Give a Teaching Career At Least Five Years

I don’t want to be a “lifer,” a teacher who stays in the classroom for 37-and-a-half years to retire on her public pension. There’s nothing wrong with that career path; it’s just not for me. I’ve been teaching for 10 years—my sixth year at a charter school — and it’s hard to imagine spending my senior years in such a demanding job.

Charter schools have earned a reputation for hiring inexperienced teachers, burning them out with longer hours, underpaying them and holding them to much higher standards than their district school colleagues. To some, the revolving door of teacher turnover is simply the collateral damage of education reform. After all, the urgency for self-sacrificing teachers who can provide quality urban educations has never been higher.

I support the charter school movement — both as a teacher and as a charter school parent of two — but teacher turnover at the rate of every two years or so is too high and it's counterproductive.

When I switched from a journalism career to education, I enrolled in an alternative teaching program. I took graduate courses in education and worked as a resident teacher inside a Chicago public school for a full year. Afterward, I had to make a five-year commitment to the profession or I’d have to pay back the stipend that funded my training.

Not all alternative teaching programs work that way. Teach for America, for example, which has produced some excellent education "lifers" whom I respect, trains preservice teachers for only six weeks and requires just a two-year teaching commitment. I suppose a smaller investment on the front end should require a shorter commitment on the back end. But every time an inexperienced teacher leaves before becoming a consummate educator, it’s like slowly filling a cracked and leaking cup with milk. Little real progress is made, and cleanup is almost always required.

The best advice I got about teaching was to change schools before leaving the profession. That’s what saved me. It took five years and three different schools before I could consider myself a good teacher. Five years -- that’s about how long it takes.

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