 I am delighted to see you all here today. Welcome, I'm Linda Darling-Hammond, President of the Learning Policy Institute, and delighted to welcome you to this briefing on teacher turnover. This is cosponsored by the Council for Chief State School Officers, the National Association for State Boards of Education, and the National Conference of State Legislatures, organizations that are all concerned with this issue of teacher recruitment retention, supply and demand, and it will feature research by one of our leading LPI researchers, Desiree Carver-Thomas, and commentary from students, teachers, local board members, and state policymakers. And today we're going to be discussing a new report by LPI on teacher turnover, why it matters and what we can do about it. And I wanna just frame this by noting why this is so important. Teacher turnover is actually the silent source of teacher shortages, which many of us have been experiencing all across the country. Districts and schools have been continuing to struggle to meet the growing demand for qualified teachers. Since about 2012, when the layoffs that had been common during the recession ended, the teacher workforce has grown by about 400,000 teachers. And districts have been seeking to reclaim the positions that they had previously cut during the recession and replaced the teachers who have left. And they're kind of trying to climb this hill every year and replace those who leave through the leaky bucket. But even with intensive recruiting inside and outside of the country, you've seen news reports about that. More than 100,000 classrooms are being staffed this year by instructors who are unqualified for their jobs. That we just did a review of state teacher workforce reports across the country and just in the 31 states that keep some data, we found 82,000 positions filled by underqualified teachers and additional thousands of unfilled vacancies. And if you kind of pro-rate that across the country, it's well over 100,000. Vacancies filled by people who are not prepared for the jobs. And as we know, that's almost always disproportionately affecting students in low income schools, in high minority schools, the students who most need sophisticated skills and capable teachers are the ones who experience the revolving door of teachers who are both underprepared and most likely to leave. And so this problem is in high relief for me right now because I just finished a study of teaching in five high achieving countries around the world. It's out in a version called empowered educators looking at China, Singapore, Finland, Canada, Australia, where there are surpluses of teachers where teachers tend to stay in the profession for a career or teachers come in with free or virtually free preparation in high quality programs, lots of mentoring, support systems from the very beginning, and where in that lifelong career, they're engaged in lots of collaboration with each other and able to make teaching the kind of career that is a high status, strongly appreciated, well-served profession. So as we will hear, the situation is very different in many states in the US. There is a lot of variability, but we'll also hear about solutions. So I'm going to get the festivities going by introducing my colleague, Desiree Carver-Thomas, who is the lead author for this report. And Desiree is a former New York City school teacher, and then a policy graduate from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, for which those of us at Stanford forgive her because the quality of her work warrants that respect. And after Desiree presents the results of this study, we'll hear from two panels examining the current context in the schoolhouse and the state house. I'm instructed to tell you that the hashtag is hashtag keep our teachers. So please tweet away. And Desiree, please join us at the podium. Thank you. Good morning. Last year, LPI released a report, A Coming Crisis in Teaching, that investigated teacher supply demand and shortages nationally. And we found that there was a teacher shortage and projected that the shortage would worsen if trends in teacher supply or demand didn't change. So one of the driving trends that we found in that report was teacher attrition, teachers leaving the field. So we wanted to understand that better. Why do teachers leave their schools either to leave the profession or to move schools? Where does that happen? And how can we reduce that? So we looked at the most recent national survey data from the schools and staffing survey and teacher follow-up survey to answer those questions. So this is what one Washington DC teacher had to say about why she left teaching. She says, over the course of four years, my school's administration steadily expanded the workload and workday while barely adjusting salaries. More and more major decisions were made behind closed doors and more and more teachers felt micromanaged rather than supported. And as you'll see, the concerns that this teacher, Sarah, brings up are not uncommon among teachers leaving the field. But first, why does teacher turnover matter? So one of the major reasons teacher turnover matters is that it drives shortages. So like Linda mentioned, we recently estimated that schools across the country were short about 100,000 teachers last year. And we went through and looked at publicly available data from states on their underqualified teachers in classrooms. And that's how we arrived at that estimate. These are teachers who are often only able to be hired when a fully qualified teacher isn't available. So that's what makes it a strong indicator of shortages. And as the beginning of this school year began, we've seen news stories that indicate that in many states, shortages aren't letting up. In fact, in Metro Nashville, students had to take online courses because the school district hadn't been able to hire enough math, science, special education, career tech, foreign language teachers by the beginning of the school year. So this pie graph shows national demand for teachers in 2016. And the shaded red area represents the number of vacancies created by teacher attrition, teachers leaving the classroom. And as you can see, almost all of the demand for new teachers is due to teacher attrition. And in this graph you can see in yellow, the amount of pre-retirement attrition. Basically teachers who are leaving before retirement age. So that accounts for most of the demand for new teachers due to attrition. Only a third of the demand for new teachers is due to retirements. So this suggests that if we could reduce the level of pre-retirement attrition, we could substantially reduce the demand for new teachers and that would go a long way towards solving shortages. Indeed, if we could cut our attrition rate in half to be comparable with other high achieving nations, we could virtually eliminate shortages across the country. Attrition drives teacher shortages and that has an impact on teacher quality and student achievement. When districts have a hard time filling vacancies, they may cancel courses, increase class sizes, staff classes with long-term substitutes, all of which undermine student achievement. But often they hire underprepared teachers. So not only are teachers without full preparation generally worse for student outcomes, they act as a band-aid solution. Research indicates that teachers without full preparation leave at two to three times the rates of fully prepared teachers, creating the leaky bucket phenomenon that further contributes to shortages. So I've been talking about the role of attrition, but our report is about turnover generally. So attrition is those teachers who are leaving schools. Turnover refers to both those leaving schools and those switching schools. So about 8% of teachers leave the profession each year. Again, that's about double the rates in high achieving countries like Finland and Singapore. And then another 8% switch schools each year. So it's important to note that while reducing attrition could go a long way to solving shortages, reducing turnover is also very important. When a teacher leaves a school, even to teach in another school, the effect on the students in that school is the same as if that teacher had left the profession. And when teachers switch schools at high rates, it exacerbates the shortages in the schools where that most often happens. So there's quite a bit of variation in turnover across the country. We see that in states, there are states with turnover rates lower than 10%. States with turnover rates higher than 20%. We notice higher turnover rates in the South overall. There's also variation across districts. Based on our analysis, teachers in cities tend to have higher turnover rates and also in some rural areas as well. Math, science, special education, English language development all have especially high turnover rates. And these are subjects that have some of the most critical shortages. These teachers tend to enter the field with less preparation. And especially in the case of math and science teachers, tend to have better opportunities for more lucrative work. Many states are using the new ESSA law as an opportunity to provide comprehensive and rigorous college and career-ready curriculums. But that can be significantly hindered without a skilled and effective educator workforce. So how can schools be prepared to, how can schools prepare students for college level math if they're having a hard time hiring math teachers and keeping the ones that they have? High turnover is especially pronounced in Title I schools that serve more low, students from low-income families. Not only that, turnover is even higher among math and science, special education and English language development teachers in Title I schools. And especially high, oops, especially high among teachers who entered teaching through an alternative certification pathway. Teachers who are also more likely to teach in Title I schools. So because of their higher turnover rates, teachers in these schools end up having fewer years of experience, stay at their schools for fewer years on average. We see similar trends in schools that serve majority students of color. Turnover rates are higher overall. And they're even higher in critical, shorter subjects like math and science, special education, alternative certification teachers are most likely to teach in these schools, but are more than twice as likely to leave them than to leave teachers, leave schools with few students of color. So with such high turnover rates, teachers in these schools have been at their schools fewer years on average and have less teaching experience. All in all schools serving students of color, students from low income families have the highest turnover rates and the least experience. And this is a huge disservice to our students because students really benefit from being in schools with a stable workforce and from learning from experienced teachers. Teachers of color tend to teach in high turnover schools. Teachers of color make up about 18% of the teacher workforce, but three and four work in schools with serving the most students of color, which as I mentioned, also tend to have high turnover rates. They're also twice as likely to enter the field through an alternative certification pathway, which again is associated with higher turnover rates. But looking at a turnover in a statistical model that controls for several factors, we see comparable turnover rates between teachers of color and white teachers who may be teaching in similar settings. And finally, turnover has costs. Turnover can affect teacher quality when schools resort to hiring underprepared teachers or inexperienced teachers. High turnover can affect staff cohesion, collaboration and the transfer of institutional knowledge. And common solutions to mitigating shortages like cutting courses, hiring substitute teachers, hiring underprepared teachers, all undermine student achievement. And finally, there are financial costs to recruiting and training new teachers estimated at the high end as much as $21,000 for each to replace each new teacher in an urban district. So I'm going to demo a calculator tool that we just released last week that helps districts to calculate what the cost of turnover could be based on several research estimates. So the first demo I'll show you is in Prince George's County. And this is if you know how many teachers have left a district. So I know that in Prince George's County, 1,197 teachers left. So I can enter that in in the top field. So that's happening. And I don't know the cost of turnover in that district specifically, but I can enter an estimate based on the research for either a rural district, a suburban district, or an urban district. And as you can see, the estimate is about $21,000 per teacher for a total of over $25 million of cost to the district. And the number below $25 million, $12 million, $12.6 million is if you could cut the turnover rate in half. So like I mentioned earlier, if we could cut attrition in half, we could eliminate shortages. We could also save or reinvest quite a bit of funds. So now I'll show you what this would look like in Oakland, California. So I don't know how many teachers left there. So I'll use the Let Us Help You tab. I do know that there are 2,796 teachers in the district. So I will enter that in. If you don't know that, there's a link where you can find the number of teachers in a district. And I know that 18% of teachers left in the year. So I can enter that in. Again, we have some estimates there that you can use, the national average for schools or districts. Again, I will select urban district and I see a total of about $10.6 million. And I wanna emphasize that these aren't the actual costs that these districts paid, but these are estimates that we can use to get a sense of what the cost could be, given the attrition rates in these districts. So thank