The National Education Policy Center recently posted a study of how teachers choose their workplace. The study was conducted in San Antonio, where about one quarter of students attend charter schools. Why do some teachers choose to teach in public schools while others prefer charter schools?
School choice involves different choosers—students, their parents, and of course the schools themselves. But teachers choose too when they decide where to work. Increasingly, this process involves deciding whether to work or not to work in the charter sector.
A recently published study by Andrene J. Castro of Virginia Commonwealth University, NEPC Fellow Huriya Jabbar of the University of Southern California, and Sebastián Núñez Miranda of the University of Texas at Austin takes a closer look at this process via interviews with 23 prospective or new-to-the-profession teachers and 22 current educators about their job searches in San Antonio, Texas, where about a quarter of the students attend charters. The semi-structured interviews were conducted pre-pandemic, during the 2016-17 school year. The study was published last summer in Education Policy Analysis Archives, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal.
The goal of the research was to examine “how choice policy contexts alter teachers’ professional identities as they search for jobs,” a topic that had received only limited attention from researchers. The researchers describe how:
[T]he job search is not separate or isolated from teachers’ professional identity, rather it is a critical juncture where teachers evaluate their professional identity as they make choices about the sector—charter or TPSs [traditional public schools]—and/or school organizations that best align with their professional beliefs and values.
Teachers, the researchers write, “largely construct professional identities to match positions in the primary sector, that is, jobs in TPSs, which typically offer greater stability, higher salaries, and predictable career paths.” These qualities of TPSs appealed to most of the interviewees.
As one interviewee noted,
Even though they [charter schools] tell you that you’re going to get paid more, in all reality once you sign the contract, the pay is not what you’re told at the beginning of signing the contract. It’s a little more frustrating because I feel like you have to fight more . . . I think it’s more of a challenge now than working at the regular big public schools.
Some interviewees also indicated that charter schools were not in line with their professional identities or values. “I’m not really interested in charter schools,” one job seeker said. “I feel like the public schools, there’s a lot of areas that we need to improve. That’s where I feel like I can do the most good.”
For these and other reasons, the interviewees in this study typically turned to charters as a last resort, explaining that charters tended to pay less, offer temporary contracts, and lack transparency. But some interviewees embraced a charter school career, responding to a different professional identity.
Teach for America participants emerged as a group favoring charters over TPSs. They perceived that the values of TFA aligned with the missions of specific charter management organizations. Also, a few younger teachers who were interviewed felt more comfortable at charters because they tended to have younger staffs, with many teachers who were new to the profession.
Teachers also applied to charters because they believed that those charters provided higher levels of autonomy, better opportunities to learn a lot in a short period of time, and the chance to receive pay raises and promotions more rapidly than might be possible in the traditional public school system. One interviewee noted:
You can be stuck in the same teaching position for seven years [at a TPS] as opposed to [charter school] where if you’re really just doing a rock-solid job at what you’re doing now you can be within mid-management principal-ship within five, 10 years.
One additional finding from the study has clear policy implications for those hoping for cross-fertilization and sharing of ideas and experiences between the sectors: Prospective teachers were more open to switching sectors than were current teachers seeking to change jobs.
“To some extent, we found these segmented identities led to sector entrapment, constraining teachers’ notions, both individually and collectively, regarding what it means to be a teacher in either sector, rather than the profession at large,” the researchers conclude.
Large public school districts often have extremely time-consuming and onerous application processes and truly insane requirements to be fulfilled within the first one-to-three years on the job in order to retain one’s position. Many years ago, I taught middle- and high-school English. I then had a long and distinguished career in the educational textbook industry. Then, at the end of my career, I decided to spend a few more years teaching high school in order to apply, myself, my lifetime of learning about ELA in the classroom.
