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Educator exodus: Inside D.C.’s teacher turnover crisis

BY SARAH CRAIG

After 20 years of teaching, Jessica Salute is beginning to hit her breaking point.

“I’m having a tough year,” she said. “For the first time I’m really thinking like, ‘I don’t know if I can keep doing it.’”

Salute, a second-grade teacher in Ward 8, has spent this academic year feeling overwhelmed by long hours, intense evaluations, and a lack of administrative support. Her conclusion mirrors that of many other teachers in the country: It’s all too much.

“The stress feels like so much. And it’s making me a worse teacher; that’s what scares me, what I haven’t felt before,” Salute said. “I am not able to be my best for the kids because of the challenges and the pressure.”

Though teacher turnover has long been a nationwide issue, attrition rates have only risen since the beginning of the pandemic. The national average for turnover in urban schools falls between 16 and 19 percent, with around 54 percent of teachers reporting they were either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to leave the profession in the next two years, according to a 2021 survey.

It’s an alarming high, especially here in the District. D.C. currently has the highest urban turnover rate in the entire country. Between the 2020-21 and 2o21-22 academic years, D.C. saw a city-wide turnover rate of 26 percent, with Wards 4, 6, 7, and 8 averaging 30 percent.

So, what’s behind this revolving door of teachers in the District?

For many teachers in D.C. Public Schools (DCPS), one culprit immediately comes to mind: the internal evaluation system IMPACT.

Introduced by DCPS in 2009, IMPACT is meant to optimize teacher performance. The evaluation scores teachers in five categories: student achievement, instructional expertise, instructional culture, community collaboration, and professionalism.

Yet the system was rated the highest driver of turnover in the 2020 Teacher Attrition Survey. The following year, the D.C. State Board of Education (SBOE) found that only 31.6 percent of teachers in DCPS believed their IMPACT evaluation would be fair and credible. IMPACT “creates this fear that every time [teachers] step into the classroom, it’s for the purpose of evaluation,” Scott Goldstein, Founder and Executive Director of EmpowerED, an educator advocacy non-profit, said. “It makes it very hard to have really open communication and a culture where everybody's growing.”

Evaluations are conducted by school administrators, sometimes unannounced. Many teachers feel that the evaluations are subjective, relying too heavily on their existing relationships with administrators. Some also argue that IMPACT facilitates a simple system of reward and punishment, rather than nuanced growth: Teachers who are rated “highly effective” are given a $2,000 bonus, while teachers who are rated anything less than “effective” run the risk of losing their jobs.

IMPACT was actually what once attracted Salute to working in DCPS, because she thought that the tool’s rigor would make her a better teacher. After nine years of teaching in the district, however, her opinion could not have changed more.

“It’s so stressful and so anxiety-provoking, and I think there’s so much energy put into it with very little benefit,” she said. “It will definitely be one of the reasons if and when I leave DCPS.”

For some teachers, IMPACT is nowhere near as stressful as other evaluation systems.

“I can understand why people hate it,” Rian Reed, a Ward 8 middle school teacher, said. Reed’s previous school district utilized the highly-criticized Danielson evaluation model. “But I’m coming from an experience that was worse, in my opinion.”

Some teachers have questioned whether IMPACT is equitable. In 2020, the American University School of Education conducted a study—commissioned by DCPS—that found IMPACT to be racially biased. Finding that Black and Latinx teachers consistently scored lower on their evaluations than white, Asian, and Native American teachers, the study identified a “potential bias in the rubric or observations in which Black teachers are stereotypically perceived as more culturally competent or nurturing but not recognized for their contributions to academics.”

One teacher participating in the study said that the creation of IMPACT didn’t just force teachers of color out: “It was that they replaced them with younger white teachers who were not from the area, who did not understand the culture of these students, and it was okay, and so because of its origins, it’s always going to be problematic.”

Another study participant corroborated this view: “It’s very prejudicial, and it didn’t help that the people who created it were not people of color, but they came and slammed this down into communities where students and families were already suffering.”

Turnover rates are likely to be higher at schools with a higher number of students categorized as “at-risk”—schools that are typically in Wards 7 and 8, exacerbating other systemic inequities between wards.

This correlation does not exist because atrisk students are harder to work with—that’s a myth Goldstein wants to dispel. “I think that that's often what the immediate assumption is— it’s just hard to work with those kids,” he said.

“In schools where there are higher concentrations of poverty, the school teachers have significantly less autonomy, flexibility, and professional respect. So they’re micromanaged,” Goldstein told the Voice. “They aren’t micromanaged in high-income schools—and it’s the micromanaging that makes teachers leave—not the challenge of the behavior, or the academic growth needed from their students.”

Emily Gasoi, the Ward 1 Representative for the D.C. SBOE, agrees. She added that in schools with high numbers of “at-risk” students, greater focus is placed on standardized testing.

“There’s just more mandates around getting the test scores up. There tends to be less of a wellrounded education for those students,” Gasoi, who is also a professor in the Georgetown