by Matt Hurt
Last week Jim Bacon published an article about the fact that our teacher vacancy rate problem is not all about salary, and I agree that other factors also contribute to this problem. Jim also posited that “It’s caused by teachers dropping out of the profession because they think their jobs suck,” and recent data seem to support an approximation of this idea.
This spring some of my colleagues and I were able to obtain and investigate the annual School Climate and Working Conditions Survey results from 2023. We specifically focused on the teacher results and were able to confirm a major tenet in the educational world: climate matters!
The survey questions were categorized as indicated in this spreadsheet. There were significant, positive correlations among all of the categories and SOL performance both at the school and the division levels of analysis. Conversely, these correlations were significant and negative with teacher vacancy rates. One singular question — overall, my school is a good place to work and learn — had the greatest overall correlation with both SOL outcomes and teacher vacancy rates. In other words, teachers were less likely to leave divisions in which they wanted to work, and those divisions produced better student outcomes.
Table 1 below attempts to better illustrate these relationships. Most of the questions were presented in a Likert scale with a range of answer options from one to six (six being the most favorable response). These results were aggregated by region, and the statistics below indicate the percentage of possible points for each category of questions. All values are color coded as follows: green most desirable, red least desirable, and yellow most central.
Table 1: Aggregate teacher survey results, teacher vacancy rates, and SOL pass rates by region in 2023.
Unfortunately, climate is one of the most intangible factors that impact teacher vacancy rates and student outcomes. There is no algorithm that an administrator at either the school or division level can employ which is capable of improving climate. Education is a people business and school/division climate can only be effectively addressed by working with all of the people involved and ensuring that their needs are addressed.
What exacerbates this problem significantly is that many leaders may not fully understand the current state of the climate in their school or division. For example, I spent the first four years teaching at a school that I thought was a wonderful school. At the beginning of my fifth year, I was transferred to another school in the division. Once I arrived at the second school, I wondered how I ever survived four years at the previous school, as the difference in school climate was that significant! Similarly, I have known of leaders who moved from a really bad situation to a bad situation. Once there, they felt that they had died and gone to heaven, not having the context to understand how bad their current climate actually was.
Another confounding factor that exacerbates this problem is the commonly held belief that climate is fixed in some schools or divisions by nature of a number of factors such as socioeconomic status of students, the percentage of students who do not speak English in the division, teacher turnover rates, rates of fully licensed teachers, etc. While these challenges certainly make the job tougher, enterprising leaders across the state have found means by which to mitigate them. When one looks into the data to find those positive outliers who face these challenges and are able to buck the trend, one also finds leaders who were able to effectively improve the climate.
In conclusion, school and division climate is critical. It appears that climate is a major leading indicator, whereas teacher vacancy rates and student outcomes are lagging indicators. Making a positive impact on climate is not easy. The only way this can happen is through employing servant leadership and developing and maintaining strong, positive relationships among all stakeholders in the organization: administrators, teachers, parents, students, etc. Leaders who convince their folks that their sole responsibility is to help their folks achieve success are those who make the most significant positive impact on school and division climate.
Matt Hurt is the director of the Comprehensive Instructional Program, based in Wise, Virginia.