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Thursday, July 5, 2007
Teacher Turnover: When Financial Incentives Don’t Work
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Cobb County is phasing out a bonus program for teachers who work in struggling schools because the 5-year-old plan apparently wasn’t working.
Instead of providing a financial incentive to stick with schools with high numbers of hard-to-teach students, Cobb teachers were leaving the campuses in droves.
According to Diane Stepp’s recent article, Floyd Middle School in Mableton had a teacher turnover rate as high as 27.9 percent in the 2005-06 school year — despite the fact that teachers there could earn salary bonuses of up to $5,000, depending on their years of service. By comparison, the average turnover rate for the system’s other schools (those not considered low-performing) was 8.5 percent.
Cobb officials are scratching their heads, trying to figure out why the program wouldn’t keep more teachers. Obviously, a number of reasons could explain the failure — poor leadership, poor facilities and resources, poor classroom support, to name a few.
But we’re talking about a specific population of schools here — schools that don’t have the cream-of-the-crop pupils or an abundance of parents who volunteer. To use another cliche: The deck is stacked against them.
With those kinds of challenges, is it any wonder teachers leave?
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