"What Else Would I Be Doing?": Teacher Identity and Teacher Retention in Urban Schools.

Our nation's urban public schools and their students are in dire need of a durable and committed corps of teachers, teachers who are willing to stay in education long enough to make a difference in the conditions of those schools, and most importantly, in student achievement. Many traditional teacher education programs critique alternative programs such as Teach for America for the relatively short (two-year) commitment that is required of its recruits, but do teacher education programs fare better in preparing novice teachers to stay in urban education? To what degree are teacher predispositions the most salient factor in determining the career paths of young teachers? Are there programmatic elements that can be identified that help young teachers stay in urban schools? Ultimately we ask: What is the role of the many experiences in the lives of beginning teachers that contribute to the development of their teacher identities--from what they bring, from their teacher education experiences, from their experiences in their school settings? In order to explore this question, for five years we have been following the development of teacher identities and career choices of a cohort of graduates of the Multicultural Urban Secondary English (MUSE) Credential and MA program at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Members of this cohort of 26 received their credentials in the spring of 2002, began teaching in the fall of 2002, and received their MAs from UC Berkeley in 2003 after completing a teacher research course and MA paper during their first year of teaching. One of the main goals of the MUSE program is to prepare teachers to teach some of our most underserved students, those who come from conditions of poverty and populate our low-performing, urban schools. We decided on this focus for the MUSE program because we so desperately need good teachers for our most underserved students. Also, we knew that many teachers leave these schools after just one year, resulting in classrooms filled with large numbers of inexperienced teachers (Henke, Chen, & Geis, 2000; Ingersoll, 2003). We wanted the MUSE program to prepare teachers in ways that would give them necessary skills, help them develop robust identities as urban teachers, and support them to stay. Since having large numbers of inexperienced teachers is associated with lower levels of student achievement (Darling-Hammond, 1999; Johnson, Berg, & Donaldson, 2005), we further hoped we would be able to contribute to narrowing the achievement gaps between these students and their more affluent peers. By following a MUSE cohort for five years, we hoped we would be able to find out whether the education we provided actually contributed to forming a group of teachers who would stay in high poverty, urban schools and who then would have an opportunity to contribute to reducing the achievement gap. We found that compared to national statistics, this MUSE cohort stayed in teaching in significantly higher numbers. Whereas nationally only 76% are still teaching after one year, 96% of the MUSE students in the cohort we studied were still teaching after their first year (Freedman & Appleman, in preparation). Of these, 92% stayed at their same school and 4% moved to another school. Almost all took jobs in urban, high-poverty settings; one took a position in a school that was a mix between urban and suburban populations. Quartz, Lyons, Masyn et al. (2004) reported on a five-year retention study of graduates from Center X at the University of California, Los Angeles, another program with a targeted focus on training teachers for high poverty, urban schools. They found that 95% of the Center X teachers remained in teaching after one year and 98% remained in education. It is interesting to note that the MUSE and Center X statistics are almost identical. We also found that after teaching for five years, 73% of the MUSE students were still teaching or doing curriculum development work for the schools compared to 54% nationally. …