Public Schools and Schools

¶ … Allocate Funds in Order to Reduce Teacher Turnover and Improve Struggling Schools: An Analysis of 5 Academic Studies

The problem identified in this study is that the public school district receives Title One and Title Two funding, which goes to support 5 low-income schools that are struggling to show academic improvement in its student body. The funding has mostly gone to compensation for teachers, though some has also been used to support summer programs, data-driven professional development opportunities, etc. Regardless of how the funds are spent, the 5 schools have not improved: in fact, these schools have the highest rate of attrition and teacher burnout among any in the district. The result is that new staff of educators is constantly being hired and trained in these schools -- the majority of them new and inexperienced. The expected outcomes of allocating funds to these schools have not, in other words, been achieved: the district has seen no increased improvement in these schools. They remain struggling institutions, in which teacher turnover rates are the highest in the district and student academic progress is the lowest. Grovetown Elementary School is one of these institutions that seeks to understand the exact nature of the impact of funds spent, whether leadership is an issue, and whether there are any innovative possibilities that exist for making better use of the district's funding.

The following five articles were chosen because each approaches the subject of education from a unique form of inquiry, which allows the researcher to develop a better perspective on the problem at hand. The five forms of inquiry identified among these studies are: Critical Inquiry, Scientific Inquiry, Hermeneutic/Phenomenological Inquiry, Ethnographic Inquiry, and Theoretical Inquiry. Each study is described and discussed in terms of how its form of inquiry uniquely illuminates an aspect of the problem depicted above.

Critical Inquiry

Caldwell, P. (2012). Marxist Criticism of Public Education Funding and Social

Reproduction. Colgate Academic Review, 2(10): 54-58.

Caldwell's study on public education funding indicates that the primary source of funding for public schools in the U.S. is local property taxes. The study takes a critical inquiry -- specifically, Marxist Criticism -- approach to the issue of why the composition of social classes is perpetuated every generation. The finding of Caldwell (2012) is that "when public schools rely on local property taxes, their students are married to the social class from which they originated" (p. 54). What this means in terms of the larger problem identified above is that no matter how much funding is supplied by the state to the struggling schools, the essential character and social composition of the schools is not going to change because of the community in which the school is situated. These regional areas are essentially "fixed" in the sense that the composition is not likely to change short of a mandated move of persons in or out of the community. The effect that this would have would be evident in the make-up of the school, which would reflect the new social composition of the community as well as whatever social ills or positives are an extension of that community. From the critical theory standpoint, Caldwell's study of the relationship between class oppression and public school failings indicates that public school failures (in whatever form) are simply representative of the community's failure to rise above its "fixed" class system/level.

The critical form of inquiry thus helps to illuminate the "class" factor that is embedded in the problem of how to allocate funds, why teacher turnover is high, and what kind of leadership is needed to improve the schools. By ignoring the issue of class, especially considering the communities in which the 5 struggling schools are located, the researcher would be oversimplifying the problem and not addressing a significant variable -- namely, the role that community/class consciousness plays in how well schools succeed. The culture of the community and of the class of people who are stakeholders in the 5 schools will naturally have an impact on the schools themselves -- especially as teachers attempt to establish relationships with parents of school children. For the schools to better succeed and more successfully implement the funds allocated to them, they should consider how "class" is impacting their schools, their teachers' attitudes and approaches to education, their students' needs, and the policies that they implement in order to stimulate growth, progress and positive learning environments.

However, this form of inquiry also raises questions about why, if these struggling schools are receiving more money, they have been unable to improve academic achievement outcomes or reduce teacher attrition. The issue may be less economical than it is cultural and the factor of leadership and accountability could be a place to begin looking in an attempt to solve the problem, using the critical form of inquiry. As Caldwell (2012) points out, it is not simply a matter of equalizing public education funding, but also an issue of addressing several other factors as well -- namely, that "instruction quality...higher education be made accessible to all, and curricula standardized" (p. 57). These would be alternative areas of focus for this type of inquiry were it to be utilized for addressing the problem of this study.

Scientific Inquiry

Fryer, R. (2014). Injecting charter school best practices into traditional public schools:

Evidence from field experiments. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(3): 1355-1407.

Fryer's (2014) study focuses on the how "a bundle of best practices from high-performing charter schools into low-performing, traditional public schools" could have a positive impact on the school's academic and professional development (p. 1355). The study conducts a scientific inquiry by conducting a randomized field experiment and comparison of the effects of five practices: more instructional time, better leadership, increased tutoring, data-drive instruction, and greater emphasis on developing a culture that focuses on achieving goals. The study found that when public schools incorporated these best practices into their programs, student academic achievement improved in certain areas, such as mathematics, but not in other areas, such as reading comprehension. The study's overall conclusion is that adopting a strategy of best practices that work for schools around the country can be a good start towards improving aspects of student achievement that are flagging.

