Note: Vice President of Content John Hiner is away this week. He’ll return next week. In the interim, please enjoy our guest columnist, Matthew Miller, an investigative reporter for MLive. My colleagues Melissa Frick, Scott Levin and I set out earlier this summer to write a story about why Michigan teachers were leaving the profession. The more interesting story turned out to be which teachers were leaving. As Frick, an education reporter in Grand Rapids, and Levin, MLive’s data analyst, and I combed through state data, we found that disproportionate numbers of the state’s most experienced educators had abandoned the profession since the pandemic hit. At the start of the 2018-19 school year, nearly 45 percent of Michigan’s teaching workforce had 11 years of experience or more. Last year, it was just over 35 percent. And that matters for students. Some early career teachers are excellent, of course, and experience alone can’t turn an ineffective teacher into an effective one. But decades of research have found a strong correlation between a teacher’s years in the classroom and how much their students learn. On average, teachers improve dramatically in their first three to five years on the job, and some studies have found that the improvement continues into the second or third decades of their careers. The presence of more experienced teachers in a school even means that other teacher’s students learn more. They can act as mentors, advisors, repositories of institutional knowledge. Why they left had a lot to do with the pandemic. Last year, researchers from Michigan State University’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative conducted a survey of teachers in some of Michigan’s lowest-performing districts, districts that saw more departures on average than other schools in the state. They found that, even though 2021-22 was supposed to be a “return to normal,” teachers described that year as “distinctly challenging…due to heightened student needs and substantial challenges meeting those needs.” Students had not only fallen behind academically but had lost a sense of how to behave in the classroom. Teachers, the MSU survey said, “noted an increase in disruptive student behavior related to unmet social-emotional needs.” Anne Monterusso, who had been a teacher in the Rockford Public Schools, told us she loved her job, but the pandemic wore her down and she found herself leaving work stressed out and guilty that she wasn’t giving more of herself to her students. But the departures can also be looked at as part of the so-called “Great Resignation.” The disruptions of the pandemic caused many workers to reconsider their relationship to their jobs. Teachers were no exception. “Remote work has been a kryptonite for us,” Flint Community Schools Superintendent Kevelin Jones told us, because schools can’t practically offer that sort of latitude. Despite the increasingly visible fights over curricula and the books kids can check out from school libraries, none of the teachers we spoke to mentioned the acrimonious political environment as a reason for leaving. They talked instead about issues like pay, stress and the sense that they no longer had the solid backing of school administrators. Sue Harper, who retired this summer from Kreeger Elementary in Fowlerville, blamed what she called “bulldozer parents.” “They want things done their way,” she said. “They don’t want their children to experience any discomfort, which means consequences for behavior.” When teachers try to impose consequences, she said, such parents typically side with their kids. In the survey by MSU researchers, teachers talked about difficult working conditions; dissatisfaction with district leadership, who they said often ignored teachers’ concerns; and low morale. “I have never been one to quit anything, and teaching is my passion, but this is not teaching,” one teacher wrote. “This is hours of endless paperwork, this is social work, this is counseling, this is parenting, this is babysitting, this is coaching, this is everything but teaching.” What can be done about it? Chandra Madafferi, the new president of the Michigan Education Association, told us that the $24.3 billion education budget signed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer earlier this summer, will go a long way toward addressing some concerns. It includes, among other things, an extra $458 per student, along with money earmarked for training new teachers and for repaying educators’ student loans. And some districts are moving forward with incentive packages of their own. Holland Public Schools is contributing to down payments on new teachers’ homes if they live in the district. Battle Creek Public Schools is giving teachers an average raise of more than $10,000 for the coming school year on top of its own home purchase program. But teacher retention is a complex problem, and no one we talked to offered up an easy solution . “We can’t just continue to write paychecks and expect that people are going to stay for 30 years,” Tim Bearden, superintendent of the West Ottawa Public Schools, told us. “We have to, as schools, make sure that we’re providing all the resources teachers need to be successful and that we’re giving them support, recognition, value – things that we should be doing anyways.” Low pay, culture wars, and ‘bulldozer parents.’ Why Michigan’s best teachers are calling it quits: Read here.
How experienced are the teachers in your school district? See the data here. ### John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions you’d like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at editor@mlive.com. | 