A Comparative Study of Why Math Teachers Leave the Profession in Southeast Alabama

A Comparative Study of Why
Math Teachers Leave the Profession in
Southeast Alabama

A Proposal Presented to the Graduate Faculty of
Troy University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
EDU 6691
By
Linda B. Phillips

July, 2009


Chapter I
Introduction
Statement of the Problem
One of the most pressing concerns in education today is the recruitment and retention of a sufficient number qualified and effective teachers to staff the classrooms of our schools. Complicating the situation, a large portion of the teachers currently employed are Baby Boomers who are now at or near retirement. While recruitment and retention are important issues for all types of teachers, it has often been asserted that math teachers are among the most difficult for school administrators to find and retain (Shakrani, 2008). As a rule, there are more open math positions than there are qualified teachers available to fill them. In recent years, requirements of the No Child Left Behind act and increasing state high school graduation requirements in mathematics have further increased the number of highly qualified math teachers that are needed in high schools.
There have been many studies regarding the reasons that the number of mathematics teachers available is generally not sufficient to meet the demand, both nationwide and in specific locations. These studies have shown that, although the number of qualified teachers graduating each year is adequate to meet the need caused by teacher retirement and other such types of normal attrition, there are not enough graduating to also meet the needs caused by the exit from the profession by those who leave the profession for other reasons (Ingersoll et al., 2006).
Some of the other reasons teachers give for exiting the profession include: unsatisfactory working conditions, low wages, lack of respect, and lack of empowerment, among others (Mihans, 2008). Determining the reasons that teachers in a specific region have for leaving the profession, or moving to a different school, would enable those responsible for keeping sufficient math teachers in their schools to make better decisions and possibly changes in policy regarding those things.
Making changes to improve the conditions that cause teachers to leave would naturally make it easier to recruit and retain teachers in all subjects, not just math. Studying the reasons that teachers leave their positions will be of great benefit to schools by providing information to those making policy regarding the teaching profession, district and school administrators, and teacher training programs in colleges.
In addition to the goal of having enough teachers to fill the required number of classrooms, there are other benefits that would result from reducing teacher turnover in schools. High teacher turnover has been linked to greatly increased economic costs related to staffing and to lower student achievement (Crowe, Schaefer, & Barnes, 2006). In these days of increasingly tight school budgets, additional costs can be very detrimental to the operation of the school. Decreasing teacher turnover could result in less money related to staffing being required from the budget. Just as important, less teacher turnover could help increase levels of student achievement.
Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this study is to determine what mathematics teachers say causes them to stop teaching, or to change schools, specifically in the public school systems in 4 counties in southeast Alabama. Superintendents, principals, and others involved in developing policies relating to teacher preparation, recruitment, working conditions, and/or retention need to know the causes of teacher attrition. Only with this knowledge will improvements be achieved that will encourage mathematics teachers to remain in the profession and, also, in their respective schools. These improvements should have a very positive effect on the results obtained by the teachers in these schools and would provide excellent guidance to other school systems with similar demographics.
Significance of the Study
This study will provide much important and relevant information to the school systems of southeast Alabama to help them develop strategies to recruit and retain math teachers in their schools. Teacher turnover has a great effect on the operation of schools, being linked to economic costs, student achievement levels, teacher-to-administration relations, teacher-to-teacher relations, and more. An increase in student achievement would be very helpful in meeting the goals of the No Child Left Behind act, the state student achievement progress goals, and the goal of increasing the high school graduation rate in the schools. It also could have an impact on the teacher training programs in the region.
Definition of Terms
Attrition refers to the reduction in the number of teachers.
Turnover refers to the number of teachers who stop teaching or move from one school to another. Likert Scale refers to a type of virtually equal-interval-based, multiple-choice question, using strongly agree to strongly disagree responses.
Limitations and Delimitations
This study will be limited to the public high schools in four counties in southeast Alabama: Houston, Dale, Pike, and Henry. It will further be limited to the certified public school mathematics teachers teaching in grades 7 - 12 who either stop teaching or leave one school and move to another during the three school years immediately preceding the date of the survey for any reason.
Hypothesis
The researcher predicts that the unique demographics of this geographic area will result in some significant differences in the most common reasons for math teachers leaving the profession in this region when compared to the reasons most frequently cited in other regions.



















