Leave Like a Champion: Teacher Embeddedness and Turnover at an Urban “No-Excuses” Charter Management Organization

• In Event: Teacher Well-Being Through the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Teacher turnover has remained a persistent issue in public education (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017; García & Weiss, 2019), and recent scholarship suggests that turnover rates may have become more urgent amidst the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Bacher-Hicks et al., 2023; Zamarro et al., 2021). Such findings may prove particularly dire for Charter Management Organizations (CMOs), as pre-pandemic literature reports considerably higher rates of turnover among charter and CMO-based teachers (Ferguson et al., 2012, Silverman, 2013; Stuit & Smith, 2010, 2012).

Researchers have explored teacher experience and turnover in CMOs from a range of perspectives e.g., working conditions/workload (Roch & Sai, 2017, 2018; Stuit & Smith, 2010; Torres, 2016a); disciplinary practices (Golann, 2021; Sondel et al., 2019; Torres, 2016b), autonomy/school-wide influence (Torres, 2014, 2019), and leadership (Boyd et al., 2011; Torres, 2016c). Surprisingly few researchers (Larkin et al., 2021; Watson, 2018; Yildiz, 2018) have explicitly used job embeddedness as a theoretical lens to study teacher well-being and retention/turnover despite its use in other fields for over two decades as a predictor of retention (e.g., Shah et al., 2020; Tröster et al., 2019). In brief, job embeddedness is a causal indicator construct developed by Mitchell et al. (2001) to understand why employees stay in an organization. Job embeddedness is composed of three key dimensions: fit, links, and sacrifice.

Specializing job embeddedness for the job of teaching, Larkin et al. (2021) believe teacher embeddedness to hold “great utility” as a predictor of teacher turnover, and this project takes up their call. Given the empirical correlation between job embeddedness and retention, this study argues that the factors that diminish embeddedness are critical to more fully understanding a teacher’s experience in a school community and teacher turnover. Ultimately, this qualitative study asks: what factors reduce teacher embeddedness in the pseudonymous CMO Polaris Academies?

Through analysis of in-depth interviews with departed teachers and principals and focus groups with new and veteran teachers across two high schools within the same CMO, this study uses a case study design with the CMO as the primary unit of analysis (Yin, 2009).

As school leaders, policymakers, and researchers look to improve teacher retention, this study adds empirical evidence for the importance of autonomy, professional development, and student-teacher relationships in the work-lives of teachers. Professional development, for example, proved to be a powerful source of embeddedness, pulling in all three factors of teacher embeddedness if done well, or reducing all three factors if not. Similarly, teacher-student relationships served as important links for teachers and notable sources of reduced embeddedness when absent. This was also true of creative autonomy: a source of reduced embeddedness when absent or, like numerous teachers in the study, a career highlight asset. This paper is one of the first studies to engage teacher embeddedness as a framework for understanding the work-lives of teachers, and this study demonstrates its explanatory power in understanding turnover and the ways in which we might provide teachers with the links, assets, and sense-of-fit to embed themselves in schools as long-term professionals.

Author

• Matthew S. McCluskey, University of Vermont