Staffing vs. Retention: A summary of Darleen Opfer's “Defining and Identifying Hard-to-Staff Schools: The Role of School Demographics and Conditions”

One assumption in education today is that no teacher wants to work at a “difficult” school, so we must figure out how to get teachers into the urban or rural schools.  Money is spent and programs are developed for the very purpose of feeding teachers into the pipeline of “hard-to-staff” schools.  In Dr. Darleen Opfer’s research entitled, “Defining and Identifying Hard-to-Staff Schools: The Role of School Demographics and Conditions,” published in the October 2011 volume of Educational Administration Quarterly, she questions whether finding teachers that want to fill the positions in these schools is as difficult as some people would like to have you believe.  This study explored 3,371 vacancies in 1,040 schools and tried to determine what demographic factors and work conditions were related to a school being hard-to-staff.  The term “hard-to-staff” dealt specifically with the hiring process and treated attrition as a separate issue.  The demographic characteristics considered were location (rural or urban), high-poverty population, high-minority population, and low-achieving schools with high attrition.  The work conditions were defined as central office help or hindrance, quality of the applicant pool, level of school resources, and opportunities for career development.  The methodology was a survey designed to elicit information on vacancies in Ohio Schools for the 2004-2005 school year as well as the factors that influenced the filling of the vacancies.

In Dr. Opfer’s literature review, she highlights the lack of empirical studies that have been conducted on the topics of teacher recruitment, teacher retention, teacher attrition, and hard-to-staff schools.  However, she argues that there are often claims of causation made regarding staffing and certain demographics, such as race and poverty level, when there has merely been some level of correlation.  Another criticism she raises is that the reasons schools struggle to hire teachers has been coupled with the reasons they struggle to keep teachers whereas those problems are distinct.  Also, she critiques the labor markets conceptual framework, which uses opportunity cost to explain whether individuals will stay in teaching.  Opfer (2011) states:

Because of the predominance of the labor market/opportunity costs conceptualization of teacher recruitment, retention, and attrition, most writings on hard-to-staff schools and state hard-to-staff policies assume that attrition, in combination with school-level demographics associated with high attrition, are proxies for a school being hard-to-staff. (P.587)

Researchers have made the mistake of not only looking at recruitment and retention as similar problems, but they have also assumed that they could generalize the decisions of individuals to describe the circumstances of the organization.

Instead, the author argues for an organizational conceptual framing because she feels that it can more accurately explain why schools are hard to staff and possibly even allow researchers to shift the problem from staffing to retaining teachers.  This restructuring allows the author to draw new conclusions about the problems of teacher recruitment, retention, and attrition.  For instance, she says, “It may not be that teachers are leaving urban, low-SES schools per se but, rather, that they are leaving schools with poor working conditions or ones whose conditions were not what their initial perceptions indicated” (Opfer, 2011, p. 589).  She highlights two studies that have used this approach to study attrition, the work of Ingersoll in 2001 and Loeb et al. in 2005.  She believes that in order to investigate school level problems, you must have school level measures. 

This study was survey-based with a two-part analysis, both descriptive and explorative. The surveys that were filled out by school administrators described the hiring process and the factors affecting the process.  There was a 67% response rate, but she determined that the responders and non-responders were similar in terms of demographics and rates of vacancies.  The author found that the demographics of high poverty, student ethnicity, and school location were not as closely associated with staffing as organizational factors such as the central office role in hiring.  Schools were divided in to the categories of high-minority, urban, high-poverty, and average.  The high-minority, high-poverty, and urban schools all filled their open positions faster and high minority and urban schools had more applicants per position.  On the other hand, high-poverty, high-minority, and urban schools all reported having difficulty hiring teachers that could teach all students, including those students who are struggling.  In order to figure out what school characteristics were associated with hard-to-staff outcomes and whether they were the same across schools, Opfer used three regression models to explore the relationship between the dependent variables of demographic characteristics, school conditions, and school achievement and their relationship to staffing.   

In this study, Dr. Opfer found that high-poverty and high-minority schools do not have trouble hiring teachers and that those teachers are often certified and in-field teachers.  Across all the schools, however, the principals felt that the quality of the applicant pool needed to be improved.  This research can help to lay the groundwork for understanding that the factors making it hard to staff schools are not outside the realm of the school district, and there can be changes made to create a better pool of applicants.  Too often the problem of staffing is explained using demographics, which masks the real problems. 

Having been a teacher in a high poverty, high-minority school with low achievement and high attrition in an urban, high crime neighborhood, I can confirm that the school’s demographics did not play a part in whether most of the teachers choose to work there.  In fact, many teachers were drawn to the high needs situation because they felt like they would have greater chance to make an impact.  I attended several hiring fairs in New York City on behalf of my school, and many of the candidates would have taken a job offer on the spot.  Unfortunately, the greater problem was that most of those teachers couldn’t give answers to interview questions that showed they were prepared to deal with the large portion of students who were struggling with literacy and basic math skills much less how they would deal with disruptive classroom behavior.  All of those factors are building blocks to being able to have a learning environment where you can push high-level thinking and truly prepare students to achieve.  It seems to me that when looking at the staffing problem, we need to make sure we are looking at the right issues.  Schools often aren’t having trouble getting applicants; they are having trouble getting the right candidates in the right jobs.  There needs to be more research in this area of recruitment and retention so that we can move past the common belief that teachers don’t want to work in schools deemed “difficult” and begin to understand what makes teachers successful in those school environments.