UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access

This research brief summarizes interim results from a longitudinal study designed to inform policies aimed at curbing the high rate of attrition from hard-to-staff urban schools. These policies range from ensuring specialized teacher preservice education that willthat will prepare teachers for the challenges ahead to ongoing support for professional development and advancement. As an initial step in assessing the impact of specialized urban teacher preparation on retention, the research brief first summarizes interim cross-sectional retention data and compares it to national norms. Second, the brief outlines an expanded conception of retention that captures movement or migration away from teaching into other professional roles in education. These “role migration” data help inform retention-oriented policies aimed at professionalizing the education workforce. The third section of the brief reports another form of migration—movement away from high-priority schools to less challenging contexts—and suggests the role improved working conditions might play in retaining teachers in the schools that need them most.

This paper presents findings from a study investigating relationships among the reasons for entry, preparation experiences, workplace conditions, and future career plans of fifteen UCLA Teacher Education Program graduates working in urban elementary schools in Los Angeles. More specifically, the analysis examines why these early career teachers stay in or consider leaving the urban schools in which they are teaching. The findings highlight the need to reconceptualize notions of teacher retention in order to better acknowledge and support the development of deep, varied, successful careers in the field of urban education. The data suggest that these urban teachers will remain in urban education if they can adopt multiple education roles inside and outside the classroom, and receive professional support during the whole of their professional careers not just the beginnings of their teaching.

This paper reports on a cross-sectional analysis of survey data collected on over three hundred pre-service teachers enrolled in a specialized teacher education program focused on the preparation of teachers for high-poverty urban schools. Initial analyses indicate that the background characteristics of individuals attracted to the specialized program and their reasons for entering the profession differ from those of pre-service teachers in the population at large. Program entrants tend to be motivated by activist ideals, expressing high levels of initial commitment to teaching and to furthering social justice through education. Laying the groundwork for comparison studies, the author argues that the specialized recruitment of pre-service teachers may combine with specialized teacher preparation to increase the retention of educators in high-poverty, hard-to staff schools.

This paper describes the creation and development of UCLA’s Urban Teacher Education Program in Center X. Specifically, it focuses on Center X’s effort to partner with local communities to create alternative sites of learning for novice teachers. The paper includes the story of Center X graduates working in one Los Angeles elementary school in order to set the stage for the research question: under what conditions do highly-qualified urban teachers remain committed to a career as a social justice educator? The paper reports preliminary retention data from a longitudinal study of Center X graduates and explores the issue of how professional learning communities emerge in urban schools.

While the challenge to retain highly competent teachers affects all schools, the crisis is critical in urban school districts, which historically suffer from a severe shortage of qualified teachers and typically fill vacancies with unlicensed teachers or full-time substitutes. This paper reports research on one effort to curb urban teacher attrition through a non-traditional approach to urban teacher education, induction and ongoing professional development. It combines quantitative data about the retention rates over five years of teachers prepared specifically as “social justice” urban educators with qualitative data about the type of preparation and ongoing support that the teachers experienced. Analyses of these data enable the authors to suggest and probe those elements of preparation and support that may be efficacious in remedying “the revolving door” of urban schools. This single case study attempts to extend the broad literature on teacher retention while establishing some groundwork for further investigations of urban teachers’ learning and career paths. The paper concludes with a proposal to reframe the professionalization of teaching debate to fit the realities of urban schools.