suburban counterparts.

The 2010 Iowa Department of Education report is an outlier in that sense. Its results show Iowa teachers tend to stay on the job about the same amount in urban, rural and small- to mid-sized towns while those working in mid-sized cities were slightly less likely to stay on the job in five years.

The report also says elementary teachers tended to stay on the job longer than middle or high schoolteachers.

'Do they leave the profession, or do they leave the state and we no longer track them? I think that's an area we have to look at,” Iowa State Education Association Executive Director Mary Jane Cobb said.

She said the Iowa figures show the five-year turnover rate in Iowa is about 30 percent, which is better than the 40 percent to 50 percent figures reported in some studies.

She said the 2013 education reform package, which offered teachers an increase in base pay plus new ways to involve themselves in leadership roles, 'could be a positive” for teacher retention.

A positive

In that respect, Cobb lines up with Linda Fandel, who serves as Gov. Terry Branstad's special adviser on education.

'The package makes it possible for every school district to adopt a teacher leadership system over the next three years to better utilize the expertise of top teachers to improve instruction and raise student achievement,” Fandel wrote in an email.

'Through this system, teacher leaders will coach and co-teach with colleagues and analyze student academic data to better meet individual student needs.”

Iowa's turnover, she added, is a concern.

'We'd like to see higher retention rates that assure every child has a highly effective teacher and reflect greater satisfaction with a teaching career,” Fandel said.

Wise, the deputy director, said allowing teachers to take on leadership roles makes sense to him.

'I was a social studies teacher for five years, and my first year looked a lot like my third year looked a lot like my fifth year,” he said. 'Giving me the opportunity to do more in a leadership role would have made a difference.”

Comments: (515) 442-9061; michael.wiser@lee.net