After months of working with students online, Virginia teachers were apparently happy to get back to work.
“Following the March 2020 shutdown there was this belief among teachers that the world has been turned upside down. We need to come together for the kids,” recalls UVA Professor Luke Miller. His team found teacher retention hit a new low the following year with more than 3,600 vacancies in Virginia classrooms.
“There are folks who need to move because of their family situations. There are folks who stop out for a couple of years maybe to care for a loved one or raise a child. There are also people who retire or move on to other jobs,” Miller says.
Those reasons aside, the average pay for public school teachers has not gone up since 2002 when you adjust for inflation. In fact, they’re making 9% less, and Miller says some are contending with a new attitude toward educators.
“Pitting parents against teachers, rather than seeing them work together as partners.”
The UVA research team found nearly 30% of high school teachers did not feel respected, and 56% of those surveyed in 2022 felt conditions in their schools had gotten worse over the last year.
“We need to think about the conditions that teachers are working in, the support that they feel in terms of their growth and their development, the way in which student behavior is managed, the level of safety they feel in the building," he explains.
He’s also troubled by the fact that teachers of color were even less likely to stick around after the challenges of 2021.
"The decline in retention rates was higher for Black and Hispanic teachers, undermining efforts that the state has taken in the last several years to try to realize some of the benefits of teacher diversity that has been shown in other research."
And he warns it would be a mistake for districts to depend heavily on provisional instructors – people not yet certified to teach.
"Those folks have an additional burden in that while they are learning to become teachers – that first year is a real test -- they are also taking courses to earn their professional license. We’re asking more of them than folks who are coming in fully prepared to be teachers."
Miller says federal dollars have been used to pay retention bonuses and to help teachers pay-off their student loans, but he worries that money -- earmarked for COVID recovery – is running out, and unless there’s on-going support for teachers he fears many more will leave.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
