International teacher attrition: multiperspective views

This special issue of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice (TTTP) features international research on teacher attrition, a perennial problem receiving heightened attention due to its intensity, complexity, and spread. The theme of teacher attrition appears often in the scholarly literature emanating from Canada (i.e. Fantilli & McDougall, 2009), Ireland (i.e. O’Sullivan, 2006), Sweden (i.e. Lindqvist, Nordänger, & Carlsson, 2014), and elsewhere. Finland with its ‘trust through professionalism’ focus also experiences retention and attrition issues (i.e. Heikkinen, Jokinen, & Tynjälä, 2012). Even heavily populated China struggles to retain qualified teachers in its rural schools (i.e. Liu & Onwuegbuzie, 2012). According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), ‘teaching is increasingly … a career of “movement in and out” and the “out” may be permanent.’ (Skilbeck & Connell, 2003, pp. 32–33).

Growing concerns about escalating rates of teacher attrition, along with its calculable and incalculable effects, spurred a group of international researchers to investigate the phenomena over the past four years. As a member of the assembled international research team (i.e. Craig, 2013, 2014, under review), it is my distinct pleasure to edit this TTTP special issue focusing on multiperspectival views of international teacher attrition. The articles in this issue, which present teacher attrition through various theoretical and methodological lenses, feature cases from the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, Israel, Norway, and England. Geert Kelchtermans from Belgium concludes this special issue with an invited commentary, providing valuable insights as he lays his in situ knowledge and experiences alongside those of his international peers.

The first article in this collection, Teacher attrition in the USA: The relational elements in a Utah case study, is authored by Melissa Newberry and Yvonne Allsop from Brigham Young University in the United States. Their contribution comprehensively surveys the teacher attrition literature and characterizes the severity of the teacher attrition crisis in the US, particularly in urban areas. The authors go on to paint the educational backdrop of the state of Utah in fine-grained detail. Then, Newberry and Allsop launch into their collective case study of six beginning Utah teachers and their decisions whether or not to leave the teaching profession. Framed methodologically and theoretically by the scholarship of Cochran-Smith et al. (2012) and Kelchtermans (1993), Newberry and Allsop’s research identifies six elements that affect teachers’ decision-making, which they elaborate. The authors conclude that ‘relationships trump economics’ where beginning teachers’ final career decisions are concerned.

The enormous problem of beginning and experienced teacher attrition in the US is followed by a more moderate case of beginning teacher attrition in the Netherlands. Authored by Perry den Brok (Eindhoven School of Education), Theo Wubbels (Utrecht University) and Jan van Tartwijk (Utrecht University), the article, Exploring beginning teachers’ attrition in the Netherlands, briefly surveys the international literature and then rigorously presents the Dutch case, using helpful figures and tables as visual aids. What the authors discover speaks to the quality of teacher education in the Netherlands. Yet, den Brok, Wubbells, and van Tartwijk also acknowledge that teachers in the Netherlands are the least satisfied of anyone working in the professions. The authors recommend the use of The Job Demands-Resources Model developed by Dutch organizational psychologists Bakker and Demerouti (2007), to uncover some of the sorely missing pieces of the teacher attrition puzzle. They furthermore suggest that Dutch teacher attrition data be systematically collected and disseminated to draw attention to increasing teacher attrition concerns sitting on the horizon.

From the Netherlands, the focus on teacher attrition then moves to Australia and this issue’s third article, Early career teacher attrition in Australia: Inconvenient truths about new public management contributed by Andrea Gallant of Deakin University and Philip Riley of the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University. Gallant and Riley interestingly chose male beginning teachers as their convenience sample because males historically have been ‘most sought after.’ They, like Newberry and Allsop (US), also use Kelchtermans’s (2009) scholarship to frame their work, specifically his Personal Interpretive Framework. In the collective case study they present, Gallant and Riley identify several critically important themes that reveal disconnects between and among theory, practice, and policy. They determine that the privileging of new public management practices supersedes all other priorities – including attracting males into the teaching profession – in Australian education. They furthermore conclude – as den Brok, Wubbells, and van Tartwijk earlier did – that teacher retention and attrition data needs to be more reliably and consistently collected and analyzed in policy-informing ways in Australia.