Chapter II
Review of Literature
Teacher Attrition
Many studies have shown that there is likely to be a critical teacher attrition rate in the coming years at both the elementary and secondary levels. It is generally believed that the main causes of this attrition rate are the rising number of students combined with the rising number of teachers reaching retirement age. However, research shows that teachers who leave the profession before retirement or move to different schools result in a significant amount of teacher turnover (Ingersoll, 2007). Consequently, schools frequently have “an unstable workforce that negatively impacts student, teacher, and school success” (National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF), 2006, p.1).
This drain on the teacher supply also drains the budgets of school systems, forcing them to spend additional funds to find replacements for the lost teachers. It has also been shown that high teacher turnover rates result in lower achievement scores for the students in effected schools (Shakrani, 2008). Teacher turnover is of particular concern in certain fields, including math and science, since there are generally fewer new teachers who graduate with certificates in those fields than most others. Therefore, finding ways to retain math and science teachers is an especially important area of research (NCTAF, 2006). Issues in Teacher Retention
According to Mihans (2008), “the five most commonly cited issues in teacher retention” are low salaries, lack of mentoring programs, lack of administrative support, poor working conditions, and lack of professional autonomy. Other reasons that have been mentioned in teacher attrition studies include student discipline problems, family or personal conditions, desire to change careers, (Ingersoll et al., 2006) lack of respect (Koplowski, 2008), staffing action, and to obtain additional education.
Interestingly, there was no significant difference found between the most important reasons math and science teachers gave for leaving and other teachers who left teaching employment in the Teacher Follow-up Survey (2004-05) of the Schools and Staffing Survey administered by the National Center for Educational Statistics. The only exception was that math and science teachers were more likely to leave for better pay or benefits (Hampden-Thompson, Herring, & Kienzl, 2008). This leads credence to the marketability theory of teacher attrition. This is the theory that teachers who possess more of the abilities that are valued by the business community are most likely to leave the profession to obtain larger salaries and better benefits (Pigge & Marso, 1996).
“What keeps some teachers in the profession while others leave?” is obviously a question of importance to administrators and other education policy makers. Although studies show that math teachers are more likely to leave the profession for economic reasons than teachers in some other fields, it is not the sole factor in the decision to leave for all math teachers. Many researchers have found that teachers who leave teaching to take other jobs report having lower work load and less stress. Lowering teacher workloads by reducing class sizes, for example, and lowering stress levels, through such things as better student discipline, would be very helpful in reducing teacher turnover caused by burnout (Rosenow, 2005).
Teachers who leave the profession to take other positions also report that they have more control over their working conditions at their new jobs, increasing their sense of autonomy. They report that while teaching, they often had little input into the conditions that exist in their schools and classrooms (Ingersoll et al., 2006).
It has been found that an extremely important factor in teacher retention is the quality of the leadership in a school. One example of this comes from a survey of 21,000 educators in Kansas which showed that “the No. 1 reason that teachers stay in the classroom is leadership (Rothschild, 2006, ¶ 1).”
Another example of this comes from the testimony of the teachers at Lincoln Elementary School in Mount Vernon, New York. Lincoln is a multiple race, low income school that would normally not be expected to compete well with other schools in the district, but has become one of the top performing schools in the district under the leadership of principal George Albano. Teachers there credit the leadership of Albano for the success of the school and the record of almost no teacher turnover during his tenure of over twenty years. “He manages the school in such a way that teachers can do their best (“It’s being done,” 2005, p. 1).” Conclusion
The existing literature provides much insight into the causes of teacher turnover from a nationwide perspective. There are also a few studies in smaller geographic areas. Missing from this body of research, however, is a study in a region with demographics similar to those found in the four counties in Alabama that are the subject of this study.







Chapter III

Methodology

The high cost of teacher turnover, both in financial terms and in terms of student

academic achievement, is well-documented in the current research. The current growth in the

rate of teacher attrition is also well-established. This study seeks to examine the reasons that

those mathematics teachers in southeast Alabama who leave their positions, or even the

profession, give for making this decision and to compare those reasons given by teachers

in other areas in the United States.

Research Questions

1. What are the reasons that public school mathematics teachers give for leaving their positions

in Houston, Dale, Pike, and Henry counties during the three years prior to the survey?

2. What reasons given by mathematics teachers in those counties for leaving are the same

as those given by teachers in other regions?

3. Is school leadership as great an influence on public school math teachers leaving in this

region as in others?

4. How much of a factor is salary in the decision of math teachers to leave a position in this

region when compared with other regions?

