Cover Story
An Open Secret

Beginning teacher Lisa Vanlandingham searched for a way to continue teaching in a low-income area of Austin. But she got no help from the school district.

Why teachers leave the profession and what can make them stay.

Lisa Vanlandingham sounds like she just climbed down from an American Educa-tion Week poster. "I have a passion for kids, and I care about our future," says the first-year teacher. "The backbone of our society is education."

She teaches 22 first graders at Kocurek Elementary, a low-income, racially diverse school in Austin, Texas.

"I love the kids. They're everything in my life. I think about them all the time," she says. She feels she's getting good support from parents, and she thinks the world of her principal.

So why is Vanlandingham planning to leave the Austin schools?

One, she can't pay her bills. Austin is an expensive place to live, and her salary barely covers student loan payments, car payments, and other required expenses. Her parents have to help support her.

And two, she's had nobody to lean on during this very difficult first year of a demanding job. There was no mentor, and no laid out curriculum to guide her in planning lessons day after day.

"I'm up hour after hour at night, trying to get things together," says Zanlandingham. "Some of my kids have behavioral problems. I love every one of them, but it's very, very challenging.

"I have five friends who all went through the University of Texas with me and got certified to teach, but went into the corporate world. They're all making a lot more money than I do, and they don't come home dead."

Lisa Vanlandingham is not alone, or even unusual.

In a country that seems to be in a panic over the teacher shortage, very little is being done to stop the outflow of trained teachers.

Thirty percent of new teachers leave their chosen profession within five years, and the number is much higher in urban areas like Austin.

So the children who need the most stability in their lives, and the most experienced teachers, get the least.

In many districts, new teachers have trained mentors only because the teachers' association stepped up to the plate when the school board dropped the ball.

Stephanie Harlan is one first-year teacher who plans to stay right where she is next year, at Gunnisonville Elementary in Lansing, Michigan.

That's because Harlan does have someone to help her--Kristan Small, one of 100 experienced teachers trained to be mentors by the Michigan Education Association last year.

Like Vanlandingham in Austin, Harlan is finding her first year difficult.

"It's more tiring, more time-consuming, more stressful than I thought it would be," she confesses. "It's not just teaching, but putting up a bulletin board, giving a snack to a kid who didn't eat at home, breaking up a fight--all at the same time."

Mentor Patricia Evans is helping Seattle teachers like Walter Smith stick with a profession they find both trying and rewarding.

But Harlan notes that her mentor helps to keep her from feeling overwhelmed. "Kristan's a mirror for me. When she observes me, she lets me in on some of the good things happening in my class. Lots of times, I see mainly the bad things."

In this vital work, educators get little help from the Lansing schools. Small will receive at most a $545 stipend for meeting with Harlan before or after normal hours. They don't even spend their school planning time together.

This summer, MEA will train Small and the other MEA mentors to train more mentors--somebody has to do it, and so far, Michigan won't.

One of the few urban districts that does take mentoring seriously is Seattle. There, 12 consulting teachers are relieved from classroom duties for three years, thanks to a contract negotiated by the Seattle Education Association, and they get a $5,665 stipend on top of their teaching salary. A committee of four SEA representatives and three administrators chooses them.

Each consulting teacher mentors about 18 inexperienced teachers.

Among the beneficiaries are Walter Smith--and his first grade students.

Smith is now in his third year at T. T. Minor, a diverse, center-city school. He can't say enough in praise of his mentor, Patricia Evans, who gave him expert advice and a shoulder to lean on when he was just starting out.

Smith had some students who needed to walk around during class. Evans helped him with the difficult and subtle work of tailoring his teaching to their strengths and needs. She also taught him how to tune his teaching pace, and how to change plans to take advantage of spontaneous developments.

Says Smith, "When people come into your classroom, you're thinking, 'What does this person really have in mind? Is he here to help, or to gather facts to use against me later?' But with her, I knew she was not coming in to shoot me down.

"Just knowing that somebody cares about you in your new and nervous state is important," Smith adds. "I'm a confident person, but being in a new environment, responsible for the lives and well-being of so many young people, was challenging."

Yet Seattle doesn't hold on to all of its talented first-year teachers because, like Austin, the pay is low and the cost of living is high. Smith thinks he'd probably be teaching in a suburb now if it weren't for his mentor.

"It's extremely frustrating--you have your family needs. Others outside teaching appear to work less and are paid considerably more," he says. His mentor "didn't take away the bills or make the hours less, but her support made all the difference in the world."