you. So instead of spending $21,000 to replace a teacher who left a school that could amount to millions of dollars, states and districts could direct those funds into residency models to better prepare teachers or competitive compensation packages or high quality mentoring, other strategies that would help to improve teacher quality, which I will get to later. So to recap, why does teacher turnover matter? It drives teacher shortages, which undermine teacher quality and student achievement. Turnover itself also undermines student achievement, even if there are no shortages because of the instability it creates. It's worse in critical shortage subjects and worse for students from low income families and students of color, and it has costs, financial and otherwise. So now that we know it matters, why does it happen? Based on our analysis of the survey data, we see that dissatisfaction plays a significant role in teacher turnover. Most teachers express some dissatisfaction with accountability pressures or with administrative support or with working conditions that they were experiencing. Next come family and personal reasons. Again, retirement is just about a third of the reasons why teachers leave. They leave to pursue other jobs and for financial reasons. We see a similar trend for teachers who move schools with even more citing dissatisfaction of some sort. So if teachers are leaving the field and switching schools because they're dissatisfied, states should consider how to improve those conditions. One of the key areas that teachers express dissatisfaction with is administrative support. And we find a significant relationship between administrative support and teacher turnover. When teachers feel strongly that their administration isn't supportive, isn't encouraging, they're more than twice as likely to leave teaching or move schools than when their administrative administration is supportive. Preparation also impacts turnover. So again, in a model that holds several factors constant, teachers who enter teaching through an alternative certification program were 25% more likely to turnover than other teachers. And we see an even greater turnover rate for alternatively certified teachers in school-serving students of color. So it's important that teacher preparation programs are adequately preparing teachers for the challenging job of teaching because that makes a difference in turnover. So this is a quote from Sean Sheehan who was last year's Oklahoma teacher of the year and he moved a few hours away to a district in Texas. And a first-year teacher in his new district makes $7,500 more than the average teacher in Oklahoma where he was teaching. So of course teachers don't go into the profession to make lots of money, but being able to take care of themselves and their families does make a difference in recruitment and retention. And in many states, that's difficult. In 30 states, a teacher heading a family for is eligible for several forms of government assistance. So compensation matters. And we see this again in our model that teachers who in districts that offer higher salary schedules have turnover rates 20 to 30% lower than teachers in districts with the lowest salary schedules. So what can we do? We know that compensation matters for teachers and that they'll be more likely to continue teaching when they receive competitive salaries. States can also consider other forms of compensation like service scholarships and loan forgiveness programs. These programs can make teaching an affordable occupation by underwriting the cost of high quality preparation, especially for those teachers who will teach in the subjects and locations where they're most needed. And districts can also consider offering other types of financial incentives like housing incentives and childcare incentives. It's important that it's important that states invest in building the teacher workforce through high retention pathways that prepare teachers who will be successful in the classroom and want to continue teaching through teacher residencies modeled after medical residencies. Residents complete a year long apprenticeship with master teachers in a high need school while completing a coursework for a master's degree. These teachers have extensive hands-on preparation before becoming responsible for their own students. Completers of these programs tend to be more diverse, more competent teachers than other beginners, and they stay in the field longer than their peers. Grow your own programs, build the pool of prospective teachers in the communities where they're needed by recruiting, training and supporting high school students, paraprofessionals, after-school program staff and other community members. Those teaching in their own communities are more likely to stay in the profession. And once teachers enter the classroom, they benefit from strong mentoring and induction, programs that support them through observation and feedback, time to collaborate with others, reduce workload and other supports to help them to be successful in their early years. And finally a key issue is administrative training. Administrators are very important to what happens, what the teaching and learning environment is like in a school, and whether teachers choose to stay or leave. So states could invest in their accreditation and licensure systems so that administrations, to ensure that administrators come into schools prepared to create supportive and nurturing work environments, and also offer ongoing professional support for administrators. Districts can build leadership pipelines that support district staff with the skills that they need to move from teacher to teacher leader to assistant principal to principal. And many states are taking advantage of the optional 3% leadership set aside in ESSA to work toward that. So I just wanna close by saying that we have a series of research reports on our little jump drives that you may have received when you came in, also on our website that go into greater depth on the points I've made here. We also have a one-pager on what states can do that's on your jump drive. And we're committed to supporting on these issues. So please feel free to reach out. Thank you. Thank you so much. We're gonna be joined now by my colleague, Jessica Cardesan, who is director of our DC office here and our federal policy initiatives. Jessica also taught in New York City, and then actually worked in Congressman and Senator Bernie Sanders' office before she meandered her way over to the Learning Policy Institute. So we're delighted to have Jessica, who will help moderate the panel and introduce the rest of the panel. I will welcome up our panelists. We will start with Sigourn Eubanks. If you can join us please. He's the inaugural director of the Center for Education, Innovation and Improvement and Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland College Park. Dr. Eubanks also serves as the chair of the Board of Education for Prince George's County Public Schools, 132,000 student school district bordering Washington, DC. We are also really excited to have Antonio Iglesias, who is a earth science teacher. It's very hard. At East Side High School in Newark, New Jersey, where he taught for the past six years and he's a graduate of the Newark-Mont-Claire Urban Teacher Residency Program. And last but definitely not least is Nyla Williams, a student leader and board member with the California for Justice in Oakland, California. She's currently pursuing her high school diploma through Gateway to College at Laney College and plans to become a teacher. Really excited about this. Lots of great perspectives. So we will start with you, Sigourn. You're currently the chair of the Board of Education at Prince George's County Public Schools. We saw the calculator for Prince George's County and Desiree's presentation. Yes, could you share a bit of context for the information that Desiree shared regarding Prince George's County and the impact of teacher turnover on your district? Sure, happy to. First, thank you very much for having me and most important thank you for continuing to make this issue of teacher turnover central to the work that we do in improving education. We mentioned Prince George's County is 132,000 student district bordering DC, one of the 17th or 18th largest in the country. When I read the report, it's interesting when you look at the demographics of the county and when you look at the indicators for teacher turnover, we pretty much have the trifecta. This proportionally high number of Title I schools, we have about 64% of our students who receive free and reduced lunch. We are a predominantly minority school district, about 60% of our students are African American, another 30% are Latino Hispanic, a number that has about tripled over the past 15 years. We have, we are actually a district that has a predominantly minority teaching workforce, I think is unique to a whole lot of other districts in the country. We are both proud of that fact and at the same time when you look at the data about turnover, it indicates that we have some significant challenges. And so when I look at that data, our numbers are slightly different, but pretty much the same. Basically, we have about 10,000 teachers. And so the number that you have represents about a 10% annual turnover. And that is about what our data tells us that we turn over about 10% of our teachers every year. Now 10% in one sense is like an average number when you look at what's going on, but in a district our size, it means we have to recruit over 1,000 new teachers each and every year just to keep up with the pace of our turnover rate. And so it is indeed an ongoing challenge. It means that we have gotten, we're also in a state in Maryland that is not a high producing state. So we have a pretty much international recruitment system. We go all over the country and in different parts of the world to meet our recruitment needs. In a district that spent, I think a lot of time early in this process getting really good at recruitment and now have started to pay more attention to that other end of it. I think that we spent a lot of time just thinking, hey, this is part of the process. What are we gonna do? We need 1,000, let's get 1,000. We need 1,000, let's get 1,000. And we got pretty good at it, but we started to need to pay significantly more attention to how we keep the folks who we get. My only other thought, when I look at that number, 25 million, it is fair to say if we cut retention in half, as a school board member, I salivate about what I might do with $12.5 million. We are currently in negotiation with our employees now. The recession hit our county hard and we have recovered at a slower rate than the rest of the region. So our employees are pretty far behind in the salary schedule and $12.5 million represents pretty close to about a full step in salary for our workforce. When I look at things like, we have 209 buildings. We have some of the oldest buildings in the state of Maryland and around the country. We have a multi-million dollar maintenance backlog, but I wouldn't do a $12.5 million just to hire a second shift of maintenance so that people can fix our building. This is not to mention the new buildings we have to build. This is just to keep the ones that we have running. We are still, I was at a parent and community advisory council when a parent came to me last night and asked why there were 40 teachers in her middle school algebra, one class, and what we could do to reduce class sizes. So when you look at what the impact of this number is, it's pretty dramatic. And I think if we were able to do something about it, it could make a significant difference in how we can help students in our district. Great, thank you. I want to continue answering that question around impact. So now that you're a senior in high school and the Gateway to College program, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you've experienced the effects of teacher turnover? Well, the public school from more than two years. I remember a lot of it in my freshman year. Freshman year is usually, it starts off really unorganized. It's your first time this in high school. You're not really prepared. The last thing you want to see is the teacher. But that was my experience. I had this pre-algebra teacher who only lasted two weeks. She was clearly unorganized, the class was unorganized and put the students in check she wasn't in check either. So eventually she ended up slapping one of the students and a few days after she resigned before she got fired, I guess, but clearly the reasons why she left was like she says that she wasn't really ready. She had a lot of kids, she was tired, she didn't want to do all the grading. So it was clear that she just wasn't prepared to be a teacher. At the time, I wasn't in California for justice. So I was kind of questioning, well, how did she become a teacher? I didn't understand the process at the time, but it didn't get the proper training due to the fact that. Great, if everyone can make sure the red light is on and just pull the microphones a little closer. Antonio, so you've heard Sagoon and Nila talk about it from their experience. Are you observing the same turnover in Newark public schools? And if so, what do you think is contributing to that turnover in Newark? Thanks, everybody, and thanks for having me. I would say definitely, it's definitely what we're seeing in Newark. For example, so I'm entering my sixth year now, and in just my department in the science department, we have 15 positions and now entering my sixth year, I have seen 16 teachers leave. So pretty much every position has been lost and replaced in some capacity. And I think it's what was in the research, what Sagoon and what Nila have been talking about. It's a mix of everything. Half of it is compensation. I'm from a district where for whatever reason, the