Teacher migration from high-performing middle schools: A case study

Abstract

I recently conducted fieldwork to explore the dynamics of teacher migration and understand how it relates to teachers' perceptions and attitudes. The research was conducted through the eyes of a sixth grade language arts/social studies' teacher working in a middle school I will refer to as PLC (Professional Learning Community) Middle School. By spending extensive time and conducting multiple interviews with the teacher and other staff members, I was able to explore some of the reasons and conditions why teachers leave schools, particularly high-performing schools to teach in other high-performing schools. Attending weekly meetings at all levels and content areas with migrating teachers, combined with interviews and document collection, allowed me to further understand the gap that exists between what a high-performing school professes to be and how it actually is perceived by its own teachers. This gap is what proves to be disconcerting and frustrating for teachers who are satisfied with teaching but consider relocation to meet further personal and professional challenges. The research took a look at a high-performing middle school from the inside out. High-performing teachers were leaving or transferring to high-performing schools in the Wake County Public School System, Raleigh, North Carolina, the 23rd largest in the country (National School Boards Association, 2006). The departure of a teacher from a lower performing school seems logical where federal and state demands increase every year and resources are limited. However, the slow exodus of quality teachers from higher performing schools puzzled me as a researcher. The area was scarcely studied in depth as is teacher migration since teachers leaving schools to work in other schools are merely replaced, not causing a vacancy in the system. In order to further understand the migration issue from high-performing schools I needed to work from inside a high-performing school and spend time with and talk to migrating teachers. My primary focus of interest was what is called organizational or collective efficacy (Bandura, 1977), the collective level of high performance by organizations. The issue of teacher migration was the symptom of a greater concern, that of the internal structure and performance of the school organization. However the greater problem lay beyond, with the school teachers as an aggregate, that is, the organization. What were contributing factors to the teacher exodus? My obvious focus was on the inner dynamics of the organization since as a "school" the outer surface revealed high-performing status yet internally things were not right since people, many high qualified, experienced teachers were leaving. Most urban secondary public schools house more than one hundred employees, three quarters of them teachers. A typical middle school in my former district employed some 75 teachers with varying styles and backgrounds. Yet in five years almost 50% of those teachers were gone, many to other schools even though the schools they left were deemed "high-performing" by the school district. By "high- performing" I refer to the North Carolina state standard of end-of-year exams where a school reaches 90% or more of their student population (tested) at grade level or above (Department of Public Instruction, 2005). Utilizing the social cognitive theory of Albert Bandura (1977) which examines how social factors influence how we create or construct our experiences, I researched the school world of a middle school teacher, observing how he and other individual teachers worked together as a group. Social cognitive theory examines the self and organizational efficacy of teachers and schools as transformative agents. Teachers with high abilities do not necessarily perform well collectively or as an organization if specific cognitive, behavioral, and environmental conditions are not in place to support their collaborative work efforts. The study of these three conditions within the school organization provided me with an in depth look at how teachers feel or believe themselves to be validated. This study can help guide future research efforts towards examining the criteria that enables a school organization to understand the designation high-performing according to authentic and local site-based school needs, not only state performance standards. The study may contribute to our greater understanding of why teachers opt to migrate from successful schools. © Copyright 2007 by Academic Leadership.