Perceived workplace conditions and first-year teachers’ morale, career choice commitment, and planned retention: a secondary analysis☆
Section snippets
The problem and background
The teacher population of the United States will be changing dramatically in the next decade given the projection for the “need to hire more than two million teachers to handle huge enrollment increases, replace an aging teacher workforce ready to retire, and respond to the chronic attrition of new teachers that plagues American schools” (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996). Given this period of widespread educational change, it is crucial to understand the factors that
Survey administration
This study is based upon data from the teacher surveys of the Schools and Staffing Surveys (SASS) in 1987–88 and 1993–94. The SASS surveys were sponsored by the United States Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Schools were sampled nationally, proportional to size within strata determined by grade level, enrollment size, geographic location (region), and sector (public/private).
Factors associated with first-year teacher morale, career choice commitment, and planned retention
Overall, the results of the regression equations performed in this study support the hypotheses that new teachers’ views of their workplace conditions are related to their morale, career choice commitment, and planned retention. Table 1, Table 2 in Appendix A summarize the significant workplace, financial, specialty field, sector, level, academic background, and demographic variables for first-year teachers’ degree of morale, level of commitment to their career choice, and intentions to stay in
Conclusions and implications for restructuring teaching, teacher education programs, and for school district and state policy
The most salient finding of this study pertains to the central importance that American first-year teachers assign to the social organizational structure of teaching. First-year teachers’ perceptions of school leadership and culture and teacher autonomy and discretion shape the extent of their willingness to do their best work, to commit to teaching as a career choice again, and to plan to stay in teaching. Not only do these findings demonstrate an important relationship between the workplace
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This study was partially funded by a grant from the National Center for Education Statistics sponsored by the American Educational Research Association.