Publications and Research

• Keywords: teacher turnover, retention, leadership, teacher working conditions
• In this paper, we explore the effects of leader-malleable school conditions (conditions under the influence of school leaders) on the stability of the school's teacher corps (defined as teachers present in the 2013-14 school year who returned for the next school year, 2014-15). We argue that re-conceptualizing turnover as teacher corps stability, an organizational property, puts greater emphasis on the building-level effects of turnover (even for districts that do not suffer from overall shortages) and on the building-level solutions that can improve teacher corps stability, even in the absence of policy remedies (such as pay raises) from the state government. We find that certain leadership/structural antecedents in the schools led to expressive conditions that enhanced teacher corps stability. Schools with enabling structures (ESS) in place and coherent programs (PC), as well as with principals who exhibited transformational leadership behaviors (TLB) and support for students' psychological needs (PSSPN), reported higher levels of faculty trust for principals (FTPRIN), greater levels of academic emphasis (FAE) and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) among the faculty, and a deeper since of collective efficacy (CTE) across teachers. Such expressive conditions among the teachers, in turn, produced greater levels of teacher corps stability. Our results suggested that one standard deviation increase (an average of one-half of a Likert Scale Point) in the expressive conditions of schools would lead to an average retention of 2.5 more teachers per year per school. Using a conservative estimate of the costs of recruiting and hiring a new urban school teacher ($8750 according to the Teacher Turnover Cost Calculator), such gains in retention could save the school distrcit as much as $1.5 million in the first year.

• Keywords: Self-Determination Theory, school climate, transformational leadership, school leadership, teacher learning
• In this paper, we apply the tenets of Basic Psychological Needs Theory (BPNT) under Self-Determination Theory to advance and test a new measure of Teacher Self-Regulatory Climate (TSRC), which is defined as a set of school-wide organizational and normative conditions capable of addressing teachers’ psychological needs for learning and development. Such an indicator, we argue, would be a useful diagnostic tool for school leaders wishing to gauge the degree to which these needs are currently being met, with the understanding that addressing these needs can be an important lever for improving teaching and learning conditions within their school. TSRC in comprised of 4 first-order latent constructs related to leadership and management addressing competency, autonomy and relatedness, which are a part of the school district's annual survey: Competency: Professional Development Opportunities (PDO); Autonomy: Enabling School Structure (ESS); and 2 constructs for Relatedness: Faculty Trust in Principal (FTPRIN) and Faculty Trust in Colleagues (FTCOL). In this paper, we assess the validity and reliability of TSRC through confirmatory factor analysis in a large urban school district with over 2,000 teachers. Our findings support its overall construct validity as well as its concurrent (criterion) validity with respect to transformational leadership and collective teacher efficacy.

This report provides a resource to inform design and implementation decisions as state policymakers embark on the task of creating their next generation accountability systems. The authors discuss the limitations of using a single composite accountability index, advance principles and a conceptual framework to drive next generation accountability, describe potential indicators of what they call an “Educational Quality and Improvement Profile,” and offer recommendations to guide the design and implementation of these new accountability systems.