Retaining Teachers in New York City Public Schools
Laura Mourino had been teaching math at a large neighborhood school in Queens for twelve years when she finally decided to leave. The school had been made part of the Renewal program, an initiative by Mayor Bill de Blasio to improve the city’s lowest-performing schools. With the program came a change of administration — the fifth such change in the time Mourino had been there. The new principal came in with an approach that Mourino described as “a little bit too militant.”
“She tried to impose her style on us,” said Mourino. “Some teachers were not used to doing this. We would fail kids and she would pressure us to reconsider the grades. A lot of [teachers] were also getting unsatisfactory ratings that were unmerited.”
Mourino knew she could not thrive in that environment and applied to work at Harvest Collegiate High School, a relatively small progressive high school located near Union Square. Here, Mourino found a place where both teachers and students were thriving. The school is part of District 2, which includes some of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods and some its most highly selective schools. But Harvest does not screen its students based on their grades. Instead, it prioritizes low-income students, with 65 percent of its students identifying as economically disadvantaged. The student body is diverse: 70 percent are from Hispanic and African-American backgrounds.
Mourino is now in her seventh year of teaching at Harvest. Here, she said, the principal, Kate Burch, has cultivated a culture of transparency and inclusion that makes teachers feel valued.
There are multiple reasons why teachers decide to stay or leave a given school. But studies on teacher turnover and attrition rates consistently show that poor working conditions are often at the top of the list for leaving. These poor conditions are usually a combination of factors: an unsupportive administration, lack of collaboration among staff, and little influence over the teaching. A report released in May this year by the Economic Policy Institute found that even among teachers who remained in the profession, over 40 percent reported some level of dissatisfaction with their jobs.
“Teaching is really hard,” said Julissa Llosa, who teaches special education and arts at Harvest. “I mean, in a day you will have taught 150 students. It’s a lot of energy. It’s overwhelming. I think if you’re not part of a close community where you feel like people have your back, if you feel isolated, there’s no way to take that much work without feeling depleted at the end of the day.”
When Kate Burch started Harvest Collegiate in 2012, she knew teacher quality and retention were key for creating the right learning conditions for her students. Burch designed the school based on her master’s thesis while at Teachers College. She had previously taught at Humanities Preparatory Academy, a small public high school in Chelsea. At Harvest, hiring is a collective decision, where teachers are also on the hiring committee.
“Kids want to learn from someone they feel cared for and inspired by, who makes them feel safe,” said Burch.
Harvest Collegiate occupies the fourth and fifth floors of a building that used to be a department store. In the mornings, Burch is usually cheerfully welcoming the students in the spacious main lobby on the fourth floor. Throughout the day, she is rarely in her office. It is not uncommon to see her in the hallways, deep in conversation with a teacher about students, lesson ideas, or upcoming plans.
Harvest teachers meet every week in subject department teams to discuss and review the curriculum together. Professional development sessions are held every Monday afternoon as part of the Education Department’s requirements, but two years ago Burch and her teachers also decided to create adult advisory groups. Modeled after the school’s student advisory groups, the teacher groups meet regularly to focus on social and emotional support for themselves. Conversations can range from race and inequality to personal struggles.
According to Roberta Kang, Director at the Center for the Professional Development of Teachers at Teachers College, such spaces are important for teachers to feel part of a professional community and thrive.
“Schools that are able to create those opportunities for teachers to take a break from their classroom, really sit and talk with one another to co-plan together or to collaborate together, are places where teachers are able to take their intellect, put that to good use and plan the next steps of their work,” said Kang.
But in situations where there is tension between administrators and teachers, most of the time, said Kang, those challenges are often about two educators who have very different values and different principles.
“One of the things we advise teachers to do is to, prior to accepting a position, to really understand the mission and vision of the school,” she said. “Those philosophical differences can be hard to uncover at first, but once we can acknowledge them, then both parties have a hard question to answer: am I going to change my philosophy in order to get along, or do I need to find another working environment?”
These philosophical differences often arise from opinions about how education should be carried out. A teacher who might be more accustomed to traditional methods and is motivated by seeing her students do well on tests would struggle in a school designed for project-based learning. On the other hand, an environment where the principal emphasizes testing and strict discipline would not be ideal for a teacher who wants to create her own curriculum, design projects, and be on a first-name basis with her students.
“Neither of them is wrong,” said Kang, “but they’re really coming to education from two different perspectives.”
At Harvest, students address teachers by their first names. The school is also part of the New York Performance Standards Consortium, which means it is exempted from standardized testing. Kang said testing is a source of tremendous pressure on many teachers.
John McCrann, who is the union chapter leader for the school and teaches math, said that while being part of the Consortium helps in allowing for more creativity and flexibility, he doesn’t think it is the only reason for the high teacher retention rate. Even within the Consortium, he said, there are principals who might take a more traditional approach to how students learn. What Harvest does well is that “teachers are given a lot of control over what we teach and how we teach it,” he said.
It might be easy to dismiss Harvest Collegiate as an outlier, but it highlights the myriad factors that have to align for good working conditions for teachers. Both McCrann and Mourino also pointed to the fact that the location of the school in midtown Manhattan, where it is well-connected to train lines, has helped Harvest attract more teachers as well. McCrann, who taught at a Bronx school before joining Harvest in 2013, said, “The school that I was at could be the greatest school on the planet, but the reality is you’re not going to want to teach at that location.”
Burch’s approach to hiring and retaining teachers seems like it has had a positive effect on student outcomes: in New York City city public schools, the average graduation rate is 75.9 percent; last year at Collegiate, that number was 92 percent.
“When I was at my traditional school, there was no appreciation, no recognition of your work,” said Mourino. “You didn’t feel like you mattered or like you were actually educating students in any meaningful way.”
And even when there are disagreements at Harvest, Mourino said the teachers know they can speak honestly with Burch about how they feel.
“I can give you a million reasons why I don’t leave,” said Mourino. “But have there been times I thought about it? Of course, I’m only human. But I don’t leave because here, I feel like I am part of a family. Here, we have choice. Kate involves us in decisions and she values our pedagogical styles. There’s not a single other place I would go to where I would have that kind of independence and inclusion from my boss.”
