Tatiana Robinson and Emma Quigg: As students, we know the impact of teacher turnover and long-term substitutes
Imagine having a teacher who just gives busy work because they are filling in as a “long-term substitute.” Imagine the difficulty of getting compelling letters of recommendation for colleges when the teachers you’ve worked with during your high school years are gone by your senior year.
Recently, we both testified at a DC State Board of Education hearing on teacher and principal retention, the subject of a recent SBOE report. The report found that one-quarter of DC teachers leave their schools each year, with a third leaving annually from those schools with the highest number of at-risk students. In Ward 8, where one of us attends Ballou High School, 78 percent of the school’s teachers had left by the end of their fifth year.
In our testimony, we talked about how teacher turnover has affected us and other students in both DCPS and public charter schools. Losing teachers and having long-term substitutes has had a very negative impact on our education. Having a substitute fill in for an absent teacher is only a temporary solution.
When teachers leave in the middle of the school year, students lose the valuable relationships they have built with them, and the frequent churn makes it hard to establish those special bonds that we need to be successful. When we have long-term substitutes, many of us can’t learn. In Spanish class at BASIS DC, for example, we went through a series of teachers in a year. We never got to learn about Latinx culture or develop any language skills because of these long-term substitutes.
Another example, this one at Ballou High School: In 10th grade, students showed up the first day of math class and we had no teacher. As the year went on, we still didn’t have a permanent teacher. It got so bad that students just stopped coming, and it affected their attendance records. We didn’t get a permanent high-quality teacher until March, losing out on almost a year of learning math.
Low teacher retention at our schools makes it difficult for students across the city to get appropriate letters of recommendation for colleges. A friend of ours was forced to obtain a recommendation from a teacher with whom she had no rapport because she never got the chance to build a strong relationship with a permanent teacher.
This year, we both have seen a lot of new teachers in our buildings. When skillful teachers stay long enough at the same school to educate students, this helps create a positive and beneficial learning experience for all. But when good teachers leave, it’s the students who suffer.
It’s not just lost instruction and the absence of meaningful relationships and support in school that result from the use of long-term substitutes; some students lose interest in their education. Many of our classmates become bitter about their classes when we have new teachers or substitutes who don’t understand that students are performing at different learning levels. We’ve also both had multiple principals in our four years of high school, which is very frustrating. Every time school leadership resets, long-term school improvement starts over.
Keeping the same support systems encourages students to complete coursework on time and come to class regularly. We’ve heard many teachers say they are under a lot of pressure to succeed but they are not given the support they need to do that. It is time to focus on solutions that will fix this problem. Retaining qualified, talented teachers needs to be a priority for DCPS and public charter schools. Instead of getting rid of teachers who aren’t highly effective, give them more opportunities to improve. Every school should have a yearlong mentoring program so highly effective teachers can support others who need help — and we can begin to retain the teachers we love. Before educators come into a school — especially first-year teachers — they should be given the opportunity to get a glimpse of the school’s culture. Let them teach a sample lesson or just sit down with the students for lunch to see if the school is, in fact, what they imagined it would be.
On behalf of the students of DC, we implore education advocates and city officials to address low teacher retention and the extended use of long-term substitutes. When the classroom becomes a revolving door for substitute teachers, students end up losing their desire to learn.
Tatiana Robinson, a senior at Ballou High School, is one of two student representatives on the DC State Board of Education and a co-chair of the SBOE Student Advisory Committee. Emma Quigg, a senior at BASIS DC Public Charter School, is a member of the SBOE Student Advisory Committee.
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