5. Do working conditions cause as much teacher turnover in mathematics here as in other areas?

Population

This study focuses on the public school math teachers who left their positions in

the three school years prior to the survey in Houston, Dale, Pike, and Houston counties in

southeast Alabama.



Data Collection

Teachers will be contacted by mail after obtaining their names and addresses from their

respective boards of education. A survey will then be conducted. After the survey is completed,

the teacher will mail it to the researcher in an envelope with postage pre-paid by the researcher.

Completed surveys will be analyzed by the researcher to determine the number of each

type of response.

Instrumentation and Data Analysis

The survey will consist of several questions with predetermined answers that will use a

Likert scale to calculate the individual teacher’s responses. The responses will be compared to

the responses given by the teachers in previous surveys, such as the Teacher Follow-up Survey

(TFS) of 2004-05 to the Schools and Staffing Survey administered by the National Center for

Education Statistics (NCES), a Study of the Factors Contributing to the Attrition Rate of Public

School Teachers in Texas by Marshall (2002), the 2007 Mississippi Teacher Working Condition

Survey, the 2006 Teaching and Learning Conditions Survey to the Clarke County School

District And Clark County Education Association of North Carolina, and the Relative Pay and

Teacher Retention in Miami-Dade County Public Schools: Summary of Research of 2004.

The researcher will use SPSS (Statistical Package of Social Sciences) to analyze data.

The process that will be used is cross tabulation and chi square to analyze the ordinal data from

the survey.

Ethical Considerations

The researcher will present the proposal to the IRB to determine if ethical conditional

have not been validated. The respective boards of education of the public schools in Henry,

Houston, Dale, and Pike counties will be fully briefed on all aspects of the research study. They

will be asked to contact by mail, at the researcher’s expense, the teachers in their systems that

meet the criteria of the study by mailing a survey, including a complete explanation to the

purpose of the study, to them. All teachers’ names and responses will be kept strictly

confidential, with the names known only to the board of education of each teacher.



References

Crowe, E., Schaefer, B., & Barnes, G. (2006, October). “The cost of teacher turnover in k-12 science and mathematics: What we know and what we need to know.” Paper presented at the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future Symposium on the Scope and Consequences of K-12 Science and Mathematics Teacher Turnover, Racine, WI. Retrieved from http://nctaf.org.zeus.silvertech.net/documents/CostofTeacherTurnover-NSFMeeting.pdf.
Hampden-Thompson, G., Herring, W. L., & Kienzl, G. (2008). “Attrition of public school mathematics and science teachers.” Issue Brief from the National Center for Educational Statistics. Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2008077
Ingersoll, R. M. (2007, April). “Teaching science in the 21st century: The science and mathematics teacher shortage: Fact and myth.” NSTA WebNews Digest. Retrieved from http://www.nsta.org/publications/newa/story.aspx?id=53821
Ingersoll, R. M., Perda, D., & The Consortium for Policy Research in Education, (2006, October). “What the data tells us about shortages of mathematics and science teachers.” Paper presented at the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future Symposium on the Scope and Consequences of K-12 Science and Mathematics Teacher Turnover, Racine, WI. Retrieved from http://nctaf.org.zeus.silvertech.net/documents/
WhatTheDataTellUSAboutShortages.pdf.
“It’s being done.” (2005, July 5). A Newsletter of the Achievement Alliance, Vol.1. Retrieved from http://www.achievementalliance.org/files/alert7_files/page0002.htm
Koplowski, C. (2008, February). ”Why they leave.” NEA Today. Retrieved from http://www.nea.org/home/12630.htm
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National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (2006, October). Symposium on the Scope and Consequences of K-12 Science and Mathematics Teacher Turnover. “Meeting Summary.” Racine, WI. Retrieved from http://nctaf.org.zeus.silvertech.net/documents/
MeetingSummary_00.pdf
Pigge, F. L., & Marso, R. N. (1996, April). “Academic aptitude and ability characteristics of candidates teaching and not teaching five years after graduation.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York, NY. (Reproduction supplied by EDRS)
Rosenow, D. (2005). “Stress, burnout and self-esteem among educators.” The Journal of Border Educational Research, 4(1), 89-94. Retrieved from http://209.85.229.132/
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Rothschild, S. (2006, August 6). “Leadership crucial in teacher retention.” Journal-World, Lawrence, KS. Retrieved from http://www.accessmylibrary.com/comsite5/bin/
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