Next on the agenda are three contributions that use different theories and constructs, but nevertheless fit together like hand-and-glove. The first of the three articles is the fourth contribution to this issue, Career Stories of Israeli Teachers Who Left Teaching: A Salutogenic View of Teacher Attrition authored by Hayuta Yinon and Lily Orland-Barak of the University of Haifa, Israel. Drawing on a model of work orientations, which distinguishes between three different meanings teachers attach to their work (job, calling, career), the study involves 34 Israeli teachers. In contrast to a pathogenic point of view which interprets attrition as a negative work outcome, a salutogenic perspective allows for perceiving it positively as a career decision. From this scholarship, readers learn that those who perceive work as a calling are driven by meaningfulness and are committed to making a contribution to others’ lives. However, those who quit the profession in Yinon and Orland-Barak’s convenience sample left because of their calling work orientation. They resigned to avoid feelings of worthlessness. This finding presents another important consideration where teacher attrition is concerned. We now transition from finding meaning in the Israeli cases to making sense of the Norwegian cases.

Leaving teaching - lack of resilience or sign of agency? authored by Kari Smith of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Marit Ulvik of the University of Bergen is the title of this special issue’s fifth feature article. Like the author teams whose contributions have already been discussed, Smith and Ulvik gave their article a unique spin. They chose to use Schaefer, Long, and Clandinin’s (2012) research on teacher attrition as a starting point from which to inquire whether teachers’ leaving the profession is a resilience problem or an example of their agentive selves at work. After collecting data from their convenience sample of four, the Norwegian researchers then borrowed the terms that Harfitt (2015) used in his Hong Kong beginning teacher attrition study and added two more concepts of their own. Smith and Ulvik concluded that the teachers in their sample of convenience did not resign because they lacked resilience. On the contrary, life in schools was simply too slow for them. They left teaching without ill feelings or significant crises because other dreams and career possibilities attracted their attention and swept them away. One is left wondering whether these former teachers exemplify the career orientation to work described earlier in Yinon and Orland-Barak’s article.

The sixth and final feature article hails from England and is authored by Emma Towers and Meg Maguire of Kings College, London. Leaving or staying in teaching: A ‘vignette’ of an urban, experienced teacher ‘leaver’ has to do with ‘wastage’ – the official British managerial workforce term for teacher attrition. The article revolves around what prompted a highly committed and accomplished primary teacher in a high needs, inner city London setting to abandon her long-serving career and the teaching profession. The work draws on identity theory, particularly using the scholarship of Schaefer et al. (2012), Kelchtermans (2005), Day (2002), and Gu and Day (2007), among others. Despite Liz’s leaving being a ‘long drawn-out process’ (Gallant & Riley, 2014), she eventually reaches a point when a plethora of factors conspired together, causing her integrated personal-professional identity to be consumed. Once again, one leaves a reading in this issue thinking that the experienced British teacher, Liz, resembles the three Israeli research participants, Rakefet, Iris, and Yaara, whose work orientation was of the calling variety. For such educators, leaving the profession is the only way to escape lack of meaningfulness when others’ interventions negatively interfere with one’s work orientation and ‘spoil’ one’s identity – as Towers and Maguire’s research participant phrased it.

In this special issue, research teams from six countries, using different theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches, have crafted cases of teachers who quit teaching and elaborated the circumstances that expedited their departures. Together, the chapters provide a multiperspectival view of international teacher attrition. Cumulatively, they pinpoint areas of global concern and offer illuminative pathways concerning how the teacher attrition phenomenon might better be understood and addressed in the future.

Cheryl J. Craig
Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
[email protected]