Exploring connections between working conditions and teacher retention and productivity

Organizations, regardless of their domain, must contend with two fundamental issues in order to achieve their goals and remain competitive: employee retention and productivity (Offermann & Gowing, 1990). Employee turnover poses an additional challenge in the educational sector in that it is not distributed uniformly across all schools, but tends to be concentrated in urban and high-poverty schools (Jacob, 2007). In this dissertation, I examine whether schools in which teachers report positive working conditions demonstrate, on average, lower levels of teacher turnover and higher student achievement outcomes. In order to observe whether this is the case, I conducted this case study in one large urban school district in North Carolina that serves approximately 140,000 students in 160 schools. I used measures derived from teachers' self-reported responses to the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey (NCTWC) describing their schools' working conditions.

In general, I found that teacher scores on the factors describing working conditions from the NCTWC instrument were related to both a teacher's expressed intention to leave her current teaching assignment and to actual teacher-departure decisions. Elementary-school teachers' intended and actual departures were related to their school's level of perceived Professionalism. The teacher factor scores that predicted intended teacher mobility for middle- and high-school teachers, however, were different from those that predicted actual departure decisions. Furthermore, the effects of the scores of the working-conditions factors on teacher mobility were not different for teachers who had obtained high estimates of aggregate student value-added in their classes and those with lower value-added estimates. Finally, the degree to which teachers believe their school leaders established clear expectations for student behavior, and upheld those standards, were related to high school-level value-added scores in the elementary and middle schools. Although the findings from my research cannot be construed as causal, they may provide tentative policy implications for this district. If teachers are found to leave schools with poor working conditions at a higher rate than less effective teachers, then district officials could target resources to improving the conditions at those schools with the poorest working conditions in an effort to stem undesirable teacher turnover.