Faculty retention remains an elusive art for many independent schools. We all recognize that it is desirable to retain superb teachers, but there are many issues and ambiguities that need to be teased out of the stock phrase "faculty retention" in order to have meaningful results on this front.
First of all, it is important to keep in mind that it is necessary, but not sufficient, to retain our best teachers. We also need to ensure that those teachers do not "burn out" or grow stale but, instead, remain vital and engaged in their teaching, intellectual endeavors, and school community.
Additionally, it is probably not desirable to have full retention of all faculty. Schools need to decide what is an optimal level of retention short of holding everyone year after year. When I was first appointed headmaster of Boston University Academy, faculty attrition was a serious concern. One of the first things I was told was that about half of the teachers were planning to leave. There were many factors contributing to this, including systemic issues such as that the Academy was a young school going through administrative turnover and intrinsic issues such as the fact that the Academy tended to recruit doctoral students who often left for university posts when their dissertations were completed. By initiating a series of changes, we turned this around to achieve 100 percent retention of all faculty and administrators in my second year. While this was a victory, it is important to note that I have not managed for this perfect retention in subsequent years. It is desirable and necessary to maintain a reasonable turnover for a variety of reasons: it brings in "fresh blood;" it ensures that your teachers don't age as a single cohort; and it is the logical outcome of having dynamic teachers (some of whom will pursue their interests beyond your walls at some point, but in the meanwhile you will have been enriched by their enthusiasm). I was pleased, then, when we had an 8 percent turnover rate in my third year as headmaster, with some teachers leaving for jobs that better suited them and/or their changing family needs. This was a stable and sustainable rate of turnover, and the replacement hires brought fresh perspectives to their discipline areas. Schools, then, should decide what is an optimal turnover rate for them, but it should certainly be less than 20 percent in an average year and probably closer to 10 percent.
BU Academy's success in stemming high turnover rates was not principally achieved by increasing salaries or fringe benefits. Instead, we focused on four areas: administrative stability, clarity about the school's differentiating value, faculty investment and engagement, and low-cost faculty development programs.
These go contrary to what many people consider to be essential elements to teachers' job satisfaction. Chapel Hill-Chauncy Hall School provides a model of Best Practices in faculty retention. When the administration realized that a 22 percent attrition rate was unacceptably high, they instituted a series of initiatives over several years to honestly assess the cause of attrition and try to redress such causes where reasonable and cost-effective.[i] CH-CH included many elements in its retention drive that other schools would do well to emulate, including assessment methods to determine if a particular approach was efficacious, feedback structures whereby teachers could share their concerns and dissatisfactions more fully with administrators, more responsive administrative decisions, and, perhaps most insightfully, a concentration on faculty empowerment, engagement, and enfranchisement rather than "throwing money" at the problem.
Significantly but not surprisingly, when CH-CH polled administrators at several dozen other schools for their opinions about what is most salient to faculty retention, far and away the most responses involved spending money on teachers: "professional development and support" and "salaries and benefits improvement."[ii] This is a widespread and costly misconception that Chapel Hill-Chauncy Hall School ably avoided.
In his classic study on employee motivation and job satisfaction, Frederick Herzberg[iii] argues that most businesses try to motivate with external factors such as pay incentives but that this does little in the way of increasing job satisfaction. Of course, it is necessary to have competitive salaries and benefits, but that still begs the question of why schools of comparable compensation packages can vary so widely in employee satisfaction and retention.
Herzberg found an interesting dichotomy between sources of job dissatisfaction and job satisfaction. Sources of dissatisfaction tended to concentrate in areas of administrative policy and implementation, while causes of satisfaction displayed a strong aggregation in areas such as "achievement," "recognition," "work itself," and "responsibility." In other words, it is desirable to eliminate sources of dissatisfaction, but doing so only eliminates irritants; it does not result in satisfaction.
Working on both fronts at the Academy, we have placed a great deal of energy and resources into getting the administrative apparatus of the start-up school (founded in 1993) working as efficiently and supportively for faculty as possible. Recognizing that such changes were necessary to minimize teachers' dissatisfaction but not sufficient for their job satisfaction, we also have introduced a series of initiatives that have included full faculty participation in curriculum review, many aspects of decision-making, and opportunities to pursue innovative teaching opportunities both here and at Boston University. As mentioned above, this has provided faculty with a greater sense of appreciation, recognition, investment, and engagement with the school. It has also been deeply informed by a clarity about the Academy's core differentiating value: as a school within Boston University, we have distinctive opportunities for teachers and students to utilize the resources of a major research university ranging from lab opportunities to lectures to interaction with leading scholars. Every school can similarly build upon its differentiating strengths to enhance the satisfaction teachers feel about being there and nowhere else.
CH-CH instituted a similar approach by celebrating the strengths of its faculty in new ways and distributing a brochure about why it was special to be able to teach at Chapel Hill-Chauncy Hall. The school also, significantly, placed a great deal of emphasis upon enhancing the experience of its current faculty in terms of empowerment and engagement -what it termed "re-recruitment."[iv]
In summary, most schools today are concerned about faculty retention. It is recommended that administrators first become clear about the need to do more than merely retain teachers and also to determine an optimal turnover rate rather than assume that full retention is always the goal. These two steps will allow for management toward dynamic and planned retention and turnover rather than chasing the stale chimera of merely keeping everyone on board.
The classic study by Herzberg and the experience of Chapel Hill-Chauncy Hall School also suggest that Best Practices for faculty retention avoids the facile and widespread assumption that the panacea is more teacher pay and incentives. Rather, it is optimal to increase the efficacy and responsiveness of the administration to minimize dissatisfaction while enhancing the teachers' participation in, recognition for, and achievement in the school's distinct mission to maximize job satisfaction.
Source: www.nais.org. Author: James Tracy, Ph.D., MBA, headmaster of Boston University Academy and principal of the Tracy Consulting Group. © 2004, National Associational of Independent Schools. Modified by NAIS, January 2004.
