Teacher Turnover in Early Childhood Education

Work & Family: High teacher turnover can affect preschoolers
Thursday, August 31, 2006
By Sue Shellenbarger, The Wall Street Journal

Carol Pilgrim's three-year-old son Jackson enjoyed a warm, caring relationship with his teacher at a child-care center -- until she quit her job.

Upset by the series of substitutes who followed, Jackson started crying when he arrived each day, says Ms. Pilgrim, who lived in Champaign, Ill., at the time. Although he had behaved well before, he began having temper tantrums. The problem, she suspected, was the loss of the teacher.

Starting new classes in the fall is change enough for most small children. But an estimated one in three kids in child-care centers and preschools will face yet another, unplanned transition during the school year: A teacher or classroom aide will quit his or her job to move on to a better-paying opportunity.

The problem calls for better planning by child-care facilities and greater awareness and activism among parents, to minimize the risks of upheaval in kids' lives. Some 57 percent of three-, four- and five-year-olds in the U.S. attend preschool or child-care centers, federal data show.

While there's no recent national research on teacher turnover at child-care centers and preschools, several experts I interviewed estimated that 20 percent to 40 percent of teachers quit their jobs each year -- two to four times the turnover in public K-12 schools, which are scrambling for teachers as well. The rate is lower in state-financed prekindergartens that have been set up in a few states, including Oklahoma and Georgia. But these programs still serve only a small fraction of all children 5 and under.

"Teacher turnover is one of the most serious and complicated issues in early-childhood education," says Jeffrey Capizzano, public-policy and research director for Teaching Strategies, Washington, D.C., a publishing and training concern. "Low pay, poor benefits and a stressful work environment combine to create a turnover rate far higher" than many other occupations.

Average pay is $10 an hour, and only one-third of child-care staffers get health insurance through their jobs, says a study released in 2005 by Keystone Research, Harrisburg, Pa.; the Economic Policy Institute, Washington; and others.

The impact on a child of losing a beloved teacher depends on the depth of the child's attachment, says Stanley Greenspan, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at George Washington University Medical School. If the child spends only a few hours a week with the teacher, "it's a loss, but like an aunt moving out of town," he says. But if the teacher has cared for the child for long hours over an extended period, the departure can trigger despondency and impulsive behavior, and may feed a lifelong fear of loved ones' leaving. Parents can avert emotional damage by offering extra comfort, support and reassurance.

There has been little or no improvement in turnover in recent years, says Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, a New Brunswick, N.J., nonprofit. Studies show well-trained and educated child-care staffers tend to stick with their jobs longest. However, the Keystone study found teacher qualifications in child care are falling; 30 percent of child-care center staffers have only a high-school diploma or less, up from 25 percent in 1985. And only 30 percent have college degrees, down from 43 percent in 1985.

Many facilities aren't prepared to handle turnover, says Angela Wiley, an associate professor of family life at the University of Illinois, Urbana, who has studied the problem. After Julia McGill enrolled her son in a Charlottesville, Va., child-care center several years ago, he had four different teachers in just three weeks. Every time she or her husband asked, "Where's Miss Suzie?" the original teacher, they got a different answer, says Ms. McGill: "She had an appointment in town; she was sick; her mother was sick; she had a family emergency."

Frustrated, Ms. McGill withdrew her son and quit her job to free-lance as a journalist. "It was an awful experience," she says.

A few states are making headway on the problem. A North Carolina initiative offering incentives to teachers to take training and stay in the field has been replicated in some other states. In most California counties, the "CARES" program, funded partly by a tobacco tax, pays stipends to early-childhood teachers for getting training and degrees; follow-up studies show reduced turnover among participants. The programs, however, have been able to reach only a relatively few teachers.

The best defense for parents is a good offense. Experts say parents should look for programs that pay teachers well -- a difficult strategy, of course, for parents already paying as much as they can afford.

It's important to support training and incentive programs for teachers. Knowledge Learning Corp., Portland, Ore.-based operator of 2,120 child-care centers, closes its centers for a full day twice a year for paid teacher training, says Toni Jaffe, senior vice president, human resources.
Ask if your child-care center has a plan for helping children through a teacher's departure; in an Illinois survey of 108 child-care centers, Dr. Wiley found only 59 percent had such a plan.

Ideally, the teacher who is leaving should be the one who tells the children, Dr. Wiley says. And each classroom should have more than one adult permanently assigned, to provide some consistency.

In some cases, suggesting supports for kids falls to parents. After Ms. Pilgrim, now a nurse practitioner in Boston, learned from the director at Jackson's child-care center that his well-liked teacher wouldn't be returning, she insisted the director bring the teacher back for a day to spend a little time with the kids. The director did so, Ms. Pilgrim says, and the children got to say goodbye -- seemingly a small thing, but easy enough to arrange, and a great comfort to Jackson.

Comment: This is the number one problem in the early childhood theatre. The few times we have had a teacher quit have been under the most dire circumstances. Good places try to keep their teachers. Salaries, paid vacation days, sick leave, personal days are all a part of hiring. The problem occurs when these things are used as weapons against the school. At that point, a decision has to be made about what we are doing as a "school." Do the needs of one teacher outweigh the performance of a whole school, and does the investing in a new teacher outweigh the problems of turning over a classroom.

We believe at the Garden School that we should all receive the same pay for the same work. We have fought for this standard for years and for the most part, it works.