Teacher Retention and Career Commitments Among DeLeT Graduates: The Intersection of Teachers' Background, Preparation for Teaching, and School Context

Abstract

This article analyzes the career commitments and retention patterns among graduates of the DeLeT program (Day School Leadership Through Teaching) who were prepared for day-school teaching at Brandeis University and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Employing t-tests to analyze survey responses, we identify factors that shape and support teachers' career commitments to Jewish day schools. Our findings suggest that those who stay in Jewish dayDeLeT's investment in the professionalization of Jewish day school (JDS) teaching and in the recruitment and preparation of effective teachers goes against the grain of popular beliefs about teachers and teaching in general, and about teachers in JDSs in particular. Both teachers and teacher educators suffer low public esteem. Teaching is largely considered a "semiprofession" (Etzioni, 1969;Ingersoll & Perda, 2008) by the general public (academics included) and teacher educators have long been mocked and viewed as unintellectual (Bestor, 1953;Kahlenberg, 2007) and engaged in pseudoscience (e.g., Labaree, 2004Labaree, , 2005. The failure of the profession to establish teaching around a specific content knowledge that is backed by scientific evidence (Tamir & Wilson, 2005) has resulted in constant interference by politicians and state bureaucrats and reduced autonomy of teachers and teacher educators, as illustrated by decades of struggles around teacher certification (Cochran-Smith, 2005;Tamir, 2008Tamir, , 2010aTamir & Davidson, 2011;Wilson & Tamir, 2008). Consistent with this general undervaluing of teaching, JDSs tend to pay low salaries to their teachers, do not require their teachers to hold teacher certification (according to Ben-Avie & Kress, 2008, only half of all JDS teachers hold state teacher certification), and provide unsatisfactory levels of professional development (see Gamoran, Goldring, Robinson, Tammivaara, & Goodman, 1998;Stodolsky, Dorph, & Feiman-Nemser, 2006; The Commission on Jewish Education in North America, 1990).Counter to these norms, the DeLeT program has tried to recruit and prepare certified teachers who care about JDSs and their students, seek to grow professionally, engage in teacher leadership, and ultimately work as agents of change in their schools. The program incorporates a residency model (borrowed from the medical profession) with some university course work, and reflects a combination of an innovative alternate route program with traditional university-based teacher preparation. DeLeT's success as a program can be assessed, in part, by the extent to which alumni feel wellprepared for teaching in JDSs and their overall long-term commitment to teaching and leadership in these schools.In order to assess DeLeT's success, this article employs t-tests and chisquare tests to analyze survey responses of alumni from cohorts 1 to 4 (2002/2003-2006/2007 Journal of Jewish EducationOur findings suggest that those who stay in JDS teaching (as compared to those who leave JDS teaching) are more likely to do so because of: (a) a stron...

Recruiting Expert Teachers into High-Needs Schools: Leadership, Money, and Colleagues

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Jewish Day School Teachers: Career Commitments in the 21st Century

“…Teachers who aspired to stay in teaching or in Jewish education, framed their commitment to day school teaching around a desire to teach students and see them grow and around a connection to Judaism (see also Tamir & Magidin de-Kramer, 2011). The other findings about the importance of working conditions for retaining teachers are both backed by research in Jewish and general education (e.g., Tamir, 2013;Feiman-Nemser, 2001;Johnson, 2004;Kardos, Johnson, Peske, Kauffman, & Liu, 2001).…”

“…Based on recent studies in Jewish and general education (e.g., Tamir & Magidin de-Kramer, 2011;Ladd, 2011), we anticipated some positive relationships, particularly between school support, as well as teacher collaboration and teacher retention.…”

“…When teachers are asked about the things that keep them in teaching, these items have consistently ranked at the top for over four decades in multiple surveys and across different school contexts (Cohn & Kottkamp, 1993;Lortie, 1975;Watt & Richardson, 2007). We also included a variable that assesses teachers' commitments to the Jewish community and sense of belonging to the Jewish community, which were found in a recent study to have positive relationship with teacher retention (Tamir & Magidin de-Kramer, 2011).…”

What Keeps Teachers in and What Drives Them Out: How Urban Public, Urban Catholic, and Jewish Day Schools Affect Beginning Teachers’ Careers

“…recent studies of alumni from the DeLeT program report a more promising retention rate of 50% in classroom teaching after five years (Tamir, Feiman-nemser, Silvera-Sasson, & Cytryn, 2010;Tamir & magidin de Kramer, 2011;Tamir, 2012). All the while, findings from a more comprehensive study by Ben-Avie and Kress (2008) conclude that the Jewish teaching force is "'graying' [which] raises the likelihood that the Jewish educator population (fully qualified or not) will diminish over the next two decades" (p. 36).…”