Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > November > 20
Monday, November 20, 2006
Why do teachers really leave the profession?
Last week, a debate erupted in the comments under this post about teaching — Is it an easy job or hard job? Are teachers well paid or under paid? Do people flock to the profession to avoid real work or do they flee teaching jobs because the work is so hard the jobs are not worth the money?
Those are hot debates. But some of the answers, perhaps, aren’t that tough. And a recent Wall Street Journal story may provide an answer to the question of how big a factor money can be.
Let’s start with the relative ease or difficulty of teaching. I was asking a teacher I know about this question. Many smart people in tough professions look at teaching, with a work day that ends by 3 p.m. and the summer off, and think that sounds like a pretty cushy job.
The teacher’s reply? It might be easy in some districts to be a BAD teacher, but good teaching is challenging and consuming work. This teacher said it may take a lot of brain power to be an engineer or long hours to be a lawyer but there a unique challenges in the classroom that would stump a lot of hardworking people. It’s not easy to do a good job helping 25 kids each overcome their individual learning obstacles, the teacher said. It requires a lot of strategic trial and error. Plus there are situations teachers deal with that other professionals would find intolerable, like taming unfair and combative parents or enduring unhealthy work environments.
And, the teacher added, good teachers put in the hours — coaching, moderating, leading committees, meeting kids before and after school for extra help, grading with extended comments late into the night.
This put me in mind of a post I wrote a few months back about a study that looked at smart, knowledgeable people who became second career teachers and the skills they lacked on their first tries in a classroom.
Then there’s the question of pay. Are teachers really underpaid?
Last week in the Wall Street Journal a story addressed the question of what motivated high performers to leave a job. Better opportunities for advancement? Bad bosses? Bad work environments? That’s why most companies believe people leave.
What do the high performers say motivates them to leave? Most of the time it simply came down to money (I think a subscription may be needed to follow the link):
“In a survey of about 1,100 U.S. employees, 71% of top performers listed pay among the top three reasons they would consider leaving their employer. Yet in a sister survey of 262 large employers, 45% of employers cited pay as a top-three reason workers leave. Instead, employers thought promotion and career-development opportunities were more important. Another oft-blamed culprit, relationship with a supervisor, was cited by 31% of employers but 8% of top performers.
The results suggest employers don’t fully understand the needs of their top employees, frustrating companies’ efforts to battle turnover as the labor market improves. “Employers have probably gotten caught up in this myth that employees leave their manager or they leave for better opportunities,” says Laura Sejen, director of strategic rewards at Watson Wyatt. “Perhaps we’re being a little unrealistic about the fundamental element of rewards, which is pay.”
Which brings me back to the question of why people leave the teaching profession. Teachers say many get out because it’s a hard job and they can’t hack it. But those who leave frequently report that it was the low pay that drove them out.
So perhaps the Journal story lends credence to the argument that teachers are underpaid? If many people leave the profession (one study by a national teachers’ union said 50 percent of new teachers bail within five years) and this study shows good people most frequently leave jobs because of dissatisfaction with pay, perhaps many of these people bail because they feel underpaid?
I’ll end with a story. The last time I considered buying a new home the realtor driving me around neighborhood after neighborhood asked me what I did. When I told her I wrote about education for a newspaper, she got very excited.
“I used to teach kindergarten in a Montessori school,” she said, as we turned a corner in her sparkling and pricey luxury sedan. “I really loved teaching.”
Of course I had to ask. Montessori trained teachers are in demand thanks to a strong movement of expensive Montessori private schools, so in theory could command a higher salary than the average elementary school teacher. So why did she leave teaching?
Well, she told me, her husband was a broker for housing loans — a one-man operation. He was doing well but working his brains out. Many of his friends were husband-and-wife operations — one partner sold homes while the other arranged the loans. The friends kept telling them how much more money they could be making if she became a realtor.
So finally, she took the plunge. She quit teaching to start selling homes. Business was good, she said. They were making much more money this way. But she really missed the kids, she said. Someday she hoped she might figure out a way to go back to teaching. But not while there was so much money to be made in real estate.
Permalink | Comments (25) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