When I first applied to the Hillsborough Country Schools, I spent an hour and a half filling out the online application. Then, a glitch in the software erased all my data. The application required information from schools I hadn’t taught at in thirty years, some of which no longer existed. Unlike applications in the business world, their system required written recommendations sent by snail mail, which was crazy. People are used to doing this stuff quickly and easily via email. The rules and eligibility for attending their job fairs were ludicrous, and I was denied the ability to attend based on a technicality (some item they had not received yet). The process required going back and forth to their offices several times, in addition to completing the ridiculous online application. And there was no means by which I could communicate via their application process that I had written and edited textbooks in literature, composition, grammar, the research paper. reading, speech, and theatre used in schools across the country and so was eminently qualified to teach English. The fact that I had spent years traveling the country speaking to teacher groups that considered me an expert in the field was IRRELEVANT to the process. They had their rigid procedure, and that was that. It was a bureaucratic procedure out of Kafka.
Then, once I had the job, I had to take, in order to retain it, 300 hours of mind-numbingly stupid ESL “training” (roll over, sit up, good boy) online. The “trainings” were characterized by poor grammar, disorganization, and factual inaccuracies. After each session, we were supposed to write reflections on these lessons. I took to writing lengthy corrections of the enormous numbers of errors in grammar, usage, mechanics, reasoning, and facts in these lessons and submitting those as my reflections. In addition, during the first year, I had to keep a huge notebook of selections and responses documenting my instruction over the year–800 pages of this junk, as if, as a full-time teacher, I had time for that. I also had to take no less than SEVEN tests at a Pearson testing center and pay for the privilege of doing that despite the fact that there probably wasn’t a teacher in their system that wasn’t using one or more of MY textbooks–ones I had written and/or edited. In other words, I was made to jump through these hoops like an absolute beginner, a tyro.
The whole thing was ridiculously bureaucratic and demeaning and inhumane and wasteful of time and resources.
Back when I started teaching, you made up a resume, went to interview in person with a principal, and that was that.
ALL THIS BS represents ZERO IMPROVEMENT over the system that prevailed back then. Little wonder that young people are saying “not a chance” to the prospect of teaching these days. Why jump through all those hoops only to be paid terribly and to be micromanaged/to have ZERO autonomy? When I returned to teaching, I was earning literally a third of what I did in my previous corporate job. A third.
A fifth. I was earning a fifth of what I did in the last year at the corporate job (with an educational publisher).
Do not read this sentence.
Oh, I left out the part where the online application required for its completion something that one could not do until one had completed the online application–a complete Catch-22. Totally Kafkaesque. It was just like James Thurber’s comment about watching people cut down elm trees for the building of an institution for people driven crazy by the cutting down of elm trees.
Do not read this sentence.
In each of these cases, when the online application required information no longer available because the school no longer existed and when it required me to do something that could not be done until the application was completed, I had a series of emails to the Hillsborough Department of Education to try to resolve the issues with the online app, and these were completely unsatisfactory. The folks who responded were insulting and refused to acknowledge that the issues existed. In order to resolve them, I had to drive to the Department of Education headquarters and speak to people until I finally could find someone who could help me. I think that altogether, I took four trips to resolve the issues that arose.
I don’t call them adminimals for nothing!
The online application was literally undoable as constructed. In order to complete the application, you had to have done x. In order to have done x, you had to have completed the application. It was bizarre.
It’s been a while, so I don’t remember a lot of the details, but it was a totally Kafkaesque procedure. It literally took months. Applying for a C-level job with a major publishing house was far, far less onerous.
Good morning Diane and everyone,
Bob, I’ve had the same experience. I once worked at a large public school as a full-year replacement for a teacher on leave. That teacher resigned and her job came open. In the application process, I had to do a demo lesson and then I had 4-5 interviews. Mind you, I had worked there for a year and had an unannounced observation by the principal. I had no complaints against me from parents or students, teachers or administrators. To get the original job as her replacement, I had to do a demo lesson and have 3-4 interviews. I also had about 25 years of experience as a teacher. I didn’t get the job. I have no idea what they were looking for in a teacher.
