Teacher Attrition and Professional Development



Teacher Attrition and Professional Development

Description of the Local Problem

When teachers leave the profession, they do so with more than their belongings. They leave with the investment that colleagues, administrators, and school districts have made in them along with the resources required to recruit them to the school and support them through the year (Ingle 2009, p. 12). Education issues includes the reading and writing issues. They also walk out with the added professional experience garnered through the year(s) and the relationships developed with colleagues in the Christian school. The true cost of exit is more than just these unrecoverable costs; when teachers leave; they leave other voids that the school must expend even further resources to fill. These points will be the main focus of the report.

Negative working conditions

Lack of support from administration

Accountability, and

Teacher preparation

Description Of The Local Setting Or Site

Research will be conducted in the setting of a Christian school that sits on a beautiful campus of a church campus, a health center, and gymnasium, football and baseball fields. The main issues that are raised in this profession is reading issues and contextual writing problems. The proprietor of the school is the church (Ingle 2009, p. 15). The research would be with current administrators, faculty, staff, students and parent. Our school's population is 75 students, 2 administrators, 40 staff members, 5 board members and 1 CEO. While recognizing that these categories are a simplification of teachers' career trajectories, this approach is useful in determining what encourages teachers to leave classroom teaching and is not without precedent.

Description of Purpose and Research Questions

The purpose of this research, therefore, was to investigate the strength and merit of two constellations of research studies which offer to overlap yet contrasting perspectives on early teacher attrition-teachers characteristics and teachers working conditions. By comparing and testing these perspectives, policy makers can have a better understanding of where to direct resources to promote teacher retention (Billingsley 2007). Results of this line of inquiry will offer insight into a comparison of the perspectives of teacher attrition noted above:

To what extent do beginning teachers' working conditions predict their attrition the year following the Christian school SASS (School and Staffing Survey) administration?

To what extent do beginning teachers' characteristics predict their attrition the year following the SASS administration?

Which, if either, constellation of studies, working conditions or teacher characteristics, better predicts attrition the year following the SASS administration?

How do the distinctive elements within the teacher characteristics and working conditions models combine and interact to predict early teacher attrition the year following the SASS administration?

Description of Proposed Research Method

The proposed research method for the research is based on the survey analysis. Specifically, it describes the rationale supporting the uses of survey responses to answer these research questions and a clarification of the statistical modeling employed and why those models chosen over other models. Finally, this chapter discusses the integrity of the research design and the limitations of the results based on the research design ...