salary schedules ended up the way they were. Many teachers who are earning masters actually earn less money for the same steps as teachers who have bachelors, which is a whole other fun side story. Beyond that, it's a lot of, as Desiree was saying in the research, where we all have science backgrounds especially. So we are leaving for these lucrative positions. We are seeking opportunities that cater to our needs because we've really invested in this world of science and we want, especially as I do as a teacher, I wanna share that world of science with them, but the reasons for us staying become less and less and also echoing this idea of administration where, and I think it's also compounded by the fact that when you have many new teachers on top of it, now that same administrator has to cater to the needs of many new teachers and then the exhaustion of these resources where on top of it, if the administrator is not prepared, now on top of it, they're catering to many teachers who aren't prepared and it just becomes this feedback loop to the point where it's like, you know, defense of the dark arts in Harry Potter and it's just every year it's a new teacher. And so I think I'm really seeing the same exact thing. It's just every year it's a new face for the, not only for the students, but for the teachers and for the administration and I think the frustration of that also caters to it because there's no, it's always in transition, it's always in flux, there's no sense of being static. So I definitely seeing a lot of the same things. So this idea around teachers leaving because it's not where they are, it's not an affordable profession. I know Desiree spoke to it during her presentation, student. In Prince George's County, you hire, first-year teachers often stay for a couple of years and then move to more affluent districts such as Montgomery and Howard counties. Can you speak to this phenomenon, why it occurs and what you're doing to try and make sure that you keep those excellent teachers in your district? Sure. Yeah, that is a phenomenon that we've dealt with for a long time, particularly in the Washington, D.C. You know, a lot of perception and then some combined reality. And the fact is that we do have seen, I can tell you, there's a lot of movement in between counties. Again, just this week, I met with a teacher who left for D.C., who, because the salary was higher, but like the working conditions back in Prince George's County and came back for a pay cut to come back to the county. So part of what our struggle is, one is clearly one of compensation. I mentioned that. We're significantly behind our colleagues in other counties. And we battle, we have a relatively constant battle of perception for our county. Again, we're a county that is, that when you really peel back some of what we do, we're incredibly successful. So our data shows that our African-American students are achieving at rates higher than African-American students in any other county in the state and possibly across the nation. But at the same time, overall, we're still the second lowest performing district in the state of Maryland, based on most other indicators. And so we battle this constant battle of perception that Prince George's County is not the place you wanna be, that if you get your stuff together and you get, you come in through Prince George's County, we have a pretty big alternative route program. You get your certification, you get your credentials and you move on to greener pastures. So we really tried to fight that perception. We've actually interestingly kind of contrary to the data, we have a resident teacher program and over the past several years, we've been able to reduce our attrition through our resident teacher program is significantly lower than across the rest of the district. We believe that's partly because most of the teachers who we recruit in that program are local teachers, people who live in the county live in the state of Maryland. I will, I can't say this without Linda being right here, put an editorial comment that it was up to me as school board chair, I would turn our resident teacher program into a true residency model is what it really needs to become so that we deal not only with doing better with retention, but we're getting folks who are better prepared to be effective from day one on the job that we have work to do in that area. But those are kind of just a few of the ways in which we kind of continue to struggle. I will mention we've tried to be creative with that a couple of years ago, we started a middle college program in the health sciences and we've had our second cohort of graduates who graduate from high school and community college on the same day. It was a great program and this September, we launched a new one specifically related to careers in teaching and education. We're very proud of our teaching career academy and so we have our first cohort of 50 students who just started as freshmen in our career academy with the idea of really building grow your own programs and having graduates who graduate four years from now with both a high school diploma and an associate's degree on their way to careers in teaching. So we're trying to do a lot more to kind of keep a build good, grow your own programs. Thank you. One of the efforts that you described was the residency program. Antonio, you're a graduate of the New York Montclair Urban Residency Program. Can you talk a bit about how that program prepared you for teaching and did it have any influence on your decision? So yeah, thanks for Sagoon for hyping up residency programs before I speak. It's very multifaceted, the really amazing experience that I had with my residency and so just to really clue people into residencies and Desiree sort of primed it as well as this idea of sort of like a medical residency but with teachers instead. And so we travel as a cohort. My cohort had eight of us and we were individuals who were in the schools from day one with our mentor teachers and we took classes together and we were a small community. And I think that's one of the cornerstones for why we felt so prepared first of all was just support. This idea that we knew people that we identified with we were always placed with them. So they would try to put us in pairs or trios in schools so that when we were placed we had familiar faces that we could rely on as resources. But beyond that, it's really about the philosophy of the program that I was in. So it was only math science education. So first off really trying to hit that niche market of areas that tend to not be well prepared. But on top of it, well actually just to elaborate on that giving the sense of changing also the way you teach science. So it becomes inquiry driven. It becomes student centric. This idea, this paradigm shift of you are no longer instructing students about rote memorization but you are trying to put the ownership with the students as well. And then on top of it we were also trained in having social justice in our classroom and that caters in both directions. Not only for the students where you're really trying to foster democratic policies or processes in the classroom. But on top of it for why I stay. I stay to advocate for them. I was learning how to really be a social advocate on behalf of them. And so when they were trying to turn our school into a turnover program that would see us have longer days for a very small stipend. We felt this was not in the needs of our students and many of us within our cohort spearheaded this response to not permitting this because we're there for the students. We're there for the communities. The stakeholders that are most valuable are them. And then just to go back full circle back to how the residency further caters support is we also have induction. So this idea that once you are released into the wild of teaching, you are not abandoned. It's this idea that for three years after I had retired teachers who would visit my classrooms periodically and make sure that I still felt supported beyond my mentor, my in school mentor. And it comes to the point where the program becomes so sustainable that now full circle I'm now working with the induction program. And so this idea that it creates cultures in small microcosms that are meant to build. So we started in one school as a lab and now we really have impact or three or four high schools. So that's really the idea is that they're small at first and there's a lot to put up front but the residual effects of it really addresses a lot of what this whole idea of turnover is. It's reducing that. And I think it's important to point out that you also spoke to not only providing you with the support that you need but also to develop the skills that you had to be a more effective teacher, which I think efforts. Nila, you are a board member with Californians for justice and you work with them on relationship centered schools. Can you tell us a little bit about that campaign why teacher turnover is an important issue for the campaign and what you're doing to it. So the relationship centered school campaign is more about making sure that students and teachers feel supported in their schools. And each region has a different way of targeting targeting solutions regarding this campaign or campaign has three bucket lists. So the first one is investing in staff. The second one is creating space space for relationship building. And the third one is implementing student voice. So currently in Oakland we are focusing on investing in staff and one of those solutions is one definitely better pay of course. And the second one is really upgrading the way we train teachers especially high quality principals. We specifically want to upgrade our training for newer teachers so that when they come into the teaching environment they're the classroom environment it's not you know as disorganized. So before we turn it over to the audience for questions just want to ask each of you a final question before the audience questions. What's one thing that you think it's important for our audience to understand regarding the impact of teacher turnover from your perspective as a school board member a teacher and a student. So maybe we'll start with with Nila. If there's one message you want the audience to kind of understand around the impact of teacher turnover what can be done about it. What would you like to share with them. Well for an example as an impact I am a definite impact for a teacher turnover turnover. For me I had some good teachers in public school as well as one of them was a history teacher of mine and she kept the students in check. She checked on their grades. She had a positive relationship with them and she she made the classroom environment very comfortable in a way where the students were able to learn good habits that they needed to learn in life more than just in school. So I feel like you know teachers like that are need to be more like more into teacher training we need to have teachers like that into teacher training so that we can have teachers like that able to stay in the district because those are the kind of teachers that that they stay there and they really build a positive relationship. I feel like every student like the teacher I had every student should have a teacher like that. But I feel like that really just goes into the way of how we train and how we just really support our staff. So I think for me from hearing just the comments and I think the big challenge when you're teachers you're just so in the realm of teaching that you forget that there's this whole world existing outside of that. And I think with teacher turnover it's just this reminder that it impacts everybody. It impacts the students who are there obviously that's the most direct impact but it impacts the teachers who stay and keep witnessing the frustrations that both you have and the students have impacts the administration it impacts the community who you want to engage but they feel disenfranchised by this idea that you can't create a safe space because there is no sense of being static and it impacts above I mean it impacts the policymakers who don't know how to solve the problem because it is so multifaceted and I think we're this is definitely going in the right direction but I think it's just this reality that everybody is affected in some capacity. I think that's really my takeaway. So I think my one takeaway is there's so much that we can do we believe that doesn't take resources. However, really hard to think of doing this without making the investments. I think about what I could do if we cut attrition to half and save 12.5 million. But I also think about the fact that I need 12.5 million to invest in order to cut attrition in half. So for example, we have a new teacher academy we have an induction program we have a really good peer assistance and review program but fewer than half of all of our new teachers get those services because we don't have enough mentors we don't have enough peer review coaches everybody everyone gets the kind of new teacher academy weekend two days before school everyone gets that but once they get into the classroom and they start to struggle those with the highest need get support but the everyday teachers who are doing their best who seem to be hanging okay tend not to get the support that they need and deserve. And so if we were to get more mentors or to expand the kind of resources that we had then I think that we'd go a long way but it is about how we combine a different approach to being more bold about the investments that we make with approaches to changing the cultures of our schools in ways that don't take money but changing culture is a pretty hard thing to do as well. For our next panel we have time for audience questions for Sugun, Antonio, Nila and for Desiree as well. We have a microphone at the center. I thoroughly enjoy the presentation. Excuse