I wrote that the online application took one and a half hours and then it crashed, deleting all my data.
It was more like an entire afternoon. I was being conservative.
In order to get a passing score on the required Pearson general teaching test, one had to pretend that one was a true believer in test-based education reform. Only by that means could one get the “correct” answers. I knew what they wanted to hear and so did fine on it. But I resented it. And I resented paying for it.
The last thing I want to do is to send money to bloodsuckers at Pear$on.
Large, ugly, Kafkaesque bureaucracies. Making personal decisions. Making curriculum decisions. Making accountability decisions.
WE REALLY NEED TO RETURN TO THE DAYS OF BUILDING-LEVEL AUTONOMY.
There’s a book to be written, here, on how bad things have gotten in large school systems.
I had a teacher friend a long time ago who loved to point out all the ways that schools were Kafkaesque. She was delightful and quite perspicacious.
One could write a lot of books on that one. Let me give you an example. In my last teaching job, we were required to write on the whiteboard, the following information for each separate class:
Class Title
Date
Standard(s) Covered
Bellwork/Bell Ringer Activity
Lesson Vocabulary
Essential Question
Higher-order Thinking Question
Learner Outcome
Homework
Exit Activity
In that order. This was doable for folks who had one or two preps, but I had FIVE separate ones. So, I had to do this for FIVE classes. I also had to do car line duty before my first-period class (all teachers did). So, I would have to arrive at school AN HOUR EARLY in order to write out this information on THREE WHITEBOARDS for FIVE CLASSES. And it had to appear IN THAT ORDER. I also had to keep in a three-ring binder for each prep all my lesson plans. These had to be prepared on a 3-page form, printed, and placed in the binder for ready inspection. They also had to be submitted to the office at the beginning of the week.
So, one day I am teaching, and the AP pops in unannounced. She goes to check my binder to make sure that all my lesson plans for the day are there. They were. Then she examines my whiteboards and exits. A few minutes later, an email pops up on my classroom computer. The AP has put a warning in my file because one of the items on one of my whiteboards was out of order. It was there, but it was in the wrong order.
One tiny example of the endless bullshit.
cx: large, Kafkaesque bureaucracies making personnel decisions
Let me add that I wrote and edited and typeset, under contract, the entirely revised second edition of Daily Language Skills, which became a huge bestseller and introduced the concept of bellwork to educators nationwide. So, here I was, the person who made this stuff nationally known, being put on Warning by this idiot AP because I had written the lesson vocabulary before the bellwork on my whiteboard. Maddening. Utterly exasperating. Brazenly impudent, discourteous, disrespectful, ill-bred, uncollegial.
cx: Daily Oral Language. The edition was called Daily Oral Language Plus.
Ahhhh…the irony and the agony, Bob! 🙂
Much of the bureaucracy you encountered is precisely the reason teacher friends support conservatives in politics. They perceive, rightly or not, that all this bureaucracy is related to college education departments. Since college was the place they had some of their preconceived notions of society challenged, they take experiences like yours to prove the intellectual bankruptcy of higher education. I think their logic is wrong, but I get the frustration with the educational brain trust, which seems to try to micro-manage the world.
Another example. We were issued at the beginning of the year a green gradebook and a green attendance book. At the beginning of each period, we were supposed to take attendance and enter it into the attendance book. Then we were supposed to fill out a slip with the names of absent students and send it to the office. Then we were supposed to enter the attendance into our teacher portal online using our classroom computer. Then, at the end of the day, we were suppose to write the names and periods of absent students on a form hanging in the teacher’s mailbox room. Then, at the end of the nine weeks, we were supposed to fill out every absence for the 9th-week period on computer-readable bubble sheets. So, that’s five times that we had to enter the same attendance information. FIVE SEPARATE TIMES.
