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What We Know: Recruitment
Read about Our Work on Recruitment |
High-needs schools often located in inner-cities or rural areas have difficulties recruiting the experienced and well-prepared teachers they need to help ensure academic success for all students. Consequently, many of these schools rely on higher proportions of under-qualified and inexperienced teachers.
High quality teachers can be selective in choosing where they want to teach. Cumbersome, delayed hiring practices, lower salaries, negative labels for low-performing schools and undesirable geographic regions often deter both new and veteran teachers from working at high-needs schools.
There are no silver bullets for recruiting quality teachers. While salary supplements and other financial incentives are a necessary piece of the puzzle, monetary rewards alone are not sufficient. A broad array of incentives and supports – financial and non-financial – are necessary to attract high quality teachers to high-needs schools.
Financial Incentives include multi-year bonuses, differentiated compensation, housing subsidies, relocation reimbursement, loan forgiveness, tuition-free advanced degrees at state universities, tuition assistance for children of teachers, and state income tax credits.
Non-Financial Incentives include early, streamlined hiring practices, comprehensive mentoring and induction programs, reduced teaching loads, smaller class sizes, strong leadership and clear administrative support, and locating a critical mass of accomplished teachers, such as cohorts of NBCTs, in high-needs schools to allow for collaboration.
Most of these incentives are being implemented somewhere across the nation, but comprehensive incentive packages which allow teachers choices from a broad menu of relevant these incentives are rare.
Consider the following teacher recruitment trends and developments:
- The 2004 average teacher salary of $46,000 compares unfavorably to other comparably prepared professionals like mid-level accountants, computer analysts, and engineers — whose average salaries are usually in the mid-70s.
- Since 1972…teachers gained only $2,900 in inflation-adjusted wages (about 7 percent), which averages out to less than $100 per year.
- Between 1994 and 2005, teacher salaries dropped by 3.4% when adjusted for inflation. Research has shown that while the gap between teachers’ starting salaries and those of their peers is not huge, but the gap widens significantly as their careers progress.
- In one of the few studies conducted researchers concluded that teachers would need to be paid at least 50 percent more to teach in hard-to-staff schools.
- According to Education Week, twenty-seven states offer scholarships or forgivable loans to prospective teachers, but only eleven programs aim for academically high-performing candidates and only ten programs target those candidates to teach in hard-to-staff schools.
- Other studies have found that minority teachers were especially sensitive to pay and working conditions, particularly those who worked in high-risk school districts where 60 percent or more of the students were economically disadvantaged.
- While teachers may need to be paid substantially more, and some more than others, there is some evidence that salary increases alone are insufficient to attract teachers to hard-to-staff schools.
- A number of researchers have found that not salary, but an effective principal and good working conditions are the keys to recruiting and retaining accomplished teachers to high needs schools. Many schools and districts are now taking steps to analyze and respond to the conditions of work which make it more likely for their respective teaching force to leave their school.