Rate of teachers retiring spikes

“The teachers are telling us  they just can’t deal with the pressure  and instability and all the changes going on.” Pat Cooper, Lafayette Parish School Superintendent “If it continues like this, it is going to be  quite a problem to fill positions.” John Watson, Livingston Parish School Superintendent

The number of teachers retiring jumped more than 25 percent as the administration of Gov. Bobby Jindal pushed an overhaul of public education that changes the rules on how teachers are evaluated, according to the Teachers Retirement System of Louisiana.

The retirements are continuing at a higher than normal rate, according to statistics compiled by the system.

“Superintendents are telling me they are seeing an increase ... even at midterm, people submitting resignations or indicating they are retiring at the end of the school year,” said Michael Faulk, president of the Louisiana Association of School Superintendents.

Lafayette Parish School Superintendent Pat Cooper said, “The teachers are telling us they just can’t deal with the pressure and instability and all the changes going on, what the new legislation calls for.”

“A lot of them are experienced teachers who have been with their systems for a while who are retiring because of the uncertainty of the evaluation system,” Faulk said.

“Teachers in the classroom are working harder than they have ever worked under a lot more pressure and a lot more uncertainty that’s causing many to retire,” Faulk said. “They have been very productive teachers, been a vital part of our schools. They are now coming and saying, ‘We don’t want to do this anymore.’ ”

The number of retirements from public kindergarten through 12th-grade schools has hovered around 2,500 in recent years: 2,598 for the 2011 fiscal year; 2,512 during the previous fiscal year.

But for the 2012 fiscal year that ended June 30 — the most recent complete year — the number retiring from public systems jumped by 697 to 3,295, an increase of 26.8 percent in teacher retirements, according to TRSL statistics.

The pace is even higher for the current fiscal year, which began July 1 and is almost halfway through, with 1,671 retirements charted by TRSL.

“This was not anticipated,” said Lisa Honore, TRSL communications director.

School superintendents say the retirements are putting a strain on school systems.

Livingston Parish School Superintendent John Watson said the parish has been able to find replacements so far. “If it continues like this, it is going to be quite a problem to fill positions,” said Watson.

Lafayette Parish Superintendent Cooper said the retirements are “absolutely” creating problems in having qualified, certified teachers in the classroom, “especially in the high-demand areas: math, science, special ed.”

“It certainly has had a negative effect,” said Cooper.

Superintendent Faulk, of Central, said schools may have to rely on people with alternative certification.

Millie Williams, who is the human resources director for the East Baton Rouge Parish School System, said the parish has noticed a trend toward earlier retirements, especially by more experienced teachers.

“It’s dealing with, of course, the stress of the accountability plan and some people choosing not to work at their age, at this time, to learn the new strategies,” she said.

Williams said the school system anticipated the situation and is conducting additional job fairs. One was held in December; another on Thursday.

Faulk said colleges are producing fewer education graduates, which adds another factor to the equation.

The 2012 state Legislature, which met from March 12 to June 4, approved major changes in state education policy, including new rules making it harder to earn and keep a form of job security called tenure.

The way teachers are evaluated was changed and will be linked to the growth of student performance.

About 55,000 public school teachers will undergo new evaluations this year, and those who fail to meet state standards may lose their jobs in a few years.

Teacher retirement eligibility requirements are: after 20 years of service, a teacher can retire at age 65; 25 years of service, at age 55; and 30 years, at any age with the highest benefit factor if they were a member before July 1, 1999. They can retire at a lower benefit level at age 60 with at least five years of service and at any age with 20 years.

There are other eligibility requirements for those hired after July 1, 1999.

Faulk said a mix of teachers are retiring: “Those who are eligible for retirement. Those who are newer and didn’t realize the magnitude of what they are getting into.” And those with 12 to 14 years of experience, deciding they want to do something different, he said.

Tenure is not a threat to a teacher, Faulk said.

“A good, efficient teacher does not worry about their job. Now, teachers are facing issues they may not have control over on which their performance will be judged,” he said.

The teacher evaluation changes related to tenure, plus a move to nationwide “common core” standards now being phased in, are contributing to the upheaval, parish public school officials said.

As many other states, Louisiana has adopted a plan implementing first-ever national academic standards designed to pave the way for tougher math and English classes. They spell out grade-by-grade items that students need to know.

“It’s a lot to swallow,” said Michelle Blouin-Williams, chief human capital officer for the Jefferson Parish School System. “Any shift or change in a model people have been used to. You can either ride to the next level or not. I’m talking about valuable employees and a lot of experience in what they have been doing.