How does this stuff happen? Well, some administrator at the school or district level gets a brainstorm, and a mandate goes out to teachers. These pile up over the years, mandate after mandate, with none of the old ones being ended. And none of the geniuses running things ever stops to do the simple calculations of the amount of teacher time that any of this nonsense will take.
All this occurs because “some administrator at the school or district level gets a brainstorm, and a mandate goes out to teachers.”
This is precisely the reason. The same people having these brainstorms have more important work to do, but their attention is focused on things that save them labor. Taking roll multiple times is a good example. You can waste mountains of time. I am convinced that the “bell ringer” activities that are so popular came about to fight off wasted on such tripe
In my 25-year career as a writer and editor of print and online texts, I introduced a number of major innovations that became standard practice in schools across the United States. In schools across the U.S., people are routinely doing, as part of their English language arts instruction, stuff that I introduced. For example, I wrote what is, to my knowledge, the first outline for a basal K-12 textbook series with a Critical Thinking strand. That series became wildly successful, and a year later, EVERYONE had such a strand, and every education conference had Critical Thinking sessions. I have many more stories just like that one. During my career, I planned, edited, and wrote enormous parts of many of the bestselling basal textbooks in ELA from the major educational publishers. My publications list runs to ten pages, single spaced, and many of the items on it are entire textbook series, ones that everyone here would know. So, WITH THAT BACKGROUND, I had to submit to this idiocy. I had to take months to navigate the application process to teach freaking high-school English, which I had already done in the past, and years more to complete idiotic requirements like the mind-numbing stupid ESL “trainings,” which appeared to have been written by remedial 9th-grade students. And in order to teach, I had to submit to micromanagement by APs with a tiny, tiny fraction of my expertise and experience. It was like having Jim Jordan tell Ed Whitten how to do physics. And this was the case for all my colleagues. Their expertise was counted for naught. Department meetings were solely about reading out administrative mandates. This is what our profession has come to.
Yup. Why any creative and intelligent person would submit to being monitored like a mouse in a maze is beyond me!
Exactly, Mamie! Being a teacher today is demeaning in the extreme. I never saw anything remotely this demeaning in the business world. Teachers are treated with breathtaking disrespect and, as I say, micromanaged in detail. NO ONE DOES HIS OR HER BEST WORK IN CONDITIONS OF LOW AUTONOMY.
Imagine that have gotten to a certain age and need to employ a housekeeper, but when he arrives, you follow him around and correct everything he does–you tell him how to wipe that table, how to move that vacuum cleaner, blah blah blah. Nothing he does goes without microdirection from you.
How long do you think that he would continue to work for you?
Well observed, Roy!
I think the results of this study would have been different if the study had been conducted in areas where the public school teachers have unions to represent them. In all of Texas where the study focused and in most of the South, unions have very little power. While there may be room for improvement in states where teachers are supported by a union, I think there would be somewhat different responses from teachers that had a union that ensured the employee had due process rights, a union backed contract and defined benefits.
Teacher attrition rates at charter schools are sky high. Unclear to me why this wasn’t mentioned in the NEPC brief.
Part of why this happens: they boot any teacher who has the slightest issue with anything that they are doing.
I taught at a high school for 33 years, having spent five previous years in three districts teaching junior high school. A few years after I retired, I was given the opportunity to do a “long-term” substitute job at my old high school. After filling out the on-line “paperwork”, I found I was required to submit to a formal Criminal Background Investigation through my local police department. I have no problem with a new hire undergoing a CBI; however, I had (a) taught at the high school for 33 years; (b)had just gone through a CBI for the National Science Foundation in order to go to Washington to receive my Presidential Award, and (c) held an identification card from Homeland Security because I am a member of the US Coast Guard Auxiliary- the volunteer branch of the Coast Guard- and had just been through a CBI for that. All of this wasn’t enough for the school dept…I had to submit to another one at which even the police detective doing the CBI commented he didn’t think it was needed, especially after I showed him my CG Auxiliary ID card. While these weren’t equivalent to what Bob Shepherd went through for his teaching job, it is another example of the insane beaurocracy prevalent in today’s school departments. While we need to protect our students, sometimes it really is overkill for the future teachers.
