How Context Matters in High-Need Schools: The Effects of Teachers’ Working Conditions on Their Professional Satisfaction and Their Students’ Achievement

• In Event: Supports, Challenges, and Opportunities: Examining Teachers’ and Administrators’ Experiences in High-Poverty Urban Schools

Abstract

Purpose

Educational policymakers have begun to recognize the challenges posed by teacher turnover, particularly for schools serving high proportions of low-income and minority students. Although some interpret the high turnover rates at these schools as evidence of teachers’ discontent with their students, recent studies provide evidence that teachers choose to leave schools with poor work environments, and that these conditions are most common in schools that minority and low-income students attend (Boyd et al., 2011; Ladd, 2009 & 2011; Borman & Dowling, 2008; Loeb, Darling-Hammond & Luczak, 2005). We build on this body of work by further examining how a broad set of working conditions predict both teachers’ job satisfaction and their career plans.

Theoretical Framework

Drawing on a decade of work in the Chicago Public Schools, Bryk and his colleagues (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, & Easton, 2010) have documented how the degree of “relational trust” in day-to-day relationships is crucial to the success of a school. They argue that improving these social conditions involves building relational trust between teachers and school leaders and engaging teachers in co-constructing the social context of their work.

Data and Methods

We combine a statewide survey of school working conditions with demographic and student achievement data from a northeastern state. We examine three primary outcomes: teacher satisfaction, teacher career intentions, and student achievement growth. We constructed a set of nine key predictors that reflect the broad-based conditions in which teachers work and fit OLS and logistic regression models that describe the relationship between each outcome and overall conditions of work and each element separately.

Results

We find that measures of the school environment explain away much of the apparent relationship between teacher satisfaction and student demographic characteristics. The conditions in which teachers work matter a great deal to them and, ultimately, to their students. Teachers are more satisfied and plan to stay longer in schools with a positive work context, independent of the school’s student demographic characteristics. Furthermore, although a wide range of working conditions matter to teachers, the specific elements of the work environment that matter the most to teachers are the social conditions—the school’s culture, the principal’s leadership, and relationships among colleagues. Most importantly, we find that providing a supportive context in which teachers can work appears to contribute to improved student achievement, even when we compare schools serving demographically similar groups of students.

Scholarly Significance

These results align with a growing body of work examining the organizational characteristics of schools (Boyd et al., 2011; Ladd, 2011). Together, these studies suggest strongly that the high turnover rates of teachers in schools with substantial populations of low-income and minority students are driven largely by teachers fleeing the dysfunctional and unsupportive work environments in the schools to which low-income and minority students are most likely to be assigned. If public education is to provide effective teachers for all students, then the schools those students attend must become places that support effective teaching and learning across all classrooms.

Author

• Matthew A. Kraft, Harvard University