me today I find it very very exciting but my question is this when we talk about teachers and we talk about students our voices tend to be lost in the emanation. How do we build coalitions? How do we build and bring in policymakers because we cannot do this by ourselves? We already know success stories exist in other countries. You know Linda's been doing this for decades and decades and decades and should I say decades? We know what works but how do we build that coalition? How do we bring the coalition and have folks up there the parents, the community members, very alongside of you echoing the same things that you're saying? Yeah sure why not. So I mean that's really the number one challenge right now is how do you get your voices heard and it's just focusing on publicizing as best you can and you have to start small. I mean we have very strong ties to the councilman in our area and really trying to get the sense of creating neighborhood schools again and making it a community where you start small and you have to keep advocating. I mean that's all it really comes down to and it's exhausting and tiresome and but you have to work and finesse the networks that you have. I mean I work very closely with Montclair State and I will forever use them as my advocates but you have to find those people who are willing to speak up because I mean and it's weird because especially from Newark, New Jersey we received that Facebook money all those many years ago and it went to nothing basically. It went to administrative costs and it found many ways so I think it's making sure that the message is heard of where the money should go to and reinforcing that, that it should be going to preparation, it should be going not necessarily more bottom up than top down because I think that's our frustration but how to get that message heard that's been the frustration since at least I've only been in it for seven years, day one for me but that's what I've seen ever since my journey has begun. I just know and obviously we have to build these coalitions and from just from a kind of a local level getting student voice involved in engagedness and getting parent voice involved in engagedness. Actually I published a message this early it's pretty exciting for us that we have a Parent and Community Advisory Council and the parent co-chair brought before our parent council that the issue that the council should focus on this year is teach a morale in order to address teacher attrition. So these parents who are active in the schools are looking around and saying hey we're sick of seeing long-term subs for our students, we're sick of seeing new faces every year and they wanna be involved and engaged in being part of that solution for us so building those local community particularly bringing student voice and parent voice into the mix I think is important as well. In the organization in California for Justice we are all about student voice and we try to make sure that we have students speaking to a lot of decision makers like the school board and the school district as much as possible. We always go to the school board, the district and we tell them that it's important to have student voice in our schools and our teachers really understand that and we've had a lot of meetings with our teachers and our members who are students are able to just say what really needs to be going down. I feel like that should be something in nationwide student voice is very important and what our organization does is organize those students so that they have a platform where they can just say their voice, have an opportunity to say it's my experience and what's going on in my classrooms and it gives a really good insight like right now on what we really need for our schools. Thanks, thank you Jessica, thank you panelists. Great question, I think forums like this help keep this on the policy radar and build that advocacy movement so I appreciate what you're doing today. My name's Ash Vasudeva, Carnegie Foundation Advancement of Teaching. My question for you is in the report you identified accountability as a major source of teacher dissatisfaction. Can you talk about how that's playing out in your systems and whether or not you see these pressures changing with SL legislation? So I guess from what I'm gathering from the report from accountability has to do basically what's expected of us on the day to day and there was that one slide where it talked about I think it was that first one that really hit hardest for me which was this idea of this is the one teacher who had the expanding sense of duties and responsibilities for the same pay and I mean, hey, I was on a contract freeze for three years so I know that more so especially now and the reality was that every day and it's always the science department because we're always pushing ahead but then it's like, oh, you're doing that, let's do more, let's do even more data. Can you collect even more data points? Can you have even more expansive lesson plans to the point where you're writing hours of lesson plans and the time it takes to write one physical lesson plan is longer than teaching the lesson and it's just like, where is this going wrong? And I mean, I've been doing this for like seven years so I have the opportunity to sort of rehash and reimagine and reflect on what I've been doing but I think the challenge is that this accountability ends up feeling like compliance a lot of times and I feel like I am complying with the needs and wants because what is the new hot button trend of this next cycle of teaching? Because there's always one, there's always one and I'm trying to think right now it's literacy in the classroom and I've been teaching literacy because every teacher teaches literacy but they're getting it to the point where they don't know their pedagogical intentionality for why they're doing it. They just think if they see the results then obviously they were the reasons why it happened and it has nothing to do with the teachers because we're giving them 110% all the time and that's really the challenge with the accountability and that's the frustration on top of it. So I think number one, you bring up a really good point Ash because when I looked at a lot of what we've learned about teacher turnover isn't particularly new, the accountability pressures that are in this data I think is showing that just as many of us have suspected particularly those who represent the teachers for so long that the accountability pressures are having a significant impact on teachers' willingness to stay in the classroom. From, I'll be honest, at a local level our teachers haven't seen or heard any real change when it comes to ESSA, right? It's still, I think that our teachers like a whole lot of teachers probably have a skeptical wait and see, yeah right, we'll believe that it's gonna be less pressure when we see it and so you narrow it like a whole lot of other places are right in the middle and we just put our plan in and I will say that over the last couple of years we've gone through a rather significant process of test reduction a lot because of what we've heard from teachers and parents that said this test thing is getting out of control and we've, I forget the number, I think we're at about 15 or 16% less time in testing this year than we were last year and so hopefully that will begin to address it but I think really the jury is out on the impact that ESSA might have on teachers. I'm Seroja Warner with the Council of Chief State School Officers but I'm asking this question as an advocate for children and communities right now. Sugun I wanna come back to a comment you made earlier because it really spoke to my spirit. When you called out that this work can't be done pro bono and for free, it will require an investment of resources and so I'm really curious to hear, I think particularly from you Sugun and where you sit in your experiences working in Prince George's County about how this question of stakeholder engagement, this is bigger than this, this is about being able to see where people's priorities are by where they invest their resources. This for me is a civil rights issue at its core. I look at this data, thank you, right? I look at this data and these are the students who are living on the margins and their families who are most impacted by what is happening with teacher turnover. So how else do we make this argument that there is no greater public good right now that we need to be investing in than in solving this problem? Sirosha, you can answer the question too if you want. Feel free. Look, I'll just say briefly, I've been on the board for four years and had a long 30 year career in education before that and this is no joke when it comes to how we look at issues of investment. We tried in Prince George's County to get bold and put a huge tax increase reform in that was gonna dramatically be able to increase compensation for teachers and put it in a crashed and burned quicker than anyone can imagine and we're still recovering from that. At the same time, it's always a very heated debate. We still have a where I have a $1.9 billion budget. So our teachers are telling us right now, use what you got to give us what we need and it's a reasonable argument and it's always a kind of back and forth about how you can make these tough choices. I will just say our data shows that while we think that given our circumstances we do pretty good at teacher turnover, we're still at about double what our surrounding counties are with the exception of DC. The Maryland counties that surround us have a four or five, six percent turnover each year and they're at about $15,000 to $20,000 per student higher than we are in spending. Everyone wants to think that that's some kind of a weird coincidence. It's hard to imagine by the time it's said and done how you don't begin to make those investments but part of it is about kind of faith that communities and voters in particular need to have in school districts in order to demand it because until they do, until they demand it, the policy makers are not gonna touch investing in education and technical. And Nyland and Tony, can you pick up on that kind of in the work that you're doing? Do you see it being communicated as a civil rights issue? Is that how it's being talked about particularly Nyland in your work? Yeah, I mean that was the whole foundation of why the residency exists the way it does. It's really to become agents of change and to create these voices for the students and that's why we are about fostering democracy in the classroom because we gotta make sure that they are the voices that get to be heard as the key stakeholders and recipients of education because if it's not for them, then for whom else? So just to briefly address it, yeah, absolutely. I definitely think it is a civil rights issue. It's pretty clear that many of our teachers are really struggling because the lack of, you know, the perception that it's just really lacking support to our teachers. People have a really poor perception on teachers. So definitely how are we going to fix this is to shift our perceptions that we have with staff and teachers. Specifically to more like a more supportive perception. I know in Singapore, they're teachers, they're called nation builders and because they're moving their knowledge, they're giving their knowledge about their nation to the next generation and I feel like we should really have that perception on teachers, our districts. Good morning. Before I ask my question, I would like to preface by saying that I just graduated from high school and I actually attended a Title I school in Colorado, one of the lowest performing academic environments in the state of Colorado, predominantly Hispanic and in my experience, I had six different principles over the course of four years. So the turnover was actually more experienced at the administrative level and it felt, I know that you guys talked a lot about the residency programs for teachers and how to support our teachers, but I feel as though this is really kind of like an inverted pyramid. Our legislators at the state aren't in, I feel as though they're not in touch with our nation or like our leaders at the national level and our state leaders aren't in touch with our school boards, our school boards aren't in touch with our teachers, our teachers aren't in touch with our community and our parents, which leads to the students. Therefore, it is a chain reaction and I feel as though I just, I would like to know in your experience as an educator, as a student and as a member of school board what we can do to prepare our administration. I had a lot of administrative members who never stepped foot in a classroom. Policy was being made in a way that I think it said, yeah, let's have community forums, let's talk about this and we did put our input but it was never actually implemented and so a lot of these things look great on paper but they're not actually being enforced. And yeah, so I was just wondering that because I am very, very passionate about it and I just feel as though a lot of administrators, a lot of teachers and a lot of policy members basically just use these Title I schools as a stepping stone for their career and not really because they're invested in the civil rights aspect and in the actual community, so. Question? No, it's not. And I have to follow that. Great, so we do have time for Rob's question but maybe we can talk just around, kind of maybe the administrative support around what some efforts maybe you're doing around keeping administrators in the district as well. Sure, I mean if we did the same study on administrators I think we'd find some similar work in Prince George's County. We work with the Wallace Foundation for the past five years on refer to support principals. I think it's interesting when we've done a lot and actually been nationally recognized for the