In March, Education Week published a state-by-state survey of teacher satisfaction. Arkansas scored highest. Next-highest states were Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Montana, New Mexico and South Dakota. Pennsylvania scored lowest in the Education Week survey, and more Arkansas teachers are staying in the same job year to year than in the past.
A survey from the Office for Education Policy at the University of Arkansas indicates 89% of Arkansas teachers say they're satisfied with their job. 90% report they feel successful at their job, and more teachers in Arkansas say they plan to stay — with an expected retention rate of 91%.
Researchers at the Office for Education Policy at the University of Arkansas, Josh McGee and Gema Zamarro, recently came to the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio to talk about their findings. McGee says the most recent retention numbers for Arkansas show an improvement since the pandemic drastically altered classrooms.
McGee: We've seen a recovery since the depths of the post-pandemic era. Around 2022 is when we saw the dip in retention bottom out, and we've seen some recovery since then. We are still about two percentage points below pre-pandemic average retention rates, but our retention rate is above 80%. If you look at those who stay in the same school, that rate is above 77%. So more than three quarters of our teachers are not just staying in the same district, but staying in the same school. Nearly 90% are staying in public education in the state of Arkansas. So we're seeing very high retention rates, and those have trended back up to those pre-pandemic averages.
Kellams: And when we look at retention rates, do you count people retiring? Does that count against retention rates?
McGee: That's exactly right. That hovers between 0.5% and 3% every year of those who are retiring, who are leaving the workforce because they're retiring, and that's been very stable. We haven't seen an uptick in retirements at all. But yes, we count that against retention. We've seen a little bit of an uptick in exits from the profession, and we've seen more experienced teachers exit. But those increases have been relatively small. We've also seen an increase in teachers switching from teaching roles into non-teaching roles in education, which could have been driven by some federal relief funding that funded more support roles. We saw some teachers move into those. We're going to follow what happens as those federal relief dollars get spent and don't get renewed.
Kellams: What can it mean for a school district or for students to have higher teacher retention?
Zamarro: Well, that means a lot, because we know that whenever a school loses a teacher, students suffer — and that even if they move to another school in the district. There is this effect on students. In terms of that small uptick in exits from the profession for those mid-career teachers, that worries me a bit, because we know that teachers gain a lot of effectiveness in their first three years. So if we are losing teachers after that, we are losing teachers who already figured it out and are more effective in the classroom. Being able to figure out how to retain those teachers — if possible in the same schools where they can be successful — is very important for students.
Kellams: So retention is doing better than it's done in the past few years. Is it the same statewide, or are there still some challenges in different parts of the state?
McGee: There are still some challenges in different parts of the state, and those tend to be places where there are historical challenges recruiting and retaining an educator workforce. The southern and eastern parts of our state are places that are challenged demographically. Generally, they aren't attracting a lot of new people. Younger folks are moving out, and those dynamics affect education, too. It makes it harder to recruit and retain educators. The places that have geographic teacher shortages, on average, retain only about 77% of their teachers, and that's about five percentage points below the state average. Those teachers are leaving for a variety of reasons, including exiting and moving to other districts. If we look at the districts in those geographic shortage areas and compare pre-pandemic to post-pandemic, we saw about 40 of 64 shortage districts have lower retention now than before the pandemic. So a lot of our shortage districts have actually fallen further behind on their retention rate. But there are some success stories out there. That means 24 of those districts that are in shortage areas have actually increased their retention rate. So they're doing something right to recruit and retain teachers in their area.
When we think about teacher shortage, it's generally a localized story. We don't have broad teacher shortages in our state. We have localized geographic shortages that are primarily confined to areas that are super isolated or in the eastern and southern parts of the state, and then in particular subject areas. Think about secondary math and science teachers, who often have a lot of other employment options other than teaching.
Kellams: And when you say those isolated districts, that means hyper-rural?
McGee: That's exactly right. Think about some of our districts in the north-central part of the state that are quite difficult to get to — Deer, Jasper. These places are just very rural and it takes a long time to get to them, and they are very dispersed as well. Kids ride a long time on buses. It's a challenge to recruit and retain teachers in those kinds of areas.
Kellams: A study like this can tell us how it's going now. Can it be used to inform how to improve things five or 10 years into the future?
Zamarro: I think we are learning a lot. We now know that increasing teacher pay helps, but we also know — from our results — that the largest effects are in the first year, and the effects seem to be declining. Why? Because school districts' overall pay has not changed since the 2023 LEARNS Act, and we know that cost of living has gone up. So it's telling us that if we want this momentum to continue, we need to keep investing and making sure that pay continues to be competitive.