In Austin last year, the Texas State Teachers Association held a press conference to publicize a little-known fact: while Texas was hiring thousands of people on emergency permits, 500,000 Texas-certified teachers were not teaching.

"There is no shortage of certified teachers, just a shortage of certified teachers in the classroom," said TSTA Vice President Donna New Haschke. She called for health insurance, fair pay, and an end to the practice of putting first-year teachers in the toughest schools.

Members of Education Austin, a joint NEA-AFT affiliate, spoke out at a school board meeting about the need to make life better for Austin teachers. Lisa Vanlandingham was one of them.

But recently, she found a job in a Dallas suburb where the pay will be higher and the work probably a little easier.

Austin will have a hard time replacing her.

--Alain Jehlen

The Disappearing Minority Teacher

For over a decade, forecasters warned of the current crisis in recruiting and retaining quality teachers. For minority teachers, the hue and cry began ten years before that.

"A student today could go through 12 years of education without ever seeing a teacher of color," says Mildred Hudson, CEO of Recruit-ing New Teachers, Inc. One-third of public school students are children of racial or ethnic minority, while only 13 percent of educators are teachers of color. Forty percent of U.S. schools have no minority teachers at all. That's just not good enough, she says.

A host of economic, political, historical, and social factors help explain the "why's." It's time, says Hudson, to focus sustained attention on the "how to's" with new models for recruiting and retaining a qualified, diverse teacher workforce, such as:

• Acknowledge the problem. The misperception has been that minorities didn't want to go into the profession. But when you see the obstacles as real--the lack of scholarship support, low retention rates of minority teacher education students, the test-score gap in teaching licensure--you can began to remove them and be effective.

• Open the pipeline early. It's too late if you try to recruit in college. Establish middle and high school teaching academies to introduce teaching as a career choice early.

• Expand the teacher candidate pool. Target paraeducators, mid-career adults, community college students, recent graduates in liberal arts, and specific populations who have the potential of staying in urban and rural communities. Many paras have been in the classroom for a lifetime but don't have the support they need if they want to become teachers. Former Peace Corps volunteers are excellent candidates because many have teaching credentials and experience working in multicultural environments, and speak a second language.

• Shun stopgap measures. Stop bringing unqualified teachers in through the back door--those without knowledge, certification, or classroom experience. Uncertified teachers are more often than not placed in high-poverty communities, and this exacerbates the problem for students and staff alike.

• Provide quality induction programs. Create a continuous network of support, mentorship, and professional development. Minority educators have high retention rates when given the proper support systems, and paras from the community tend to stay there.

• Provide alternative compensation. Commit to meaningful financial support such as scholarship support for teacher prep programs, housing allowances, and signing bonuses. Loan forgiveness is a key incentive for minority educators.

For More: E-mail Hudson at Mjrhudson@aol.com, or visit www.rnt.org.

Q & A
Invest in New Teachers

Mary Hatwood Futrell served as president of the NEA from 1984 to 1990. She is now dean of the George Washington University School of Education and Human Development and president of Education International, a federation of organizations representing 23 million educators in 170 countries.

Futrell is a strong advocate of quality professional development throughout a teacher's career.

What was your own experience as a new teacher?
I was lucky. I had an excellent mentor, Flora Chase. We were both in business education at Parker Gray High School in Alexandria, Virginia. She took a lot of time with me.

The district didn't do much to make that happen, but she observed me. And we talked a lot in the evenings and during planning periods about how I was doing and what would help me as a teacher.

If not for her, it would have been much more difficult for me. We're still friends today.

How should new teacher induction be organized?
The new teacher should be paid a full salary, but should not have a full teaching load--maybe half or three-quarters. The new teacher should have opportunities to be involved in well-developed programs that will shape and cultivate that teacher's expertise, and help the teacher develop confidence. The master teacher, too, should have release time, and should be paid to be a mentor. Induction should be seen as an investment.

This is what happens in other professions, such as law and medicine. Doctors don't just come in and treat people. Neither do nurses.

We find that when new teachers have support from master teachers in their schools, they stay longer and adjust better. They're more confident and more successful.

What's the impact on students when districts don't invest in new-teacher induction?
We lose a lot of good teachers, and the turnover causes instability in schools. Especially in urban and rural schools, many of the children end up being taught by people who are not certified because so many trained teachers leave.