Research Center Blog

You want to improve factors that determine whether staff will stay. What should you do?

What does the research say about what you need to do to retain staff? What schools are doing great work, and what exactly are they doing?

When we present survey results, audience members often ask, “What can we do to get better?”

We went straight to the source to learn more: the schools that are doing the best on the most important metrics.

Over the next three months, we’ll share what works based on research and on-the-ground examples from district leaders. This month, staff. (Next, we’ll talk through students and parents.)

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What makes teachers choose to leave their classroom and what helps them decide to stay is remarkably clear and consistent in the research. Whether we’re talking about the US or Finland or the UK, and whether we’re talking about yesteryear or yesterday, the answers are the same.[1]

Of course, pay is the most frequently cited factor.[2] But the ability to do “meaningful work” is a close second.[3] Teachers stay when they feel that their valuable work is valued.

So, how can school leaders make teachers feel valued even in the midst of funding and enrollment challenges?

Fair pay practices

It’s no surprise that pay ranks among the most significant items for staff satisfaction. But, as discussed last month, you don’t have the funding flexibility to flip a switch and increase pay to the degree necessary to fix engagement or retention issues.

That doesn’t mean you can’t improve how staff feel about your district’s pay practices.

The Kettle Moraine School District saw significant growth in staff, who agreed that its pay practices were fair. Superintendent Steve Plum and Chief Human Resources Officer Charles Wiza pointed to a difficult but rewarding restructuring of their administration and pay plan a few years ago.

In that process, they simplified the ways for staff to increase pay, including removing some previous “micro-adjustments” for certain professional learning benchmarks.

“If you just convey this is why we’re doing what we’re doing, then I think people are going to go, ‘Ah, do I have to jump through hoops, or am I going to get paid what I’m worth?’ I think we tried our best to remove the illogical hoops,” Plum said.

The research literature backs up Kettle Moraine’s strategy. Clear communication about pay scales tells teachers that they matter. That kind of communication improves retention and morale.[4]

Similarly, the Oconto Falls Public Schools experienced significant growth in satisfaction with their pay practices since they first surveyed staff in 2022.

“Our baseline was, in some ways, kind of brutal,” Superintendent Dean Hess recalled.

They simplified the alternative compensation model to a one-page document and systemized one of the ways to advance, National Board Certification – one of the most prestigious certifications available to educators. Oconto Falls now has days built into its schedule to work on that certification and a formal coaching system with teachers who have already achieved it.

While the certification was in the previous, more complicated model, Hess said staff did not always know how to get started or dive into the process, leaving it feeling unattainable.

“I own that because I thought, ‘If you create it, they will come,’” he said.

Since implementing the new system, they’ve gone from 0 staff with the certification to 13 in the process now. Hess called it “unbelievable how it’s taken off” since they created the structure.

These districts increased their teachers’ job satisfaction through clear communication about pay practices, rather than by committing to prohibitively costly across-the-board raises. Pay matters, as the research says, but collaboration and communication around pay scales can help teachers see that leaders take teacher pay seriously.

Value their input

Pay wasn’t the only challenge when Oconto Falls began surveying its staff. Results showed they did not feel their input was valued.

“There was a lot of things in (that first survey) that folks were pretty frustrated with,” Hess recalled.

That data pushed him to create a staff advisory team, an idea he’d had for years but “had enough doubt (in) that I kind of set it on the shelf.”

That team was made up of people considered thoughtful leaders within the organization. Though some didn’t have official leadership roles, they were people who their peers trusted and relied on.

That team has changed how information is delivered at schools. Instead of a principal or Hess himself sharing updates with buildings, staff advisory team members deliver it, which Hess said changes the tone.

A vital part of the group’s success: accepting that conflict is OK.

“Their way, my way, is not wrong or right,” Hess said. “We all work together.”

The research literature has a name for what Oconto Falls has done: distributed leadership.[5] Meaningfully including teachers’ voices in decision-making and information-sharing processes generates buy-in and a sense of shared mission.[6] Teachers are more likely to stay with schools and districts where they feel their professional opinions carry weight, and the inexpensive organizational changes that Oconto Falls put in place made a tremendous difference to its teachers’ level of job satisfaction.

The Maple Dale-Indian Hill School District scores in the 99th percentile on two questions (out of 30) and 98th on three more on School Perceptions surveys. In fact, it is in the 74th percentile or higher on every staff metric but one. (In other words, even on their “worst” metric, they still outperform nearly three-quarters of school districts in their comparison pool.)

But Superintendent Timothy Joynt knows that doesn’t mean everyone is happy with every decision.

“We have to be careful that, while we can get really good results, it doesn’t necessarily transfer into day-to-day sunshine, rainbows, and lollipops,” Joynt said. “We’re all in a difficult business. But if we can, as much as possible, be on the same page when things get difficult, I think that’s what’s super helpful for staff.”

For Joynt, that means clearly communicating the “why” behind every decision. That helps those who might disagree at least understand the intentions behind it and see how it fits into the broader direction of the district.

Again, Joynt’s strategies are echoed in the research literature. Studies routinely find positive relationships between “participatory styles of leadership” and high levels of teacher satisfaction.[7] Some studies have also documented relationships between leaders’ communication strategies and higher student outcomes.[8]

While this communication style may be easier in a smaller district like Maple Dale-Indian Hill, Joynt pointed to three key pieces of his communication efforts: a weekly blog sent to the whole district, a shared leadership council to discuss issues, and administration being visible within schools.

On one recent staff survey, Joynt noticed that the comments didn’t match the quantitative data. With the shared leadership council (which includes non-administrative staff members), they discussed the themes and data to discern the disconnect. Members of that council then communicated back to their colleagues.

“It needs to be staff helping staff understand they really listened, we really gave them feedback, and here’s what they can and cannot do,” Joynt said.

Turn feedback into action together

Joynt knows that his smaller district setting offers some opportunities others might not have. But the principles underlining the work they do, he said, can apply elsewhere.

“While my solutions may not apply to a larger district or a larger district’s solutions may not apply to mine, it’s really about the feedback loop and identifying what measures are you going to look at? Which measures are you going to raise the importance of?” he said.

For Wendell Quesinberry, the Tomahawk School District superintendent, trust with the school board is crucial to turning feedback into action.

“Putting this out there and asking folks some of these tough questions and providing that feedback to our board, it puts us as an administrative team in a vulnerable situation sometimes,” Quesinberry said.

If the board can focus more on the response to challenging data than blame for how it got there, he said there’s lots of room for productive discussion. In Tomahawk, they’ve used the data to better communicate which initiatives are most important – and which aren’t – and take some older requirements off teachers’ plates. This has saved staff time and brought improvement in staff feeling their workload is reasonable.

“The health of your school revolves around relationships,” Quesinberry said. “I don’t think you’ll ever have great relationships if you don’t have opportunities for feedback.”

In Kettle Moraine, Plum makes every individual school’s data available to all his administrators. He said it’s important to “pull away the opaqueness” and help each other understand what’s going well elsewhere so that they can dig into the reasons and improve at their own building.

Commitments to sharing information, hearing feedback, and working together on common goals are not only successful in these examples but are backed up by a wealth of educational research.[9]

“The only way I think that is successful is you pull the guilt and shame label and attachment off,” Plum said. “You just get rid of it.”

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The School Perceptions Blog and Resource Center features the voices of our team members. This post was written by Scott Girard, Project Manager, and Derek Gottlieb, Senior Research Director.