I worked at the local university with future teachers for several years after retiring – I would not encourage young people to go into the teaching profession these days. It is not worth the grief and aggravation.
YES! And we retired teachers, in a pub together, could regale one another until the wee hours with stories of such absurdities and still not scratch the surface. Thanks for sharing this, Susan.
A bit tangential- Politico reported about a poll examining views about masculinity and political party support. One of the questions solicited input about agreement or disagreement with the statement, “Traditional family structures with a wage-earning father and homemaking mother best equips children to succeed.” 52% of GOP agreed, 16% of Democrats agreed.
So, success for girls is homemaking? In this context, it can be seen why a career like teaching that advances women professionally would be undermined by Republicans. And, it explains why the Taliban eliminates schooling for girls. And, it may explain a rationale for same sex schools in right wing American religious sects.
We are three nations. The older Democratic one. The older Republican one. And the kids coming up. The second is utterly out of step. It’s the Greying Old Party. Suggested campaign slogan: Back to the Future; We Mean Way, Way, Way Back.
Linda: like most questions, this one was loaded. Traditional households would no doubt prepare students for success. One parent to work for a sustainable wage and the other to organize educational opportunities and ride herd over the kids. Who gets to do that?
Most parents of stable household must work to provide income necessary for real educational opportunities. Often, even though both parents work, there is still not ample money for education of the kids. Sounds like there was something wrong with the question to begin with
Agree Roy, based on other questions cited in the poll- however, the question I summarized in my comment, whether it was framed as an ideal or not, or, if there was a context, the result is still alarming.
The traditional Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver nuclear family with Mom and Dad and the kids isolated together in a house in the suburbs accounts for what, 19 percent of households in the U.S. now? But people imagine that this bizarre and almost always, in time, profoundly unhappy arrangement is normal. It’s not. It’s not how most people lived for most of human history.
A walk at 4:30?
Sure!
Just kidding.
But enjoy!
I’m a retired Florida public HS teacher for 33 years & 4 years in the DROP program (look it up). With that DROP money & my Florida state pension, I’m doing pretty well. Despite all of the negative aspects of education & teaching in Florida since the Jeb Bush years of the early 2000’s, I must commend the nice retirement system we have here—at least until some moronic, Oligarch-owned legislators attempt to take it away somehow.
The right wing has been working against the state pensions for some time. It’s a national effort to undermine them, implemented at the state level. The scheming continues. Years ago, Joshua Rauh ended up in controversy for his pension research which critics called flawed (it’s conclusions lined up with the aim of the Koch’s State Policy Network).
Enron ‘s John Arnold is known for his attacks against pensions. After Enron, he had a hedge fund.
His Arnold Foundation worked with a “Pew” organization to tell their negative version of pensions at the state capitols.The campaign against pensions benefitted from Pew’s positive reputation for research. If I recall correctly, the Pew group traveling with Rauh had “charitable trust” in the name). The charitable trust side is separate from the well known research side. Rauh et. al took their dog and pony show to the state capitols. Eventually, legislators found out that there might be an agenda behind the Pew group that visited.
I think Rauh moved from his university employer to Stanford. He may have/have had a connection to SIEPR which critics identify as the Stanford Institute for the Evisceration of People’s Retirement. It’s possible he has/had links to the right wing Hoover Institute located at Stanford?
Recently, Arnold renamed his foundation, Arnold Ventures.
Teachers choose charters for one reason only. They are not good enough.
I don’t see any comments about the differences in certificationa/credentialing that may be a factor in someone choosing to teach at a charter school. They often have more “flexible” regulations regarding who they can hire, and many times hire teachers “out of area,” meaning they may not meet state regulations for licensing in a specific academic area. Was this aspect addressed in the study?safety