Inexperienced
Teachers at High Poverty Schools
The Achilles'
Heel of Urban School Reform
As in many large urban school districts, San Diego City Schools provides different levels of instructional capacity at different schools. Most notably, inexperienced teachers are disproportionately concentrated in the District’s poorest schools. In fact, recent research by the Dialogue has documented that students at the poorest schools in San Diego are over twice as likely to be assigned to a “new” teacher (a teacher in their first or second year of teaching) than students in the system’s most affluent schools.
This fact poses troubling questions for a reform program that is predicated on offering unprecedented levels of professional development to its teachers. If teachers gain additional skills via this professional development, but then depart disadvantaged schools for more advantaged sites, high quality instructional capacity will never be sustained at these “hard-to-staff” schools. There is also the troubling phenomenon of teachers departing the District, or departing the profession altogether, because of new requirements being placed on them through the reform program.
The most recently available evidence suggests that the concentration of inexperienced teachers is actually increasing in San Diego City Schools, as more and more new teachers are hired to fill open slots within the District’s schools. If systemic reform is to be sustained in San Diego, teachers must come to embrace assignments at the highest poverty schools in the District and be provided the tools and resources necessary to make these sites outstanding environments for teaching and learning.