kind of leadership development work we've done. We still have work to do when you look at some of our feedback from our service. Numbers of teachers who don't feel supported by their principal is remarkably high. But how we support and sustain our leaders is equally as important to this effort. And I would just say the way we deal with teachers and administrators traditionally in public schools is we don't pay you for your hard work. So our reward structure is that you move to easier jobs. That is still the primary structure and so of course you started a title one school as a teacher and you cut your teeth as a new teacher in a title one school and when you've gotten some experience and some seniority under your belt you move to an easier school and principals are doing the same thing. So until we can flip that reward structure and start to reward our most capable folks for taking on the most challenging assignments that whole process of principal and teacher movement between schools won't be solved. So we have time just for one more question. And I'll make it quick. That was an excellent question by the way. Thank you Jessica panelists, Linda and your team. My name's Rob Mahaffey. I'm the executive director of the Rural School and Community Trust. We advocate on behalf of the 12 million children that live in rural and remote places. And I'm really struck in the research. So Desiree I turn to you that the states the two states that have the highest turnover rate are Arizona and New Mexico. The two states that have the lowest turnover rate are my home state of West Virginia and Utah. Those are four very rural states. You get outside of Charleston and Salt Lake City, Phoenix. What are you seeing in the data that makes a difference in rural communities? Because we know that rural teachers tend to be their lifers. They come, they start, they stay, they never leave. And that has its advantages and its challenges, right? Or teachers are on a constant churn. There isn't sort of this core set of teachers like Antonio that have been there six, seven, eight years. So are you finding anything? Because this is a key issue for us at the Rural School and Community Trust. Pretty consistently that schools in cities have higher turnover rates no matter what region you're looking at. But that rural schools were sort of different from cities in that in some places in the West, in particular, rural schools had especially high turnover rates higher than, mix up my stats. But I wanna say it was higher than cities in Western states versus in the South, the Midwest, the Northeast, rural schools had some of the lowest turnover rates. So it is an interesting question. It's not one that we investigated deeply, but I think it's one that we will want to dig into a bit more. It's hard looking specifically at specific state data using the source that we were looking at. But regionally, that is something that we noticed. I wish I could tell you, give you some reasons why that might be, but it's not something that we looked into. I'd like to thank our first panel for setting the stage on what this looks like in practice. And we will now turn over to our policy panel who can talk more about the solution side, although that can help support actually the solutions that you're implementing at the local level. So thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. And we're gonna very quickly ask our other panel to come up here. Thank you, Maria, for shifting all the nameplates. First, I'm gonna ask Representative Sharon Tomeko Santos. Thank you. Sharon was elected to the Washington State House of Representatives in 1998. She serves as the chair of the House Education Committee and on the Washington State Educational Opportunity Gap Oversight and Accountability Committee. She is former vice chair of the National Conference of State Legislatures Education Committee on what she still serves. We greatly appreciate her coming all the way out here from the left coast to join us today. Secondly, we have Seth Gerson, who is the program director for the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices. Seth serves as the program director in the education division of the National Governors Association Center where he works on early childhood and K-12 education issues. He, before that was on the Hill for a long time as a staffer with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards deeply steeped in these issues. He has written some of the best parts of the ESSA. So I just wanna give him a little credit for that. And then we have State Superintendent Steve Sables, who is the State Superintendent in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the great state of Virginia. Steve was appointed Virginia's 24th Superintendent of Public Instruction by Governor Terry McAuliffe. As superintendent, he serves as the executive officer of the Virginia Department of Education, which oversees the Commonwealth's public schools. He's been doing some really creative and innovative work in the state around the reconceptualization of education under ESSA. So I hope we have a chance to think and talk about that a little bit. So I am now gonna join you in the conversation. Let's start with the context that we're now in. I was reflecting on the fact that in 1992, the attrition rate for teachers in the United States was 5%. It's now about 8%. So it's significantly increased over that period of time. And a lot of things have changed in that period of time. We have, as we've heard, preparation matters a great deal to teachers staying in the profession. We have many more teachers entering without full preparation today than we did in 1992. Some of the earlier data showed that fully prepared teachers would leave over the course of their first five years at the rate of about 14%. And uncertified teachers would leave at the rate of about 49%. So huge differentials. And we have now about a quarter of our teachers entering the classroom without full preparation each year. Mentoring matters. Teachers who get strong mentoring stay at much higher rates. The number of teachers according to federal data getting mentoring now is less than it was a decade ago because of the cuts that occurred during the recession. So now only about half of teachers are getting mentored, which is I think roughly what Saguna was saying in Prince George's County, as opposed to the fact that we were up over three quarters a decade ago. Salaries have declined since the 1990s in real dollar terms. Working conditions have declined because of the recession, larger class sizes, fewer materials, instructional specialists. And then there's been this issue of, you know, what some would call teacher bashing. A lot of discourse about the fact that the real problem of schools is just that we have to get rid of bad teachers rather than looking at many of the other issues. So I'm gonna compose these challenges to our policy respondents here. And I'm gonna start with you, Representative Santos. Could you provide us some context on Washington State and the challenges the state is facing with respect to teacher shortages and then sort of a frame for what you're seeking to do about that. Thank you, Linda, and thank you to LPI for organizing this very valuable opportunity for us to discuss these important issues. So we heard from our first panel, I think, one of the things that we all have to acknowledge at the get-go is this is a very complex issue. And there is no real simple answer, but we do know that if we're gonna have a quality education system, we have to begin with quality educators. And so starting with that, to talk about what are the challenges, but also the opportunities in the state of Washington, as the report indicated, we face all of the issues that were identified in the report. It's been complicated, however, by a particular adequacy funding lawsuit in our state, which we have tentatively resolved just this year where we are going to be adding somewhere in the neighborhood of $7.3 billion a new funding towards education over the next four years in Washington state. So I'm very proud of that. However, yes. However, we should acknowledge too that funding alone is not going to solve the issue around teacher attrition and teacher quality. We have not only enrollment growth in our state, we have increased retirements in our state. And we have fewer enrollments in our teacher preparation programs. These are some of the bigger issues that I think have been identified in the report. Very specifically in Washington state, I will reiterate some of the findings. We have a shortage in elementary students, or excuse me, elementary teachers, certified teachers math, science, SPED, CTE, and ELL. We have a shortage in terms of teachers of color. We also have a shortage in our Title I schools, and interestingly to the rural question in central Washington, which is a largely rural area of our state. But where I would like to flesh this out a little bit is in terms of both the mobility issues as well as the emergency certifications. One of the things that I thought was very fascinating is that 32% of Washington's certificated teachers are age 65 or older, or excuse me, 50 years or older. That is- That's a big difference. That's a big difference. I just wanna say- Sorry, sorry, sorry. That's a big difference. Yeah. Being in that cohort. Yeah, exactly. But the point of that is that I think it has something to say about some of our societal attitudes about professions in general, not just about teaching. We talk about in comparing ourselves to some of our highest performing educational systems across the world, the lifelong careers of education. Well, when you take a look and I'm going to speak to you as the grandparent and great-grandparent of 38 children, and the oldest grandchild is 40 years old, I will tell you the attitudes around careers for 40-year-olds or 30-year-olds or 20-year-olds is very different than the career attitude that I grew up with. And so when you then think about the 45.5% of certificated teachers in Washington state, who have zero to 10 years of experience, we're looking at a churning in our system that is not going to go away, largely because of social attitudes around careers that are reinforced, I think, by a challenge that exists in our structure. Of the zero to 10 group, I would also note that almost a little over half, so 28% of all certificated teachers in Washington state have zero to five years of experience. So that's a lot of relative inexperience in our system. And I think the question about attrition really, and we heard it in our earlier panel, goes to a lot of different issues in terms of the impact to our teachers, in terms of impacts to our principals, impacts to our students. And here's one of the things that I'd like to share with you, which is a data point. In a recent survey, so 2016, of our principals and human resource directors, we asked the question, in the last five days, how many principals have had to sub for missing teachers in classrooms? 61% of our principals said that they have had to sub in a classroom because they lack the certificated teachers. That says a lot about what's going on, not just in the classrooms, but somebody in the previous panel also talked about the administration and the fact that our administrators, if we're asking them to be instructional leaders, are having a very difficult time being those instructional leaders because they're having to make choices about whether they're gonna split up a classroom and divide those students between other classrooms or are they gonna go and step into the classroom themselves? I think that a couple of very choice quotes that I'd like to share with you, and I overprepared, so I'm rushing because I think there's some important things that I wanna share with you and I'm hoping that you will ask me questions afterwards. But here's one of the quotes that I wanted to share with you because I thought it was very important. This is what's going on in our principals' lives. Finding teachers in subs in all areas are incredibly difficult. I've attended teacher career fairs in Washington, Montana, Oregon, and Idaho trying to find qualified teachers. When I attended the job there in Idaho, there were more school recruiters than teacher candidates that came through. Finding subs is very difficult as well. I've had to teach in classrooms and I got my CDL last year so I could help drive a bus when they couldn't find bus drivers. That is what's going on in administration and that we haven't even begun to touch on. So what are we doing in the state of Washington? We are trying to really grapple with a big picture of the leaky pipeline. Not just a leaky bucket but a leaky pipeline. That begins, we really believe, in our secondary schools where we have a captive audience that we can engage in beginning to discuss about pursuing an educational career. We also know that we can do a better job of working in our teacher preparation programs whether they're offering the conventional or traditional certification programs and I have some things to say about that if asked. Into our K-12 classrooms, where there is great need. And I would point out that in our state, we are finding that the great need is both in our highly urban areas as well as in our rural areas for very different reasons. And so one of the questions that I think policy makers have to ask of ourselves is what is the right division of responsibility between state policy makers and our district policy makers? Meaning all of you who may be in the audience who are elected school board members. In Washington state we have 295 school board members and they are the ones that are often asked to make the terrible decisions both about funding but in response to state mandates but also being responsive to local conditions. And oftentimes they're put in a very, very difficult place of having to choose are we gonna comply with the state