Retaining educators. A call for reform.

By Julie McGahan, Principal, Oceanside School #6, Long Island, NY

January 3, 2024, was the first day of this school year that my elementary school was fully staffed.  For the first four months of the year, the aspects of my job as principal that I have historically considered the most important (curriculum leadership, supervision, professional development) have taken a back seat to the hiring and retention of educators, both certified and non-certified.  

By coincidence, also on January 3, 2024, Newsday published an article naming my district as one of the top ten districts for teacher turnover in Long Island (click here).  This was not our proudest moment, as a district employee or as an advocate for the profession at large.  What if the most fundamentally important profession in the world could no longer do the most important work of growing citizens who would become the doctors and lawyers and janitors and mechanics and engineers of the future due to a staff shortage?  I dove into the web in hopes of debunking this ominous thought.  

Unfortunately, what I discovered didn’t assuage my fears about our beautiful profession at all.  In fact, the more I read, the more I realized that we need to invest ourselves in addressing this phenomenon.  In April of 2023, News12 Long Island published a story referring to “a mass exodus” of teachers leaving a school district on the island (click here).  Over 1000 miles from Long Island, Wisconsin Policy Forum published an article called Revolving Classroom Doors (click here) for the August of 2023 publication).  And, in an attempt to learn about international trends, in January 2024, I took advantage of the opportunity to converse with four officials from the Ministry of Education for The Bahamas, where I learned that they had lost 900 out of 4000 teachers in the last year.

These statistics and anecdotes are a staggering call for reform.  

In the first four months of this school year, not only were there traditional vacancies that I struggled to fill, but there were also unanticipated resignations.  Having received transformative professional development from Dignity researchers and authors Floyd Cobb and John Krownapple, and coaching with Dr. Nathan Hostetler to implement the Dignity Framework (Cobb & Krownapple, 2019) and grow a culture of belonging in my school, I had begun to look at hiring and retention through the lens of culture and climate.  I had learned the hard way that mechanical and structural solutions were short term band aids for most school culture problems, and that meeting the dignity needs of staff members by creating a culture of belonging was consistently a far more impactful (and sustainable) way of approaching solving this problem.  

In an attempt to understand the culture elements that were impacting educators’ decisions to leave the profession, I began conducting exit interviews, many of which initially identified reasons for departure including hours and/or salary.  However, upon diving deeper with questions specific to feelings of appreciation, validation, acceptance, and fair treatment, the patterns began to emerge, and I found clarity:  When staff members feel they belong to a school culture, when they feel they are a part of something greater than themselves, when they know their contribution matters, they do not leave for another job that is offering a few bucks more.  

Perhaps this concept resonates in terms of staff retention, but what does this have to do with hiring practices? 

My data from the exit interviews also shed light on another sad truth: my most recent hires were the ones with the greatest rates of resignation.  It was time to look in the mirror to figure out where I had gone wrong.  A few contributing factors and some background information: since COVID, we have all experienced challenges remaining fully staffed (as have restaurants, hospitals, and most other places of employment).  In addition, my building had recently undergone a fairly large expansion, moving from zero pre-k classes in 2021 to seventeen pre-k classes in 2023. If I am completely honest with myself, the bottom line is this:  My response to the higher rates of vacancies that needed to be filled was to create efficient hiring practices.

In my nineteenth year of the principalship, I entered this hiring spree with confidence that I could identify the best folks quickly. I let myself believe I did not need (and could not afford) to spend extensive amounts of time with a multi-step interview process that would require my committees to volunteer hundreds of hours to this cause.  Instead, I used brief virtual screenings, I delegated aspects of the hiring process to my administrative assistant, and, when facing 40+ new hires in one school year, I intentionally eliminated aspects of the hiring process that consumed extensive time (tours of the building, 40-minute demo lessons, visiting classes with each new hire).  

The result was a cohort of new hires who objectively had no sense of belonging when they walked in for their first day.  There were no teachers or aides who had been part of ‘selecting them’, and who they knew believed in them.  There was no understanding of what the job or our classrooms looked like, no sense of familiarity or comfort.  And, though I find this terribly embarrassing to admit to myself and to anyone who reads this, these new hires did not feel valued or appreciated by their new principal.  I was not their leader and cheerleader.  I was someone who would sign their paycheck if they showed up for work.  I had not garnered one iota of loyalty from any of the new hires, nor did they feel any loyalty from me.  So when the district next door offered two dollars more per hour, the financial incentive was the resounding factor.  

What kind of reform does this call for?  