The scientific inquiry can help to illuminate an aspect of the problem of the struggling schools in the district by serving as a method for research to be conducted that gathers statistical evidence of correlating variables, statistically significant relationships, and pertinent predictors. The scientific inquiry applied to this case could also be used to measure outcomes of experiments -- such as the one described by Fryer (2014). The same experiment could essentially be conducted with the 5 struggling schools in the district to assess whether incorporating these best practices has any impact on students' academic achievement and/or teachers' professional objectives.

A practical experiment that could be conducted using scientific inquiry in the case of the problem described herein is to measure the impact of extracurricular activities on student academic improvement, measure the impact of variables that impact the achievement gap, measure the variables that impact a teacher's decision to stay or leave the school (this would help identify the reasons for teacher turnover), and measure the effect of leadership decisions in the school. On top of these options, one could conduct a correlation analysis of the school's culture and the student's academic progress. In short, a number of possibilities are available to the scientific inquiry method, which would surely shed more light on the underlying factors impacting the schools' stagnation in terms of progress.

Hermeneutic/Phenomenological Inquiry

Giles, D., Smythe, E., Spence, D. (2012). Exploring relationships in education: A

phenomenological inquiry. Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 52(2): 214-235.

The study by Giles, Smythe and Spence (2012) focused on the experience of being a student teacher and the role that developing relationships with the students plays in the teacher's progress and overall commitment to the job. The study takes a phenomenological approach and interprets the data hermeneutically, finding that "relationships are at the heart of educational encounters" (p. 214). What can be learned from this study is that by taking a deep, immersive look at the lived experiences of real teachers in the classroom and how they interact with students, a better understanding of the actual (not theoretical) practice of teaching can be gained. It is, in other words, like benefitting from have had that experience oneself and being able to draw on the feelings, thoughts and ideas that it generated over time. By exposing the actual experiences of teachers, how they feel, what they think, and how they interact and develop relationships with students over time -- and most importantly what it means for them -- the study hones in on a real issue which impacts all educators: specifically, the issue of what it means to be a teacher. The study provides an up-close-and-personal, introspective account of a number of teachers whose lives are discussed in a phenomenological manner. What is revealed is the prominence of the student-teacher relationship that acts as a binding force for both.

This study's hermeneutical inquiry provides a uniquely illuminating light on the problem of leadership, teacher turnover and struggling schools by focusing on the issue of relationships between students and teachers. This focus corresponds with the ideas discussed in the previous forms of inquiry, notably the critical inquiry form in which culture and class play predominant roles. What the hermeneutical inquiry process reveals about the problem of teacher turnover is that somewhere, for some reason, the kinds of relationships that need to be formed are not being formed. The question of why this is not happening is one that requires answering and that could be answered through the phenomenological approach. The researcher would have to immerse himself into the schools' environment, take field notes on teacher and student behavior, and discuss in extensive interviews the real problems and issues that impact the teachers' and their decisions to stay or leave.

The hermeneutic form of inquiry allows the researcher to "write and rewrite" the stories of the teachers until the essence of the nature of the relationship between teachers and students has been distilled, captured in the text, capable of communicating to the reader the perceived nature of the phenomenon. This type of inquiry can be a crucial supplement to the statistical type of inquiry that is scientific inquiry. These two approaches together combine a qualitative-quantitative examination of the problem and could offer a mixed-methods manner of investigation, yielding a much richer, broader range of results, findings, and possible conclusions.

Ethnographic Inquiry

Johnson, S., Kraft, M., Papay, J. (2012). How context matters in high-need schools:

The effects of teachers' working conditions on their professional satisfaction and their students' achievement. Teachers College Record, 114(10): 1-39.

Johnson, Kraft and Papay (2012) examine the working conditions of teachers who choose to leave their profession after a few short years of service. They find that "poor work environments" are the main reason that teachers become dissatisfied with their jobs. This study takes an ethnographical inquiry approach to the subject of teacher turnover and identifies a common factor among schools with high turnover: they are typically "minority and low-income" schools. By examining the teachers in their natural environment -- the schools and classrooms in question, and collecting information about the teachers' environment and the culture of that environment, the researchers are able to use this method of inquiry to locate the critical variables that impact a teachers' decision to leave a school -- which in turn places undue stress upon the institution as it must continually engage in another round of hiring, training, and searching for adequate staff members. The study examines "how working conditions predict both teachers' job satisfaction and their career paths" (p. 2). The researchers found that environments that have a "positive work context" is one in which teachers are more likely to stay (p. 4). What this study reveals is that it is not just relationships or how money is spent but the nature of the actual surroundings, the environment, the social conditions that prevail, the culture that predominates, the leadership shown by the principal, and the relationships that are formed among faculty members -- it is all of these factors that add up to determine whether a teacher will continue on in his or her position or ultimately decide to leave.