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No Hollow Promise - Preparing teachers for their toughest assignment

by Ken Olsen • Photography by Laurence Chen

Jacqui Fisher ’00 crouches beside a tow-headed first grader and points to his hands. “If we have eight boys and eight girls, how many hands and feet do they have?”

The student looks at Fisher, looks at his hands, and then gets up and prances around the long, narrow table where his fellow students sit. He points to each student and announces “Two there, and um, two there, and um . . . ”

It’s five hours into a non-stop day in Miss Fisher’s first-grade class at Edison Elementary School in Tacoma, Washington. Fisher has been here since early morning and, with the exception of a brief lunch break, shepherds students through reading, writing, and a host of other academic tasks without pause. She is always on, always engaged, always moving. Her students never stop needing her attention. Fisher must be commanding yet gentle, energetic yet well-paced, creative yet simple.

No wonder teaching has one of the highest turnover rates among traditional professions. In fact, half of all newcomers leave the ranks within five years. The attrition rate is even greater in public schools such as Edison, where a majority of the students have fractured and impoverished home lives.

“There’s kind of this revolving door of a lot of teachers coming in, spending a year or two, and leaving the profession altogether,” says Dawn Shinew, a Washington State University education professor.

This is not a natural, desirable winnowing of mediocre talent. The best and the brightest often are the first to leave teaching, warns teacher turnover expert Richard Ingersoll, associate professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies teacher turnover nationally.

That enormous attrition rate, more than any other factor, depletes the teaching ranks of their most qualified recruits and deprives high-risk children of the stability and positive role models they desperately need.

“If we want to deal with this teacher shortage problem,” Ingersoll says, “we are going to have to deal with turnover.”

Which is exactly why WSU selected inner-city schools like Edison to hone student teachers in a pioneering effort called CO-TEACH (Collaboration for Teacher Education Accountable to Children with High Needs). “I was told if I could teach here,” says Fisher, a veteran of the program, “I could teach anywhere.”

Stress City

“Here” is a weary neighborhood in southeast Tacoma, where the homes are uniformly small, generally neat, and often unfamiliar with fresh paint. Here there are no Hummers, BMWs, or sweeping driveways leading to three-car garages. Just tiny yards with the occasional car that hasn’t run since the Reagan administration. And a nearby retail district interspersed not with Starbucks and Pottery Barns, but pawnshops and bars.

Here is the sort of neighborhood that summons singer Neko Case’s description of Tacoma as a place where “there was no hollow promise that life would reward you.” Indeed, Case’s hometown is known for gloomy skies, white-knuckle commuting, high divorce rates, and stark economic disparity. Sperling’s Best Places rated Tacoma as the most stressed-out city among the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the nation for 2004.

Imagine how the teachers feel.

Tacoma also is almost exclusively one of two distinct classes: rich and poor. This side of the city is decidedly poor. More than 70 percent of Edison’s students are eligible to receive free or low-cost breakfast and lunch. That figure is repeated next door at Gray Middle School, another CO-TEACH site.

Students rarely live with both of their original parents. Those who do, “stick out like a sore thumb,” says Bob Hitchcock, a second-grade teacher and CO-TEACH mentor. Plenty of other elementary school students get their younger brothers and sisters up in the morning, fix them breakfast, and accompany them to school, because the parent they live with works the night shift.

“Look outside—the atmosphere,” adds Zach Womack, a CO-TEACH student teacher at Gray Middle School who graduated in May 2004. “You have kids walking by who aren’t in school. You are on a bumpy street. Them making it here is enough.”

Making it as a teacher in these sorts of schools is equally tough. The pact with parents used to be “kids came to school clothed, fed, mannered, with their homework done, and motivated,” Ingersoll says. Now teachers and schools are called upon to handle many of these tasks.

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Teaching has one of the highest turnover rates among traditional professions. Half of all newcomers leave the ranks within five years. The attrition rate is even greater in public schools such as Edison, where a majority of the students have fractured and impoverished home lives.