“We have a lot of dedicated employees who are making decisions, making decisions this is it,” Blouin-Williams said.

Livingston Parish School Superintendent Watson said teachers have been through a number of changes through the years as education policy was altered at the state and national level.

“They have decided they don’t want to go through it again,” Watson said. “This was kind of the nudge.”

Comments

1) Comment by ultimateliberal - 16/01/2013

Test scores are the absolute worst method of evaluating teaching. Personal commitment cannot be measured--I guess evaluations are stupid!

2) Comment by Concerned_Parent - 14/01/2013

I wonder if ScotB would be happy with his employer if they told him, "In order for you to keep your job and POSSIBLY get a raise you must do X, Y, and Z." You then ask, "What is X, Y, and Z and how do I achieve them". The answer is "We don't know, it could be this or it could be something else, just keep working, you are doing it for the love of the job anyway right?" I'm sure you would say "Great, thanks Boss, this is exactly the type of job I've always wanted!"

3) Comment by Concerned_Parent - 14/01/2013

ScotB....please explain the accountability measures to us all. You can't, nobody can, how do you not get that? That is the problem. Not accountability, but the lack of a definition of it.

4) Comment by Concerned_Parent - 14/01/2013

and again!!! How is the word c followed by r and then a ending with a p, a reason to wack my comment but you continue to allow this other person to post a link to a "work from home" scam site?

5) Comment by Concerned_Parent - 14/01/2013

****Comment Removed for Violation of Terms of Use****

6) Comment by ScotB - 13/01/2013

If you are going to hold me accountable for results, I am going to retire! Take that, Gov. Jindal! ........hmmm....maybe Jindal wants the ones who do not want to be held accountable to retire?

7) Comment by redanyeage - 13/01/2013

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8) Comment by Warp7 - 13/01/2013

Apparent our over the top ego driven Governor did not anticipate that teachers had a choice. For some of our good teachers the choice is to say good bye to a system/profession that gets no respect from our political leaders, namely Jindal and his machine. I suspect Jindal thought he could just ram these changes through the system and people would have no choice but to follow. Well guess what, they do have a choice and are now leaving the system. Our governor has no respect for the teacher profession or for that matter anyone not of the ultra-conservative ideology. Some of these folks like to blame the teachers for systems that have failed. In some cases we probably do have a small number of teachers who should not be teaching. However, overall we have good teachers in our schools. What these detractors fail to state is that our teachers have to work in systems that provide them with no support. They have to work in schools where children have no respect for authority. They have to work in schools where school boards are more interested in politics and self-interest, instead ot the welfare of students. They work in an environment where bad student behaviour is supported by parents. They work in schools where their is very little parent involvement. Unlike many others, a teachers work day does not end when the bell rings. Their work continues at home drawing up plans, schedules, test, grading papers and attending after school functions. All of which they do for "free"! Now add to this the new planning,etc. that has been added to their work by the Jindal Machine (also recognize that they only get one hour free time to do paper work at school). When you look at the amount of work you are expected to complete in a day, and the iffyness of the evaluation processs, plus the amount of pay you are getting, if I was a teacher, I also would say good bye. As the article states, you don't have a lot of folks jumping to become teachers. I suspect this does not impact Jindal because he probably wants this to happen so that he can simply contract teaching out.

9) Comment by 1ryben - 13/01/2013

By tracers I mean teachers. It's only a matter of time before someone points out ever grammar, spelling, and punctuation error to use as their reasoning for their belief that teachers are terrible.

10) Comment by 1ryben - 13/01/2013

Sorry I went off on a tangent, but the blatant disrespect and disregard for tracers by these reformers I'd ridiculous. It's the absolute worst way to manage a business. They are touting free market principals and education as a business. If so, they are failures as business people, terrible managers! Just terrible.

11) Comment by 1ryben - 13/01/2013

@MBW "If all these "veteran" teachers are so good, why are Louisiana's school always near the bottom in almost every measure??" Maybe you are on to something. Maybe the blame DOES NOT rest solely in the hands of the teacher. Maybe there are myriad of other factors that affect student achievement. Maybe we should take a holistic approach to school reform instead of the point and blame. Maybe we should try to reach all students instead of sorting them by socio-economic class. All teachers are asking for is for someone, anyone, to listen to us. Here what we are saying. For Christ's sake we are the only people in direct contact with the students on a daily basis!! LISTEN TO US! We are not a bunch of whiners, we are not scared to be evaluated (scared of all get up of this VAM nonsense though) WE HAVE NO UNION! The media just parrots press releases of White and Co. We have no voice, no say. We are lead by people that are woefully u defraud lifted for their positions and blamed for every conceivable ill. No wonder many are leaving the profession. I check the help wanted ads daily. TFA? What a joke! Two year, pad resume, who cares what mess they leave, what resources they drain. Science, data, research mean nothing to these people, only their ideology. Terrible, terrible, terrible way to treat the people millions entrust to care, nurture, and educate their most prized possession...their children. Funny, Jindal doesn't send his kids to a RSD school. Why not? If they are the superheroes rescuing schools from failure? His kids go to a school the exact opposite of the agenda he's promoting as best practice...why is that?!? Because in his deepest of hearts, he knows its a crock. A big ol' White lie!

12) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 13/01/2013

@MBW: your statement is "good teaching is good teaching." I couldn't agree with you more. Unfortunately, the evaluation system known as Compass isn't really based on "good teaching." It is based, at least half of it, on the Value Added Measurement system that has gotten incredibly negative results. What do I mean by "negative? How about a scatterplot that looks like birdshot hitting the plot from a distance, with a fairly random pattern across the whole plot, where the "X" axis and the "Y" axis represent the percentile ranks of teachers in each of two different years. If the VAM really represented a teacher's "good teaching" then there would be a very high correlation between two different years. Instead, we get birdshot. As far as what we currently know about Louisiana's VAM, given the nature of the tests, teachers teaching very high-performing students or very low-performing students will be at a very large disadvantage in the forced distribution of teachers. I don't know if you were a TFA or just taught for a short time, but surely you should know that standardized tests are nothing like a teacher produced test, where every child conceivable could make an "A" on the test. Standardized tests are specifically designed to differentiate students along a continuum, with emphasis on certain break- points. For that reason, knowing what percent of questions a student must answer correctly in order to pass tells you NOTHING about the difficulty of the test.

13) Comment by citizeninBR - 13/01/2013

Here is said teacher, and she is not political and has no idea what TFA or unions have to do with any of this...http://newtotheorleans.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/speedos-and-statistics/

14) Comment by citizeninBR - 13/01/2013

MBW, you are actually incorrect. VAM will misidentify teachers on all ends of the spectrum. There is a large chance that effective ones may be identified as ineffective, and ineffective ones may be identified as effective. Good teaching is good teaching, but some students are below average, and not all kids are able to learn everything they are exposed to. The teacher might be great, but what if some of the students doesn't take the test seriously? What if they work with kids on the lower end of the spectrum who won't test at proficient no matter who teaches them? What about gifted teachers who have to show "growth" with kids at the upper end of the spectrum? The class is already scoring near the top, so growth is harder to achieve than it is when someone is behind grade level. Good teachers are scared, MBW, because they know that this formula has a high likelihood of misidentifying them as ineffective, a label that would stick with them regardless of the quality of their teaching. I used to think like you do, but I have heard and seen enough to know that there is no way to accurately measure teacher quality with standardized multiple choice tests given to every grade schooler who shows up on test day, provided they have been in class at least 1 out of the last 20 days. A teacher of the year in New Orleans, who teaches at a school of last resort, was identified as ineffective, and that is the farthest thing from the truth. Multiple choice is a problem because if they guess correctly, they are falsely demonstrating proficiency. If they know the material but are confused by the question, they would be incorrectly labeled as not demonstrating proficiency. Just because it uses math doesn't make it infallible. If you put garbage in, you get garbage out.

15) Comment by MBW - 13/01/2013

If students have really learned material, they can demonstrate it in a variety of contexts, not just on a test. But if a multiple choice test is a problem, you can bet that something more complex or rigorous is also going to be a problem.

16) Comment by MBW - 13/01/2013

The bar for "passing" on the state tests is so unbelievably low. If your kids can't pass a test, there is a real problem there. When I was teacher in GA several years ago, a "passing" score on the state test was getting 40% of the questions right. Scary.

17) Comment by MBW - 13/01/2013

Even though I have many problems with standardized testing, there is still one thing that I know to be true: good teachers have nothing to fear from new evaluation systems. Good teaching is good teaching.

18) Comment by MBW - 13/01/2013

In many ways I sympathize with the teachers....I have many problems with standardized testing and with the unintended consequences of that. At the same time, I must ask: If all these "veteran" teachers are so good, why are Louisiana's school always near the bottom in almost every measure??