If you are like most building educational leaders, you have little control over the salary educators receive or the hours they work since these factors are negotiated between the district-level administration and union.  But, as building leaders, we have ALL of the control over creating a work environment that makes people feel like they are in a home away from home, where they have a sense of belonging, and where their dignity needs are met.  Furthermore, I have discovered that there are hiring practices that are both efficient and effective in ensuring that the good humans entering our schools feel a sense of belonging on their first day of work:  

• “Try-outs”: Instead of a 40-minute demo lesson for each teacher candidate, leaning into the model that coaches have used to identify the best of the best athletes, we have used “try-outs”.  Following screening interviews, we invite successful candidates to do a 15-minute demo lesson in a classroom on a Monday.  I personally explain to the candidates that the goal of a 15-minute demo is not necessarily to see the highest quality of lesson design, instruction, or learning.  It is, instead, to see how they connect with the learners, foster curiosity, and create a climate of enthusiasm about learning.  After the demo lesson, the host teacher and I, along with other committee members, meet with the candidate and give them feedback, containing both positive reinforcement and suggestions.  I immediately learn if a candidate is defensive or if they are reflective and open to feedback.  I then invite successful candidates back on Friday to the same classroom for another 15-minute demo, and the host teacher provides her contact information in case the candidate has any questions or wants to collaborate.  This is how we learn three critical factors:  (1) whether the candidate is collaborative and pleasant to work with (2) whether he/she is capable of using feedback effectively and reflecting backwards in order to plan forwards, and (3) how the candidate uses what he/she learned about the students to impact the next lesson.  By the time we offer a candidate the position, we have trimmed down the demo lesson from 40 minutes to 30 total minutes, learned more about them than we could have in the one-shot demo, and have set into motion a partnership with the host teacher.  Sense of belonging on day one:  check!

• Speed-dating-interviews:  Instead of a committee of teachers, aides, secretaries, custodians, and administration meeting with candidates, we have created a process by which different groups of staff members sit together and candidates circulate to meet with each group for 3 minutes.  Each group contributes to the creation of the rubric we use. I keep the flow of the speed dating and I oversee the project table, where candidates are scheduled two at a time to work on an assignment together (e.g., for aide vacancies I might ask them to work together to create a list of rules for students at recess time).  By the end of this process, we all have efficiently learned a great deal about candidates and their performance at the project table tells me (1) if they are collaborative, and (2) whether they approach rules negatively/punitively or through the lens of empowering and educating students.  In addition, reviewing the rubric from each group of interviewers allows me to clearly see which positions they may be best suited for.  And, when candidates walk into school for their first day of work, there are staff members who will say things like, “I am so glad we got you in special ed.  They wanted you in a kindergarten classroom, but we knew you would be great with us in special ed.”  Sense of belonging on day one: check!   

• Video submission:  About a year ago, I began to ask candidates to submit, along with a resume, a one-minute video introducing themselves to the students and parents. In addition to the credentials garnered from the resume, this video provides a wealth of information.  Working with an inspired team of my teachers late one night, we created a rubric for the video submissions.  After we watch the one-minute videos and apply the rubric, successful candidates are given a copy of the rubric, asked to use it to reflect on their video, and send me their self-reflection within 24 hours. We have now learned whether candidates have charisma, if they can appeal to a variety of people who watch the video with me (teachers, aides, secretaries, parents, even students), whether they are tech-savvy and/or creative, whether they researched our district and found a way to incorporate what they learned into their introduction videos, and whether they are humble enough to reflect honestly and effectively when provided with the criteria and expectations for an assignment.  In addition, and perhaps most importantly, by the time they enter our building on their first day of work, there are built-in cheerleaders who approach them to say things like, “I LOVED your video submission. You have to show me how you…..” or “I LOVED how you included pictures of yourself in all of the costumes in your video” or “I saw your video, I was rooting for you to get the job”.  Sense of belonging on day one: check! 

This has become a powerful part of our process, so much so that when a local technology company found out what we were doing, they wanted to learn more, and we began a collaborative partnership that resulted in the creation of a Dashboard called HireArk.  In the six months that we have worked on this app, it has grown into what will likely be the next OLAS (On Line Application System), with capabilities to do all for the things that OLAS does, while integrating space for interview committee members to take notes, apply the video rubric, use AI for analyzing certain features within a resume, check certifications on the NYSED TEACH data base, and integrate districts’ hiring protocols into a streamlined submission process that will ensure efficiency while maintaining the highest levels of quality for our hiring processes.     

Colleagues, while there is reason in this challenging market to consider you my competition for hiring and retaining the very best candidates out there, there is something more at stake that I believe calls for our collaborative efforts. Our profession, the most noble and important of all fields, the field that paves the path for ALL other fields, is in jeopardy due to a staffing crisis.

In this tax cap era, while we can’t pay our faculty members what basketball players and movie stars make despite how much we value them, we can improve job satisfaction, teacher morale, and school climate.  We owe it to the field of education to answer this call for reform with collaboration, sharing of effective hiring and retention practices, and working in unison to recreate a system to which the very best humans want to belong.  I invite you to connect with me and share your strategies and best practices for hiring the kind of people that our students deserve in our schools and retaining them by cultivating school climates in which they feel a sense of belonging when they walk into our schools on day one.  

Julie McGahan is in her 19th year as building level leader on Long Island, 13 of which have been spent in Oceanside School #6, 3 in Smithtown Mt. Pleasant Elementary School, and 3 in Copiague at Deauville Gardens Elementary School.  

Connect with Julie via email jcfmcgahan@gmail.com