Philadelphia teacher professional development meetings are akin to family reunions. In the seconds after a Zoom breakout room is created, there is an inevitable high-pitched squeal and friendly demands: “Where are you at now?” If we still met in person, there would be hugs to go around.
With over 57 high schools and 151 elementary schools, there is a lot of mobility in the School District of Philadelphia year after year. It is not uncommon for a teacher to have worked in six or seven buildings in their career — that’s a lot of “work moms” and “work sisters.”
In a once-a-year process called “site selection,” a teacher can interview to work at a different school with an open position the following year, a process leading school organizational researcher Richard Ingersoll from the University of Pennsylvania calls “migration.” As a result, entire departments and grades may experience a wave of new teachers. Just as teachers leaving the District is a sign of trouble citywide, teachers leaving a school en masse is an early indicator that all is not well with their building’s organization.
Take what happened a few weeks ago at Castor Gardens Middle School on Cottman Avenue: A student brought in a knife and stabbed two staff members, resulting in finger-pointing at the school’s “epic administrative failure” — as if that failure were something surprising.
In fact, if District administrators had studied the data around teacher migration, they might have found an indicator of the school’s long history of dysfunction. Last year, nine teachers left Castor. The previous year, a whopping 22 teachers left the school. (Some may have retired, or been forced to leave.) Only 12 out of 27 Castor teachers last year completed the annual Philadelphia School Experience Survey, an opportunity to weigh in on what works and what doesn’t in each school, either because of disinterest or fear of reprisals. Still, the survey results suggested there were unaddressed organizational issues, and it scored lower than other peer schools.
Is teacher migration the canary in the coal mine of school dysfunction? And if so, what does that mean for students?
A sign of poor school performance
According to Ingersoll’s research, teacher migration is an indicator of a school’s organizational health, the vision, systems and processes that leaders put into place to ensure that students learn. This can be as simple as the protocol for family conferences, and as complex as a predictable disciplinary scale for challenging student behavior. The performance of any institution is the outcome of these converging systems. McKinsey & Company consulting notes that organizational health is the chief indicator of long-term performance for its companies. A school is no different.
Across the District, countless schools are dealing with the same difficult variables — community violence, funding issues, poverty, non-English speakers — but having radically different outcomes. In his research, Ingersoll found that when organizational variables weren’t working coherently, teachers transferred to other schools. Simply put, when schools aren’t functioning because of the organizational health of the school — when the created culture of the workplace simply does not line up with the end goal of learning — teachers don’t stay.
I recently spoke to a host of local teachers about their own experiences moving schools. All said the same thing: They love teaching, but they couldn’t work any longer with the dysfunction of their school’s administration. One teacher I spoke to, who wished to remain anonymous, recalled how when the administration regularly ignored student misbehavior, all but five teachers left the small middle school.
Another teacher, at Overbrook Educational Center, described her school’s dysfunction this way: “We had a new principal last year and the staff morale took a huge dip. Our principal does not respect our staff, constantly belittles us, and refuses to take ownership when things she plans go wrong. Three teachers left for the sole reason of not wanting to work with the principal anymore. Two teachers resigned already this year, and four more teachers are planning on leaving this year.” The teacher went on to describe how all the teachers that migrated during site selection were veteran teachers. Meanwhile, novice teacher replacements who requested support “were belittled.”
Despite the correlation between organizational dysfunction and operational success — the School District does not track or analyze the movement of teachers from school to school.
Departing experienced teachers take with them the curricular and institutional expertise and connections that promote building stability and student academic growth. Without consistency, educators are unable to build trust, which according to leading researchers, is the core of any improvement strategy. Ask any teacher, trust and relationships are the antidote for hard school days. For researchers in New York City, it is the remedy for exclusionary discipline disparities. But trust is earned. Trust takes time.
What emerges is a tiered system where veteran and highly skilled teachers are clustered together in select schools. Meanwhile, an overwhelming number of novice teachers are assembled together in departments and grades in struggling, high-needs schools. A running joke in the teaching community illustrates this well: A new teacher at a struggling high school in Hunting Park became a department head because there were no other personnel options.
“This trend of new teachers leaving underserved schools becomes a vicious cycle. Students in low-income schools are more disruptive in class. Novice teachers who lack effective classroom management skills are more likely to leave for another school,” Ingersoll notes in his research. A 2009 study from the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute reported that many similar underserved schools lose half of their teaching staff every three years. There is no such research initiative explicitly in Philadelphia.
At the end of the day, the impact of teacher migration is most acutely felt by students. In Philadelphia, only 35.5 percent of students read at grade level, and only 19 percent are proficient in math. We certainly should be using every pre-existing data point at our disposal to bolster student success. And there is growing evidence from researchers at Texas A&M that meaningful, long-term teacher relationships can neutralize the vulnerabilities of at-risk students. This is common sense — many of us have memories of that one teacher who understood and advocated for us throughout the years.
As teachers pack up their belongings for summer break in June, it isn’t uncommon to receive questions like “Are you going to be here next year?” noted Sarah Klinke, a doctoral candidate at Gwynedd Mercy University who is studying attrition post-pandemic patterns in the urban sector. “Teacher retention directly affects student success. We need continuity. Who is going to teach the students when the teachers are gone?”
Start with the data
Two of the District’s chief goals under Superintendent Tony Watlington are “prioritizing the social-emotional well-being, mental health, and intellectual and physical safety of all students and staff,” and “centering schools and school leadership teams as the units of change.”
Despite this — and despite the correlation between organizational dysfunction and operational success — the School District does not track or analyze the movement of teachers from school to school. As District spokesperson Christina Clark told me, “The [teacher migration data] that you are asking for doesn’t exist.”
Still, the District would appear to have some sense of the teacher migration waves as they have financially incentivized teachers with bonuses to work at 50 high-needs schools as a “retention and recruitment strategy.”
In fact, the data does exist — I have it. In Pennsylvania, all teacher school assignment data is public record. Anyone can pull the yearly school assignment roster from the District Performance Office with teacher names, mine included, and cross-reference years. Using a series of functions in Excel, one can triangulate how many appointed teachers are leaving individual schools each year. (Unfortunately, due to the limited qualifiers on publicly available teacher data sets, retirements and forced transfers are still reflected in the data.)
The data set allows the curious to track patterns and cross-reference them to other metrics like where teachers are relocating to and who is losing the most teachers. Not surprisingly, Murrell Dobbins Technical High School on Lehigh Avenue, whom I used as a case study of dysfunction and the need for data tracking in a 2023 article for The Inquirer, lost the most teachers — 24. Remember Castor Gardens? Along with Thomas K. Finletter Academics Plus School and Warren G. Harding Middle School, it had one the highest rates of transfer among elementary and middle schools. Twenty staff members left.
According to the data, over 1,610 teachers left schools between October of 2022 and 2023. That is a major movement of teachers. If the District is not tracking that movement, then it is also not tracking why it happens, what it means for students and what needs to change: Are the internal transfers happening at a higher rate at particular schools? Are they consolidated in low-income neighborhoods? Are minority teachers more likely to transfer schools (research suggests that they are more likely to be more intrinsically motivated to work at high-needs schools)?
Is a seventh grader in Hunting Park experiencing higher teacher migration patterns than his counterparts in Fishtown? Is there a correlation between student academic deficits and migration patterns? Are pressing building environmental conditions contributing to the migration patterns? With principal experience and tenure?
Those are all important questions to answer if we want successfully run schools that result in student success. We must begin to use the data to triage and address difficulties that schools are having. Future student success is dependent on our timely analysis.
Lydia Kulina-Washburn is a high school English teacher in Philadelphia.