19) Comment by Traveler - 13/01/2013

Teachers will put up with a lot of things. They will put up with wages that are not commensurate with their degrees and credentials and experience. They will put up with working in physically substandard classrooms where they have to reach into their own pockets to purchase materials and supplies. They will put up with after-hours faculty meetings and mandated participation in evening activities for which they are not compensated. They will put up with unresponsive and ungrateful parents who avoid conferences and give no evidence of assisting children with studies at home. What teachers will NOT put up with is the disrespect of a governor, a State Board of Education, and a Sate Superintendent of Education whose agenda is clearly not to support educators. Millie Williams (director of Human Resources for the EBRP School System) is wrong when she says that teachers are unwilling to learn new strategies-----nothing could be further from the truth. Teachers, by their very nature, are chronic learners----they LOVE to learn! What they are not going to do, however, (given the choice) is invest their time and energy and integrity in programs that make no sense and that harm the profession. To Noel: you're right----this trend was predicted some time ago (and it will continue). To Morellok2: do you suppose that this was part of the administration's long-term strategy to replace veteran educators with amateurs?

20) Comment by JohnBoy.White - 13/01/2013

This is actually part of our master plan. Follow our thinking here. Teachers now have little to no job security, since we have tied their future employment and pay to a highly developed Value Added Measurement (VAM) formula. Knowing that teachers are smart enough to see that they are more likely to win the lottery than the VAM game, many will choose to leave! Since no one will actually be able to see the formula for VAM, we can constantly tweak it to ensure that the rate of what we are calling teacher retrograde advances, in addition to retirements, provides districts with a steady supply of positions for Teach For America. This will ensure that we have Kira's vote. Eli and Wendy and I have gotten this all worked out. Sure, some teachers will lose their livelihoods and certainly might find themselves unable to afford their homes and food for the table. At the end of the day, though, these retrograde teacher advances will benefit those who matter most, and, as you have heard me say many times, it is about the children, not the adults. And remember, I care about teachers. I used to pretend to be one.

21) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 13/01/2013

Looks like the effective rate of teacher retirements for this year will top 33% increase over the last few years. Remember, the increase of >25% last year took place largely at the end of the fiscal year, after the draconian "reforms" were implemented. Looks like the state will have to increase funding for TFA and TNTP! I know that will please BESE and the reformers pulling the strings. You know, the ones who bought BESE!

22) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 13/01/2013

“This was not anticipated,” said Lisa Honore, TRSL communications director. This quote from the article took my by surprise. To give her the benefit of the doubt, I am going to hope that she means this was not anticipated several years ago. Why? ANYONE involved in public education could and DID predict that teachers would leave the profession in droves. The evidence from what little has been squeezed out from district and individual teachers and administrators has made clear that teachers are on the receiving end of reformers using them for target practice. VAM is a turkey shot, and every mathematician or researcher (other than those who are paid lots of money to deny this) knows that there will no longer be any tenure, and that teacher scores on VAM are about as stable as the weather has been over the last few weeks, which is to say not at all! The attacks on teachers will continue until the last professional has left the public schools. Then their will be no one to interfere with the profits of those pulling the strings of those they placed in the Department of Education.

23) Comment by dday198 - 13/01/2013

i don't blame them a bit . take this job and shove it governor.

24) Comment by citizeninBR - 13/01/2013

Why are we using test scores to rate teachers when such scores are universally accepted by researchers from all academic fields as flawed? Teachers realize the real possibility that these value added evaluations will incorrectly identify teachers as effective or ineffective. The scores from such tests are not designed to measure the quality of one teacher, and basing teacher and whole school ratings on such scores will lead to unintended consequences. High quality teachers will continue to exit the system (because they have the knowledge that VAM-based evaluations are unable to account for all variables influencing such scores, and the potential for being wrongly identified as ineffective is high, and will be just as likely each year). This hyper focus on standardized test outcomes (that are largely influenced by numerous factors beyond any one teacher's control) will also cause the curriculum to be narrowed to test content, as time spent on test prep increases and less and less time will be spent on anything the test doesn't measure (character, art, conflict resolution, community mindedness). What kind of citizens do we want? The test doesn't measure that. It measures poverty level. So we are judging, and soon to be punishing) teachers for teaching less advantaged or poor kids. Who would want to work under these conditions: no funding, no support, no rewards, no sympathy, job security based on factors outside your control, being punished for other people's actions (if the previous teacher was lacking, or another teacher has a negative impact)? Is it anyone we want teaching our kids?

25) Comment by morellok2 - 13/01/2013

I wonder if the administration foresaw this and went forward anyway with the idea that it would allow them to use even more TFA youngsters in our classrooms. Bet some private/parochial schools will be happy to scoop up some of these experienced teachers who have had enough of the disrespect that this administration has displayed to teachers who have dedicated their lives to teaching our children.