Reducing Teacher Turnover in Struggling Schools: Five Inquiry Methods

Introduction: The Problem of Funding and Teacher Turnover

The problem identified in this study is that a public school district receives Title I and Title II funding designated to support five low-income schools that are struggling to show academic improvement. The funding has mostly gone toward teacher compensation, though some has also been used to support summer programs, data-driven professional development opportunities, and similar initiatives. Regardless of how the funds are spent, the five schools have not improved. In fact, these schools have the highest rates of attrition and teacher burnout in the district. The result is that new educators are 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 been achieved: the district has seen no measurable improvement, and these schools remain struggling institutions where teacher turnover is the highest and student academic progress the lowest.

The following five articles were chosen because each approaches the subject of education from a unique form of inquiry, allowing the researcher to develop a broader 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 described above.

Critical Inquiry: Class, Community, and School Funding

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 approach—specifically, Marxist criticism—to the question of why the composition of social classes is perpetuated across generations. 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 is that no matter how much funding the state supplies to struggling schools, the essential character and social composition of those schools is unlikely to change because of the community in which each school is situated. These regional areas are essentially "fixed" in the sense that their composition is not likely to change short of a mandated movement of people in or out of the community. From the critical theory standpoint, Caldwell's study of the relationship between class oppression and public school failure indicates that such failures are simply representative of the community's inability to rise above its fixed class level.

The critical form of inquiry thus helps illuminate the "class" factor 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 given the communities in which the five struggling schools are located—the researcher would be oversimplifying the problem and neglecting a significant variable: namely, the role that community and class consciousness play in school success. The culture of the community and the social class of the stakeholders in these five schools will naturally affect the schools themselves, particularly as teachers attempt to establish relationships with parents. For the schools to improve and more successfully implement their allocated funds, they should consider how class is impacting their teachers' attitudes and approaches to education, their students' needs, and the policies they implement 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 economic than cultural, and the factors of leadership and accountability could be a useful starting point. As Caldwell (2012) points out, it is not simply a matter of equalizing public education funding, but also a matter of addressing additional factors—namely, that "instruction quality…higher education be made accessible to all, and curricula standardized" (p. 57). These would be alternative areas of focus were the critical inquiry approach to be applied more fully to the problem.

Scientific Inquiry: Charter School Best Practices in Public Schools

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 how "a bundle of best practices from high-performing charter schools into low-performing, traditional public schools" could have a positive impact on academic and professional development (p. 1355). The study uses a randomized field experiment to compare the effects of five practices: more instructional time, better leadership, increased tutoring, data-driven instruction, and a greater emphasis on developing a goal-oriented school culture. The study found that when public schools incorporated these best practices, student academic achievement improved in certain areas, such as mathematics, but not in others, such as reading comprehension. The overall conclusion is that adopting a strategy of evidence-based best practices can be a good starting point for improving aspects of student achievement that are lagging.

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

A practical experiment that could be conducted using scientific inquiry in this context includes measuring the impact of extracurricular activities on student academic improvement, measuring the variables that affect the achievement gap, measuring the factors that influence a teacher's decision to stay or leave the school (which would help identify the underlying causes of teacher turnover), and measuring the effect of leadership decisions on school outcomes. In addition, one could conduct a correlation analysis between school culture and student academic progress. In short, a number of possibilities are available through the scientific inquiry method, and each would shed further light on the underlying factors contributing to these schools' stagnation.

References

Caldwell, P. (2012). Marxist Criticism of Public Education Funding and Social Reproduction. Colgate Academic Review, 2(10): 54–58.

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.

Giles, D., Smythe, E., & Spence, D. (2012). Exploring relationships in education: A phenomenological inquiry. Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 52(2): 214–235.

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.

Quinn, M. (2011). On natality in our roots, routes, and relations: Reconceiving the "3 R's" at the rendezvous of education, citizenship, and globalization. Teachers College Record, 113(6): 1214–1236.