EPISODE FORTY-SIX
AGENT JAIME BONATO (TEACHER ATTRITION)
Your lesson, should you choose to accept it, is to examine the factors contributing to, and find strategies that teachers, administrators and districts can use to prevent, teacher attrition. The special agent assigned to help you with this task is Jaime Bonato of Sacramento, California.
The statistic that I’ve heard, and you may have as well, is that 50% of teachers leave the profession in the first five years, though as we’ll discuss, this number is hard to verify. Even if it may be as low as 30%, the turnover for new educators is still higher than other professions such as engineers or even lawyers, and this rate of attrition represents a loss of both money and student learning for districts. The resulting staff shortages are also often distributed unevenly, with students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds being affected the most. Fortunately, there are those who care deeply about keeping teachers teaching, with Jaime Bonato being one of them. Jaime has her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership with a focus on new teacher attrition and retention, and she is also a working teacher and mentor, which made her the perfect person to talk to about this issue. My hope is that this episode can help districts, administrators, and colleagues better retain new teachers on staff, reassure new teachers that they are not alone in feeling overwhelmed, and perhaps prepare those thinking about going into the profession for the challenges ahead.
In this episode we discuss:
The main factors that are leading to teachers leaving the profession (it’s not the money!)
How the traditional school system is set up so that the beginning years of teaching are often the most difficult
Strategies that districts, teacher prep programs, administrators, mentors, and colleagues can use to reduce the attrition rate
You can find out more or contact Jaime through her Website, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Links mentioned in the episode:
