Running head: TEACHING ASSIGMENTS: A LITERATURE REVIEW 1 Teaching Assignments and Their Connection to Teacher Retention, Attrition, and Tracking: A Literature Review

This literature review considers the influences on teacher career decisions, specifically how a teacher’s assignment affects teachers’ career decisions and retention. The literature demonstrated connections between challenging teaching assignments and teacher attrition, in addition to links to testing, collective bargaining agreements, and school leadership. Teachers of the neediest students are more likely to leave than those with less challenging assignments. The body of literature fails to include a qualitative study of the process of the distribution of teaching assignments at the secondary level, making it difficult to recommend specific improvements to the process. Keywords: teaching assignment, teacher retention, teacher attrition, literature review, teacher tracking TEACHING ASSIGNMENTS 3 Teaching Assignments and Their Connection to Teacher Retention, Attrition, and Tracking: A Literature Review Introduction Teacher attrition has been a concern for school administrators for many years and researchers have long been interested in this topic. Based on the belief that high quality, effective teachers, researchers have attempted to find reasons that teachers leave or stay in particular schools or in the profession more generally. Many components of the working environment, including salary, administrative support, and self-efficacy have been found to contribute to teachers’ decisions to stay or leave. The problem of teacher attrition is even worse in low-income, minority schools. Teaching assignment is one important factor that has been little examined by researchers. The intent of this paper is to synthesize empirical research on teaching assignment in order to answer the following questions: What factors do teachers take into consideration when making career decisions? How is teaching assignment connected to teacher retention and attrition? What considerations do administrators take into account when distributing teaching assignments? While teachers’ working conditions has been of interest to many scholars, limited research exists on the issue of teaching assignments. The purpose of this paper is to summarize recent relevant research, and discuss the implications of that research for how principals might consider crafting teacher assignments. Teaching assignment will be defined as the matching of teachers to specific courses, grade levels, and ability levels within a school building. I begin this paper by reviewing recent literature on teacher retention and attrition and laying out its connection to teaching assignment. I then examine the literature on teacher TEACHING ASSIGNMENTS 4 assignment and its links to retention and attrition, testing, teacher quality, and tracking and sorting in order to answer the research questions. Conceptual Framework Teaching assignments vary based on grade level and subject area, making them complex and difficult for researchers to define. At the secondary level, public schools provide various courses including honors, Advanced Placement (AP), and International Baccalaureate (IB), as well as general and special education courses. These courses came about as a result of tracking practices in the typical U.S. comprehensive high school. Various professional organizations and educators criticized tracking in the 1990’s, resulting in many schools adopting a detracking policy. As the controversy died down, some schools returned to tracking (Loveless, 2013). Despite the decrease in formal tracking across all subjects, according to Bernhardt (2014), “today, this practice [tracking] continues in nearly all middle and high schools (Hallinan & Kubitschek, 1999; Lucas, 1999; Oakes, Gamoran, & Paige, 1992)” (p. 3). These schools provide a wide array of courses for students who may select into various levels of a course. According to Bernhardt (2014), “many middle and high schools have begun to implement open course enrollment policies to increase opportunities for students to experience International Baccalaureate (IB) and Advanced Placement (AP) classes” (p. 2). Tracking has been studied to examine its impact on students in the areas of “student achievement, socioeconomic and racial segregation, differences in classroom practices, and affective outcomes” (Bernhardt, 2013, p. 1), but researchers have not generally taken into account its effect on teachers. What this comprehensive high school means for a Chemistry teacher is that he or she could be teaching AP or IB Chemistry, regular Chemistry, or teamed Chemistry (co-taught with a special education teacher including students with Individualized Education Programs or IEPs). TEACHING ASSIGNMENTS 5 An English teacher might teach AP or IB Literature, Honors English, regular English, or teamed English. Selection processes for advanced academic courses vary; some require teacher recommendations while others consider classes open enrollment in an attempt to close the achievement gap (Bernhardt, 