Abstract
AbstractThis case study seeks to examine the exit-decisions of “invested leavers,” teachers who have taught for five or more years and then left the profession for reasons other than retirement. As traditional studies of teacher attrition tend to focus on new teachers, (teachers in their first five years of teaching), their findings may not help explain the high attrition rate of experienced teachers, an understanding which may be important to addressing the problem of the high rate of teacher attrition.
To examine this phenomenon, this study identified and interviewed, from a sample of convenience, six former Idaho teachers who had all taught for five or more years before leaving education for reasons other than retirement. The interview transcript data were thematically coded in order to identify emergent themes.
The data were examined through the conceptual lens of “Attrition as Resistance,” which speculates that many “invested leavers” may exit the profession because ill-considered policies mandate that they must teach in ways that are not in the best interests of the students they serve, and they cannot in good conscience continue to violate their own sense of professional ethics.
The interview responses did not show strong support for Attrition as Resistance by that definition, but they did suggest that the interviewees left the profession for reasons different from those most-commonly cited in traditional attrition studies, such as student misbehavior, lack of administrative support, workload burnout, and financial insecurity.
The “invested leavers” interviewed discussed their love of students and teaching more than any other subject. Lack of administrative support was not a strongly-cited factor. They expressed more a sense of injustice over the unreasonable workload than a feeling of burnout, which suggests a sense of inadequacy. A sense of the injustice of a teacher’s compensation was discussed twice as much as feelings of financial insecurity.
The study findings suggest that experienced teachers may exit the profession for reasons different than those most-cited in traditional studies, but that a conceptual expansion of Attrition as Resistance may be necessary to help explain exit decisions. Invested leavers may exit as often over perceived injustices against teachers as they do over those against students.