State slow to develop plan to combat teacher turnover

In his State of the State speech this year, Gov. Mike Dunleavy said he had instructed the education department to get a working group together to deal with teacher turnover.

“Solving this issue will be a focus of my administration this year,” Dunleavy said.

The working group has yet to meet.

The focus on retention is not like other ideas in the State of the State speech that went nowhere—such as the state lottery, exchanging Permanent Fund dividend certificates for state land, and creating a new inspector general’s office to deal with waste, fraud and abuse.

Unlike those three items, which seemed be inserted into the speech to fill time, the working group on teacher retention is coming together. Better late than never.

Education Commissioner Michael Johnson sent a letter May 8 saying he wanted to schedule the first meeting soon, with the goal of finishing a report by Dec. 1. The group is to review the research, interview teachers to find out why they are leaving and make recommendations.

The problem of filling teaching positions in 2020-2021 is likely to be much more difficult than in the recent past because of COVID-19. Schools have to adjust to the new demands of keeping kids and staff members safe. It’s not clear what form education will take in the next school year and it could vary from district to district. Some may be entirely online, while others may have some students in classrooms and others connected electronically.

Recruitment was already a serious issue that hampers K-12 education in Alaska before the pandemic.

The solutions will cost money and won’t be easy to implement. They require changes that the governor and legislators may not want to deal with. Teacher salaries in Alaska are less competitive than they used to be, but there has been a nationwide problem in attracting people to teaching. The problem is not just salaries, but working conditions, professional options and community support for education.

A 2019 study said teacher turnover in Alaska is about 22 percent a year, while the rate is higher for principals and superintendents. The numbers are higher in rural areas, small schools and schools that serve low-income families.

With nearly 8,000 teachers statewide, that means about 1,600 leave their jobs each year, some to change schools or districts. About half of those who leave either quit the profession or the state.

“From 2012/13 to 2017/18, the average turnover rate for teachers in urban locales was 19 percent compared to 36 percent of rural-remote teachers,” said the study by the Rural Educational Laboratory Northwest.

Most teachers hired to work in Alaska come from Outside and are more likely to quit and go elsewhere than teachers trained in the state. And many of the teachers going to rural Alaska have had their academic training Outside and don’t stick around that long.

“Interviewees cited a range of possible reasons for this high turnover and also emphasized that the reasons vary depending on district demographics and locale. Several interviews mentioned the sense of isolation, which is driven by the difficulty of making connections with the local community; a lack of non-work social activities; limited communications with the outside world; and the time, cost, and weather-related challenges of traveling to larger in-state communities or to visit family in other states. District leaders also mentioned a lack of opportunities for professional growth compared to larger districts and the difficulty of buying a home in some communities due to limited stock.”

The study recommended several steps, starting with increasing the number of teachers trained in Alaska. This has been a priority of the University of Alaska, but the effort has also been hampered by the management failures that led the University of Alaska Anchorage to lose accreditation for some teacher programs.

“Considering that high turnover is concentrated in rural-remote schools, increasing salaries may be an effective tool to retain teachers. However, it may need to be combined with other strategies to improve working conditions in these schools,” the study said,