2013). These assignments often determine a teachers’ workload and may contribute to working conditions and job satisfaction, in turn affecting student learning and teachers’ desire to stay at or leave a school (see Figure 1). Another important piece of the conceptual framework for this literature review is teacher tracking and sorting. Finley (1984) defined teacher tracking as the “phenomenon by which teachers are mapped onto the ability groups” in a school (as cited in Kelly, 2004a). Tracking and sorting disadvantaged students with special needs and often segregated minority and lowachieving students from peers (Adamson & Darling-Hammond, 2012; Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2005; Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2006; Finley, 1984; Kalogrides & Loeb, 2013; Kalogrides, Loeb, & Beteille, 2013; Kelly, 2004b; Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2002). Teacher sorting has been found to disadvantage minority and female teachers (Adamson & DarlingHammond, 2012; Clotfelter et al., 2005; Kalogrides et al., 2013), and minority and lowachieving students tend to be assigned the newest teachers and those of the lowest quality (Kalogrides & Loeb, 2013; Lankford et al., 2002). These studies illustrate the need for a review of the teaching assignment literature with the goal of finding research and policy recommendations that may help provide equity for both teachers and students through the teaching assignment process. TEACHING ASSIGNMENTS 6 Figure 1. Concept Map: Influences on and Effects of Teaching Assignments Methods This literature review includes sources from 2002 through 2014 with a few earlier sources used to define key terms. The search window was set at post-No Child Left Behind in order to avoid out-of-field teaching as a factor in teacher attrition; NCLB attempted to do away with out-of-field teaching with its highly qualified teacher requirement, so more recent studies generally did not include out-of-field teaching as a variable. Key search terms used included teaching assignment, teacher sorting, teacher tracking, retention, attrition, student tracking, student achievement, teacher quality, testing, staffing, scheduling, master schedule, planning, school administrators, influence, perception, efficacy, leadership, leadership theory, collective bargaining agreement, and union. From January 2013 through April 2015, I used multiple databases to review teacher attrition literature, including EBSCOhost, Education Source, Education Abstracts, Education Research Information Clearinghouse (ERIC), JSTOR, and Google Scholar. Searches on the master schedule process were mostly fruitless, revealing further gaps in the literature. Teacher Attrition and Retention What factors do teachers take into consideration when making career decisions? Many Administrative or Leadership Decision-­‐ Making + Teacher Preference Teacher assignment • grade level • subject matter • student characteristics • working conditions Instruction • interactions between teachers and students Teacher retention or attrition Student learning Teacher self efCicacy TEACHING ASSIGNMENTS 7 recent studies have examined factors related to teacher attrition and retention, demonstrating that teachers are more likely to leave schools with unsupportive working conditions than schools with positive working conditions. Schools with poor working conditions often house low-income, English language learner, and minority students. This has led researchers to devote their efforts to discovering what policies and strategies might be put in place to retain high quality teachers and what specific factors contributed to teachers leaving schools for other schools or leaving the profession entirely. Researchers found predictors of attrition included being a minority, low number of years of experience, apathy, race incongruence between teachers and administrators, behavioral climate, salary, student characteristics, and school characteristics. In this section, I will examine research on predictors of attrition and retention using subsections of demographic characteristics of teachers, schools, and students; working conditions and salary; and teacher self-efficacy and affect. Teacher, School, and Student Demographics and Characteristics Most studies focused on attrition are quantitative and attempt to find predictors of teacher attrition or relate demographics or school characteristics to teacher attrition. In a study with a number of limitations, Kelly (2004a) examined 7,200 public school teachers who left jobs from the 1990-1991 SASS and 1992 TFS using the Stratified Cox Proportional Hazard models and found that poor behavioral environment led to greater teacher attrition while higher salaries only marginally reduced teacher attrition. The researcher found no evidence of higher attrition rates for teachers of low-track students. In contrast with Kelly’s (2004a) findings, Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin (2004) found that teacher mobility was more strongly related to student characteristics than to salary; however, salar