Keeping Good Teachers in the Classroom

Getting and keeping good teachers in the classroom is essential for improving the instruction that our students receive. However, without adequate support, great teachers are likely to head out the door of failing schools and off to better schools or more lucrative and less stressful careers.

In my own school I watched this past Friday as a fellow teacher and friend announced that she is leaving our school and our students in the middle of the school year. Like many of us in the school she is a new teacher, and like many of us, she often ends her day exhausted and frustrated from the many battles that she has to fight to get her students to learn.

This teacher joined the Baltimore City Teaching Residency this year in the hopes of showing low income high school students that math could be fun. She was not only knowledgeable in her content area, but she was also an innovative and passionate teacher who spent late hours and weekends at the school developing games and engaging lessons for her students. She had high behavioral and academic expectations for her students, and she accepted nothing less, which often put her at odds with the administration at our school when students inevitably tried to push the boundaries and expose any weaknesses in our school protocols.

Of course teaching in an urban school is challenging, to say the least, and new teachers quit all the time. However, this teacher had thirteen years of experience of working in Baltimore City schools, and so despite the fact that she had never been a teacher, she was by no means new to the urban education scene.

On Monday students will have a substitute teacher until our school finds a replacement. Several students have already expressed legitimate worry that they will not be able to do well on the HSAs without this teacher there to instruct them. How her loss will affect our students’ learning experience is yet to be seen, but I can’t imagine anything positive coming from this experience.

What I do know is that things did not have to end this way. She needed support and never received it. She constantly expressed that she didn't feel like she was challenging the students, and she was unsure of her teaching abilities, especially when students acted out and refused to do the work. She sent e-mails to the administration asking for help, and after calling off work several times in a course of 3 months, it was obvious that something was not right. Knowing that this teacher had great potential and truly loved working with students, I even reached out to the administration in the hopes that they could at least come into her classroom to see what was going on. Could things have been improved by shortening the amount of time she spent lecturing students? Maybe, starting off her class each day with positive praise could have helped her build a more positive relationship with the students. Whatever the issue was, nothing was done, and now she is gone, leaving our team and our students in a very hard place.

Of course she is not the only one who feels frustrated and ineffective, and I would be surprised to see any of the 9th grade teachers on my team return next year – myself included. I work in a brand new transformation school that sadly seems doomed for failure if things do not change fast. Although some of the problems of a being a new school are inevitable, it seems that there are many aspects of our school that have no excuse to be failing so miserably. In a school where there is a ratio of 1 teacher to every 15 students, how is it that students roam the halls, come out of uniform, and disrespect teachers without it ever being addressed. Teachers call homes, assign detentions, and write referrals, but there are no meaningful consequences for students, and no expectations set by the administration, and so the chaos continues.

Of course teaching isn’t for everyone, but how can such a small school have such big problems? Furthermore, could greater administrative support or mentoring have saved this struggling teacher?