mandate or are we going to be responsive to local conditions? And so I think there's great opportunity for us as policy makers to open up the dialogue and say we all have the same interest in providing every student in our system with high quality effective teachers. Not I didn't say highly qualified although that is important characteristic but high quality effective teachers and how do we do that together? I'm worried about time. Am I doing okay? You're doing everything. Oh okay. I'm trying to really rush. Good time to summarize. Yes. So I think that again when we talk about what are we doing in Washington state we're trying to take the long view. For too long I think that we both at the state level and at the local level have been really focused on the short term immediate crisis at hand. It's not that we should ignore the immediate crisis at hand but if we are constantly on that merry go round of solving of engaging in crisis solutions then we will never get our arms around the holistic issue of what is changing in our society in terms of attitudes, what is changing in our economy and how are we going to be able to provide and deliver a comprehensive solution that will last beyond the next three to five years? Thank you so much. That's really helpful. Steve in Virginia. You are seeing teacher turnover there as well. I think some of what Sharon said was really helping frame the issue of where are we with making teaching a respected profession again, right? Because that's really why people aren't going into the profession in the same way and staying. So tell us a little bit about the key issues you're facing and how you're approaching it in Virginia. Linda, thank you. Thanks to you and the Policy Institute in Desiree for I think shedding light on what is the next big thing for all of us. That is the looming crisis of teacher shortages. And I use that word purposefully. I was speaking with a well-resourced suburban superintendent a few days ago and he said, you know, teacher shortages used to be a problem because they happen to other people and now they're a crisis because they're happening to me. And I think he's exactly right because what he was saying was for many years we had gaps and shortages in some places in Virginia. Today I can tell you we have gaps and shortages in every place in Virginia. We do a survey each October simply asking local divisions, there are 132 school divisions in Virginia. And we say how many funded positions do you have that are unfilled as of this time? Last October there were 1,000 in Virginia which means there were 1,000 long-term substitutes serving in classrooms teaching children. What we know is the problem is not equitably distributed and that's what my colleague in the suburban area was saying, all of a sudden we're seeing gaps and shortages everywhere but it is much more pronounced in our highly-challenged, less-resourced divisions and I don't have as much data as Representative Santos, I was impressed with that. But let me give you two anecdotes and then talk a little bit about policy. I had the opportunity this summer to walk through a middle school with a principal in one of our more challenged urban settings and one of the questions I always ask is how are you doing on staffing? Are you ready? Are you ready for the year? And he was so excited. He said, oh, we've had a great year. We've had a great year. He said, I had 27 openings and I've filled all 27. And I said, well, that is great. How many teachers do you have? And he said, 50. He was excited because he filled 27 openings but literally half his staff turned over and I said, was this kind of a year that was exceptional? And he said, oh, no, no, this is every year. This is just the first year we filled them all. Then I went to another smaller urban setting that is one of our most challenged places. If you were a sixth grader in Petersburg City Schools last year, at no point did you have a licensed math teacher provide instruction to your children, not a single day. But when we say this is the next big thing we know from research that if we're looking at school impacts on student learning the teacher is clearly the key and we are unable to provide highly qualified, highly talented teachers to all of our kids. So it is the next big thing. What we're looking at is a variety of solutions and Representative Santos said, well, there won't be a policy solution. There's not one way to do this. And so what we're trying to do is approach it in a contextual manner. In our rural under-resourced divisions the solutions look different than they do in our urban less-resourced division. So we're trying to roll out a variety of opportunities that localities can buy into that says this one fits my need. So in our more rural settings we're really focusing on grow your own programs. Because we know that there are in fact folks who are already embedded in, committed to and have a long-term commitment to that community. So we simply need to upgrade their skillset because they're already there. My colleague out in Lee County which is the western part of Virginia. Lee County is as far west as you can go in Virginia. By the way, it's west of Detroit. Little tip of Virginia that goes down. And he said, here's my problem with recruiting. He said, I go to a college and I sit down with a 22 year old and I say, if you move to Lee County you're only a 30 minute drive from the nearest Walmart. Recruiting is not his solution. Retention and grow your own are his solutions. So we're working there for him. But in urban settings we have amenities that often are attractive to young people. It's a different recruiting retention methodology. There we're talking about expanding residency programs and increasing mentorships. And I think mentorships is likely the place where we're going to invest much of our policy effort. There was a time when you were a new teacher and I was one of those in 1976. Before Antonio was born I think. And the induction program was here are your keys, that's your room, here's your roster. Go get them champ, you're at it. My fear is that our mentoring and induction programs haven't changed significantly since then. We provide to our mentor teachers the grand stipend of about $200 a year. So mentor teachers literally do it at a cost of their own skin, their own hide. They're doing it because they believe in the profession, they're committed to the profession and they're willing to do it basically as a volunteer. So I think we're gonna have to look particularly in our urban settings to beef up the induction and mentoring because we're likely gonna be solving their shortage by bringing in a bunch of new teachers who are new to the area and new to the whole sense of those kinds of schools. Wow, very vivid. Thank you so much. I had the same induction program that you did. Yeah, in a different state actually. So Seth, you're with the National Governors Association. There are 41 gubernatorial elections by 2018. Presenting the prospect for a new wave of new policy makers at the state level. You work closely with governors. Can you share what this turnover of governors could mean for state efforts to address teacher turnover and teacher shortages and to support districts and schools facing these challenges? Good and thanks Linda for bringing us all together on this important topic and having National Governors Association as a part of it. I'll start where I think Representative Santos left off which is to say this really is the right time for the discussion. It's the right time because it's a, there's just a real opportunity to reframe the dialogue not only on teacher shortages and on teacher turnover but to really zoom out and take a larger big picture look at how we're preparing, how we're developing, how we're supporting our teachers in states. And Linda mentioned the electoral opportunity and I think that's an important one. The 41 gubernatorial elections but what makes this a very unique election is that we know that means at least 20 new governors because it's 20 open elections already next year so that can only be an increasing number and with new governors comes the opportunity there'll be 20 new governors looking to lead and engage on education policy and trying to address some of these bigger picture issues in human capital like teacher shortages and teacher turnover. And for returning governors as well, we usually see this as a fresh look. It's an opportunity to try something new, look at what, build on past successes but also look at what's worked in the past and what can be done differently. And I think coupled with that electoral opportunity is also the national conversation where it's been trending for many, many years feels like we're at a pivot point. It looks sort of down the row and Linda talked earlier about the international work she's been doing of looking at examples as part of the empowering educators work with NCEE. I think about the work that represented as part of NCSL and the no time to lose report or CCSSO and our promise, our responsibility report and some of the NTF work that Saroj has been doing that grows out of that. That's just three reports right here and all saying that we need to take a comprehensive approach to solving these issues. And I think that really speaks to that this is a pivot point in the conversation. And in terms of a governor's role and how they're well positioned, the governor is that unique individual, the unique policymaker that naturally oversees both K-12 and higher education and is really able in that way to act as the coordinator, as the convener, as the connector of all of these systems. And we're seeing already some real traction on these issues that we only expected to be an uptick Governor McAuliffe earlier this year called together a task force on teacher shortages. And I think this speaks to the last part that he tasked with leading that task force, the leader of the school board, the state board as well as the leader of the higher education board. So again, sort of as that overseer of systems, really important to be able to, again, naturally bring together systems. And that's the real challenge going forward as many of the panelists have been saying. So many promising practices out there, but it's that taking that systematic approach and being able to tie it all together is the challenge going forward. Yeah. Let me stick with you Seth for a moment and then we'll kind of come back down the row and ask about what you're doing at NGA to sort of align the efforts across the different parts of the system, the different state agencies and stakeholders and advance some solutions across those systems. And I think this is really where it has to be a state and local conversation on looking at the data. It has to start with looking at the data, I think about the line of Tip O'Neill in a very different context, but all politics is local. And I know as shortages are just the same and understanding where the shortage is, why is this happening, where is it happening? Before you can have the sort of knowing how to address the issues, you need to know is there a special education shortage in my state? Is there high teacher turnover of math and science teachers in my state in high need areas? This is, it has to be a state directed conversation too many times we find in education we go right for the intervention and don't sort of look at the root cause of the problem and know what the scope of it is. And I think of the work of Ellen Sherratt who was at AIR and now at National Board and she spoke about it, I think it's the perfect term that before you're going into this conversation it's looking at multiple data points but it's having a coherent dialogue and a common language for how you're talking about that because we all talk about teacher shortages, we talk about teacher turnover but we first need to know and this is particularly important on the state level to know what are the terms we're talking about, what are the specific issues that we're dealing with then we'll know how to address it. So along those lines at the National Governors Association in advance of the 2018 election what we're working on developing is identifying what are those decision making tools that governors can use to get to the root cause? Pause analysis, there's been some great work done I think about Minnesota with their teacher shortage predictor or the teacher and supply demand reports they made it very actionable and as well as Missouri and Arkansas with teacher shortage predictor tools. So what kind of planning tools can be in place if we're going to break this cycle of teacher shortages and teacher turnover it's going to be because there's been planning ahead on the issue and setting that in motion. But if I have time is alongside of this is putting together a roadmap for governors so when they are looking at it able to see what is happening in their state it's also saying here's some best practices along the systems we know again, promising practices we heard a number of them this morning Antonio and going through the residency program students starting in high school and on that career pathway towards teaching certainly professional growth and learning for all teachers beginning teacher support residency program. So we have we have these pieces about just a couple of months ago when we were having this conversation last with with governors it was that governor's education symposium Denver five partisan governors came from across the country and both governor Hutchinson from Arkansas and governor Cooper both talked about the importance of national board certification as sort of being a leverage point for retaining teachers in their state teacher leadership opportunities as well. So again it's it's putting it together and so you're really talking about a comprehensive approach and I want to ask superintendent Staples as you kind of think about Virginia you mentioned the investments and mentoring being a key piece. How are you thinking about the solutions to getting a stable high quality teacher workforce? Linda thank you and Seth thank you for mentioning our governor governor McAuliffe. He did direct us to pull together a task force and so I'm going to be a little circumspect in giving you specific recommendations from the report we're giving him on October one. So I want to make sure I don't get myself in trouble with that as well. But Linda I think there are two things that we perhaps don't think of because we've talked about mentoring and residency programs and grow your own and these are good solutions. I think we might overlook two. Number one is we're now having the conversation that the shortage problem isn't just a recruiting problem and I think we all tend to look at oh I've got to fill this bucket so I just need to turn the faucet a little more open and my bucket will feel quicker. What we're asking folks to do is look at what's pouring at the bottom of your bucket and that's the retention problem and I think many of our locals are surprised when we can give them some data not just about their shortage needs but how their retention is such a significant part of those and Desiree I loved your data around that so I think that's helpful in recognizing that it's not just about getting more people in it's about keeping people in who are already there. But I think we underestimate one that isn't automatically an easy policy fix and that's raising the respect for the teaching profession and the question asked to the first panel was about how accountability might negatively impact the teaching profession. The teachers that I speak with in Virginia are not afraid of nor do they want to get away from accountability. What they want to get away from is unreasonable inequitable accountability and micromanagement of their response to outcomes and my fear is that in schools where we see the greatest outflow teachers take a job until they can get the next job where their transfers aren't even recorded well for us because they're intra district. So I get into this district and I stay at this school until a job opens up at a preferred site and then I move over there where we're not even collecting that data because it looks like they're still in that district. They're just leaving those schools and that's why that principal has 27 openings. Many of those teachers stayed in that district. What teachers say to us in those schools are number one, hold me accountable fairly. Growth in ESSA gives us the opportunity to change the accountability paradigm because what teachers say is hold me accountable for what I control. If I get a fifth grader who's at the second grade level at the end of the year they're at the fourth grade level and you tell me I'm a failure. That's not what I see as fair and equitable accountability. I moved a student two years and you're telling me I'm a failure. I'm going to go to another school. So we look at that. We have to look at that as accountability. Also we have to raise up teaching as a profession and recently much of the dialogue has been about how bad teachers are. How horrible it is, what a horrible profession it is and we're now eating our own. When I go to teachers in the profession and I say would you recommend teaching as a career the vast majority to me say no. I tell my own children not to do this. Not because they don't want to be good teachers it's because we're not allowing them to be good. Going to challenge schools too often our response is more scripting of teachers, more regimented pacing guides and more monitoring day to day to say where are you at this moment in time? In the sense that teachers feel so put upon that they can't do what brought them into teaching in the first place which is to interact with children in a positive personal way. So part of our effort in Virginia from Governor McCulloch on down is really trying to change the dialogue. To say to teachers what you do is valued. Your work is important and we appreciate it. And it's interesting because we're hearing folks begin to echo that message in a way that we hope encourages others to go into teaching and then mentoring and training can help them stay there. But we've got to convince them that this is a worthy task and it's worth them committing part of their life even when it may not be economically rewarding part of what we're trying to do. Representative Santos you talked about taking the long view on solutions. So talk to us a little about what you're doing in Washington you co-sponsored HB 1827 which addresses this issue in Washington. What recommendations are you making both in your state and to other state legislators about how to take that long view and what that consists of? Thank you. I really appreciate the setup both by South and the superintendent because I can't disagree with what they described in it. The heart I think the key message here is there are big picture issues that we all grapple with and those are in some ways very much the same but the solutions really are going to have to take a unique stand from the situations in our respective states. So for example an important distinction in my state that I want to draw out is the superintendent and I were having this conversation earlier is we have a very diffuse executive branch. Everybody remembers there are three branches of government there's the executive often headed by a governor there's the legislative which is the legislature and the judicial. In my state we have three or excuse me we have nine constitutionally established executive officers. So the governor actually doesn't have sort of the fulcrum of responsibility over education in my state. I share that with you because I don't know where all of you are from but it's going to be important for you to understand you have an appointed superintendent such as superintendent Staples or do you have an elected superintendent such as the superintendent in my state. That's very very important. Back to Linda's question I do think it's very important for me to say that in establishing our response to the issue of the teacher shortage we began with the crisis mode last year and recognize that in a short session we were not going to be able to establish the types of strong institutional responses that this crisis requires. So we said okay let's do what we can in a short 60 day session which is establishing but putting a bandaid over this gushing wound. But let us talk and take the time for in the long session which was 2017 to begin addressing some of the long term solutions. Well one of the first things that we did and somebody asked the question earlier is we tried to assemble all of the right stakeholders so it wasn't just policy makers we brought in and I'm very fortunate to have on my committee several classroom teachers. Having classroom teachers as part of the solution is very important because one of my members said what we really need to do is we need to stop sucking the joy out of education. And that goes to your accountability piece is unless we can recapture that sense of joy and the issues of disposition through aligning and consolidating previously disparate efforts addressing the teacher shortage then we won't get to what we really need to do which is a systemic comprehensive solution that addresses igniting the interest, supporting teachers, recruiting based on unique characteristics. You're gonna use different strategies for high school students than you are for paraeducators and how many of you have huge military installations in your state? They are ripe to begin filling your teacher shortage. The issues around mentoring and providing incentives those two are going to be a question for policy makers of are you creating the right types of investments and incentives where you're getting the most bang out of your buck? So for example in my state national board certified teachers get $5,000 bang done. If you teach in our title one school hard to reach school another $5,000 bang done. Do we ask anything of them? No. Those are some of our best mentors presumably. How do, so rather than saying how do we recruit new mentors why don't we look at what we have in the field and say what are we doing to ensure that our new teachers our new inductees have the type of mentorship that's gonna be meaningful to them. Again I would hope because I'm seeing the one minute sign here that you will ask questions that are about sort of the long term. But the final thing I wanna say is I'm hoping to engage LPI and this group of experts in a true long term conversation in Washington state that will stretch over a number of years to talk about the various aspects not just about teachers but also about principles and leadership and how we bring our superintendents and our local boards into this conversation so that we can do what is an old Pacific Islander saying which is if you want to get to your destination everyone has to be in the canoe pulling in the same direction. That's great I love that metaphor that's a good thing for us to invite the audience if there are questions that you would like to raise please come up to the microphone we have a couple of folks aiming in that direction. Excellent and we have about nine minutes for those questions so we might take a couple of questions and then let you play off of those please. Good morning I'd like to thank the panel my name is Peggy Brookins I'm the presidency of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards so you answered one of my questions already but the second question I have is around reciprocity and how you see reciprocity helping the teacher shortage problem. That's great we're going to hold that question and combine it with a couple of others so you know kind of keep notes or sharpen your brains. Yes my name is Samantha Koba I'm a former third grade teacher from Cleveland Ohio. In my experience in teaching I found that it was while rewarding it was the most emotionally physically mentally exhausting experience I've ever had to date and I'm just wondering as we talk about teacher turnover and retention what's being done to address the mental health of our teachers as well as our students because we are finding in this new generation of learners and families where teachers are simply not equipped to address the needs of our students. So what is being done on the mental health aspect and yeah just interested in that. So much we'll take one more and then we'll take another batch. Good morning. My name is Melinda George and I'm with Learning Forward. I want to say thanks to this panel and the one before it's been a terrific discussion. My question is really I think kind of goes along with the one just asked and that is around professional learning for teachers. If we're really looking at how we retain teachers what kind of support are we providing in schools and through districts in order to make sure those teachers feel supported and I don't necessarily mean training. I mean real professional learning supports. You. All right. So we have reciprocity mental health and professional learning support. Would you like to start us off Steve. Wow. Nine minutes. Piece of cake. Well we don't have all of this. We only have about three. All right. I'll do this in one. There are two things we're working on and I can't answer all three of those questions but you you've hit an important issue for us in Virginia and that is as we look at providing help to teachers we can't just look at it as a classroom only exercise. The State Board of Education just passed a series of staffing adjustments to say what will the state pay for. We have a shared finance model where they focused most of their changing ratios was to increase the number of school counselors psychologist and social workers. Hence why so many of our children come from trauma backgrounds that teachers even the best are often unable to deliver high quality instruction in a manner that's effective because the children can't overcome the trauma. That care also goes to teachers as we've been training them in trauma informed care to help them better understand how those interactions with children allows good instruction to flow through to those kids. And then finally I guess the last one is because our first lady is very involved in this we really been trying to ramp up our programs to feed children. No is that a lot of children come to school and they are very concerned about where the next meals coming from or they've missed the last meal. Last night at our teacher of the year banquet the governor was pleased to announce that we served a one million more breakfasts last year and we had in any previous year and those were the children who likely never had breakfast. So we're looking outside the classroom to provide supports to children and training to teachers to help them understand how trauma impacts learning in the classroom. The only thing I would add is just on the professional learning and growth that has to be continuous it has to be collaborative and in that way that'll be that'll help support teachers along along their career their career path and just to step back and as representative Santos said about the big canoe I think that that helps a lot is bringing the teacher voices into the discussion feeling like you're being heard feeling like you're not only your own you're not an add-on you are you are part of the process of developing the policy across the state and that's the only way in my in my experience overall not just at this job that it's the only way to make these reforms sustainable anyhow. You know this is not again it's not a nice have but if you actually want your your policy to stay and sick it has to include educator voices and parent voices and community voices in that discussion to make it make it work. Thank you. I let me dispense with the first question around reciprocity an important important question. I'm sorry I don't have an answer for you. We are struggling with that in our state and I suspect most states are and of course the tension is between getting more warm bodies but also making sure that the standards established by Washington state are met. And so we are struggling. That's really the best answer I can give to you right now. But the other pieces that I did want to touch on with respect mental health both for teachers and students perhaps some of you know there was another shooting just this last week in Washington state and it has really to do I think with a couple of things that we as policymakers can really focus in on. One has to do with social emotional learning standards are your states actually moving down in that direction. Are you upholding and providing support for the multi tiered system of supports that benefits both students and faculty in the buildings. The other two elements that I would focus in on our RTI response to intervention and what we in our state are calling WISP the Washington Integrated Student Support Protocol where again what we want is to engage our schools as they were originally created as centers of our community. Why are we asking our educators to be all do all for our students when there are issues around trauma when there are issues around hunger when there are issues around homelessness and we can't ask our educators to do all of that but we can and should be asking our communities to step forward. That's great thank you. Let me just add you mentioned the social emotional learning there is a lot of work going on now around social emotional learning for teachers as well including mindfulness and other kinds of training that is being very helpful to a lot of folks dealing with the stresses of teaching and being able to manage that so I'm really glad that you brought that up and on reciprocity there are these challenges because states have their different standards and some states have really dropped their standards to a point where you're now not sure what the license means in that state when somebody comes in with it. On the other hand national board certification is a national standard and one thing states can do and many have done is to say if you come in with a national board certification you are automatically licensed in our state so that's one national way to get some reciprocity. There is a performance assessment that many states are taking up at TPA and that's another way that people can have a common standard when they cross state line so I think we're gonna have to start looking at those kind of strategies because reciprocity is really important. 25% of teachers change states and a lot of teachers leave teaching and become a real estate agent at the point where they can't transfer their license into that other state so Mark nice to see you. I'm gonna take three questions again and we'll see what we can do with those before the end of the hour. Thank you Linda and Desiree and panelists for this incredibly important work. My name is Mark Simon and I'm here today with a new group called Empowered DC which is trying to lift the voice of teachers on classroom school climate issues. And my question is about the politics of this issue of teacher turnover. In DC for example the school system recruited researchers to show that when you look at the test scores of teachers who leave versus teachers who come in there's a marginal improvement evidently in the DC data. In other words this huge effort to say teacher turnover isn't important and I don't think it's hard to, well it is hard actually to look at that data and see why that data isn't really reflecting what's going on and why there are things that are impacted by teacher turnover that they're not even looking at. But my question is have you encountered that kind of denial and use of researchers to come in and downplay the issue? And if you have what do you do about that? Specifically the use of research to kind of deny that this is an issue. Turnover deniers. Exactly. All right we have, it's actually 1101 so I appreciate people being here. Jane I want to give you a chance to quickly ask your question if it's a one second question. Kudos to you all for an incredible effort and keeping this on the national radar screen. I can't tell you just from being in DC how important your voice is. Question about the future and representative. A quick one and an easy one. Santos, not so easy. Do we need to begin to look at restructuring the roles in schools given all the millennials who are not gonna stay in a profession for 30 years the way we did in our generation? Do we need to think about a senior master core supervising people who rotate through every two or three years? And is that happening anywhere and can we make it happen? That's an easy one. How you doing? Sean Warner from Clark Atlanta University. Just wanted to thank the panel again for a wonderful discussion. Two very quick questions or one statement, one question. I want to thank the superintendent for the, I want to appreciate the comment that he made about trauma because as a former dean actually twice over it was something that I kept trying to push amongst the faculty about looking at trauma. And I think that there are great opportunities for schools of education to look at trauma across their actual programs. But the question is for my friend from Washington. What is Washington doing to sell itself, right? Sell itself to get candidates, particularly candidates of color to their state. I'm not saying that you don't have that. I know that you do, but I wonder about that. I wonder about are there, have you looked at partnering with MSIs across the nation? We know that there's a major demographic shift that's happening in the South. And obviously when you look at the numbers as well as those that are graduating from high school since 2013, we know that the numbers dropped. And so at least till about 2023, we won't see that again. So basically there'll be less teachers coming out anyway. There has been just for those who want to reference that statistic about a 35% drop in the number of people going through teacher education. So it is 1104, I'm going to give each of you about a minute to take one of the questions that most appeals to you. And we have research on turnover, new structures that might be needed in schools and how will Washington sell itself? Maybe we should let you start with that. Thank you for those questions. I think it is very important. Again, I'm going to go back to how it's very unique in every local school district. So for example, in some select school districts where they have 10,000 or more students, I thought it was very interesting that there was actually an increase in white teachers in Seattle Spokane and Highline. Why is that important? Because Highline School District in my state is the most diverse district school district in the state. So we're seeing an increase in white to this gentleman's point. Whereas in Tacoma, which is one of the largest black student populations along with Seattle, we've seen a decrease in black teachers. And in Yakima and Kennewick, where we have large migrant populations, we have seen an increase in Hispanic teachers. So what I'm saying is that the solution is going to have to be locally driven, not just at the state, but what the state can do and what we have started to do is we put together a marketing campaign beginning last year that needs to be beefed up. But what we need to also do is work with our largest businesses in the areas to help us, and this is a much larger conversation for some future date, where high cost areas like Seattle are driving teachers away because they can't afford to live there. Whereas rural districts, their issue is how do you attract and retain those teachers who don't imagine a lifetime of living in a small community where your school district has 70 students? Just imagine what that looks like. So all of our responses are going to have to be very tailored to individual school districts. And this is too important to leave to chance. We have to come together and work on what the collective solution is that provides tailored responses to every district. Thank you. One minute, I will try and address the notion of restructuring roles in schools. It is something we're having pretty substantive conversations about. Our legislative body has supported two important initiatives there. One, they've developed permissive legislation, which would allow a school division to become a division of innovation. And we have been given permission to waive everything but state and federal law. So the state board has the authority to say, it's a do-over, how would you like to do it? And what we're seeing is school divisions are stepping up with different looking staffing models that I think respond to the reality of supply and demand. If you need 20 math teachers and you only have one applicant, then you may not be able to maintain a traditional structure because you're gonna have 19 classrooms with no math teacher. They're looking at creating a lead math teacher position that works then with either residency students or apprentices who are working to go into the profession and that teacher directs the activities of the others. I call it the dental model. I'm old enough to remember when I went to the dentist and the dentist cleaned my teeth. I spent a half hour with my dentist. I went last week and I spent 30 seconds with my dentist and other people did it under his direction and tutelage with him checking on what was going on. I think we've gotta look at that. And most importantly, as we elevate teachers to become supervisors and mentors, working with folks who are moving into the profession, it is not just money, it's time. It's time. For some reason in K-12, we didn't get the memo that higher ed got and higher ed was better at this. We don't value non-student contact time. If you're a K-12 teacher, we believe the only value you have is if you are constantly engaging with students and anytime away from students, we say, well, that's worthless time. I think we've gotta change that model to recognize that our teaching professionals need to have non-student contact time when they can work with colleagues or train folks who are moving into the profession. And if we look at a staffing model that gives them time and money, I believe in the long run, we'll get teachers to stay. I'll try to group both the questions together, which I think really is about the attractiveness of the profession. How do you improve the attractiveness of the profession? And I think to Jane's point about teacher leadership opportunities really provide that ability not only to be a retention strategy, but a recruitment one as well. And that's upping the attractiveness of it. I think of Governor Branstad's work and continued under Governor Reynolds out in Iowa, the teacher leadership and compensation system, they have there, you have a governor creating the space for more teacher leadership opportunities, you have increased retention, and what does that say to the teachers in that state that they're going to be supported? That you're treating teachers as professionals and that's bringing them into the classroom as well. And I think really quick point to note on that is that it's the governor creating the space and the vision and the bully pulpit for moving it forward, but it's also helpful, he has a supportive, she has a supportive commissioner, Ryan Wise, who's moving that forward in a day-to-day implementation as well as a supportive one. So it's just, it's key when all kind of work on these important issues. So that leaves me with the research question, I think, which I'll take one second to simply say that the particular study mark that you were talking about, people drew inferences and claims from that study that were not, that went well beyond the actual analysis and the data that were there to be inferred from, but there are different perspectives out there about turnover and there was a line of argument for a period of time that we should try to fire the bottom 5% of teachers every year and then overall the average would go up and we would eventually get to Finland and I made the claim that you cannot fire your way to Finland because in fact what they do is prepare people really well, they keep them for a whole career and invest in their professional learning and expertise development and we're in a situation where if we were to let people go in large numbers on that model we wouldn't have qualified people to replace them and we also know that the very fact of turnover when it's high at a school level reduces achievement for the kids in the school, not only those whose teachers left, but for the other kids in the school because of the disruptions and so on. So there is a variety of perspective, I think one view is let people go, have them come in and out, it's cheaper, is the view, you can keep people at a low salary level, nobody vests in the retirement system and you can just kind of have a Walmart teaching force. We have a lot of evidence, which of course this report is part of, that in the long run that has big, both financial costs for districts and achievement and learning costs for students and we will continue to see lots of research being done on this question and hopefully research that really takes those variables and the life of the school and what that does to the life of the school into account. I wanna thank everyone who has stayed beyond our, nobody left to run out at the bell. Thanks to our co-sponsors, to staff who participated in particular, Jessica Cardeshawn Maria Heiler who did a lot of our organizing Shawnee's hood, there she is in the back, Deanna, Julie, all of our DC office staff who were busy stuffing envelopes over lunch yesterday, thanks to you for coming and for all you will do to help strengthen the teaching profession and to reduce teacher turnover.