Our surveys also tell us about the working conditions of our teachers. Pay is important, but working conditions are also very important. When we ask teachers about the main sources of stress, one that comes up very clearly is managing student behavior. 56% of teachers choose managing student behavior as one of their top three sources of stress. So we know that — and that's something we also hear from teachers. It's not just a few teachers. This is something that is a struggle. So thinking about what supports can help with that — things like banning cell phones, maybe — can be helpful for teachers.
McGee: We're also finding that early-career teachers in particular struggle with this. Coming out of their educator training program, that is the area where teachers feel least prepared. Those types of supports, especially early in career, look to be particularly important. We're also finding that protected planning time is very important. There are a lot of things that encroach on teachers' planning time — administrative duties, other jobs at the school. But teachers' planning time has been shrinking, and that protected planning time is very important for teachers not only being prepared, but being effective in their roles. They report this on our surveys routinely. Also, clear administrative communication and feedback on their job is something that teachers really value and want more of.
Kellams: How far could you drill down in this? I'm wondering if you have any idea about satisfaction in districts that have gone to four-day weeks as opposed to five.
McGee: We looked at that in the first year of our survey, a couple of years ago, and we didn't really see much of a difference in satisfaction. It was about the same. Teachers liked the four-day school week — when you ask them specifically about it, they reported that they liked it — but we didn't see any difference on the satisfaction survey question. I think it raises an important issue. We need to do a little bit more work to try to relate these satisfaction measures and measures around working conditions to other elements related to the job and to district and state policy. I think that would really help folks understand what they might do to improve the situation, or areas where they could address some needs of teachers.
Kellams: And what do we even mean by job satisfaction? I mean, that's a big question for all of us.
Zamarro: We ask different questions. We ask directly, "How satisfied are you with your job?" and we find these high numbers. But we also ask how successful teachers feel they can do their job, and they also have high numbers. It's interesting, though, because we also ask them, "Would you recommend this profession to a young person?" and only around 56% say yes. So they feel satisfied with their job right now, they feel successful — but the environment might be such that they will not recommend it to someone entering. It goes in line with the working conditions and the fact that, you know, it's a satisfying job that people can feel happy doing, but also the working conditions that you have to deal with day by day make you think, "Is it good for someone new?"
Kellams: That leads into another question I had: can higher retention, if it continues to go up, be a positive for recruitment?
McGee: Absolutely. If we're retaining more teachers in the profession, if more teachers are staying put at their school, that means they're generally satisfied with their school. It can be an indicator of broader economic conditions, but we're in pretty good job market times right now, so there are a lot of opportunities in the labor market for people to pursue. But we're seeing teachers are staying put in higher numbers than they were in 2022. In the last five years, we're seeing the highest retention we've seen. I think that's a really good sign. I think that's a sign that the job itself is something people want to continue in, and that it is both stable and rewarding. Now we're seeing compensation go up, so it can be rewarding financially as well in a way that it wasn't in some areas of the state before. So I expect to see an uptick in recruitment as well.
Kellams: There is a category in this — "stayers." 77% of Arkansas teachers are stayers, meaning–
Zamarro: They stay in the same school year after year.
Kellams: That would make administrators happier, right?
McGee: Yes, definitely. It certainly makes managing the workforce easier if you're having to replace fewer teachers year over year. You've got more people in their roles who know how things are done in your school and are comfortable with the way things are done. It makes that administrator's job much easier, and they can focus on improving working conditions and managing other aspects of the school — and maybe get out of the HR replacement business quite so much.
Kellams: Finally, when you as professionals look at something like this, do you get questions for future study and research?
Zamarro: We always have questions for the future. One of the new things we included in the survey — we're interested in AI. Whether teachers say they use it and for what. Whether they think it will change the teaching profession. What types of things are barriers for them to use it. Any job right now is trying to figure out what is going on with AI, so I'm interested to see how teachers are using it or adapting to it.
McGee: The AI questions are going to be very, very interesting. We just started fielding that survey, but there's a lot of interesting data coming in. Teachers are using AI across a bunch of different dimensions, and they're reporting that they think it's really going to change the teaching job, as it's going to change jobs across our economy.
I'm also very interested in how feelings of satisfaction change over time and how that relates to teaching effectiveness and retention in the profession. Do those feelings of preparedness for early-career teachers actually relate to their staying in the profession? And are there things that districts can do to better support those early-career teachers to get them to stick around?
Zamarro: There is a lot still to learn from the LEARNS Act. The LEARNS Act changed many things for teachers. We evaluated the salary raises, but we plan to evaluate the merit pay, which is another part. We plan to evaluate the provision of maternity leave and see how all these different aspects are working, or where areas of improvement are.
Kellams: Could vouchers be something you would look at?
McGee: We are working right now on an evaluation of the Education Freedom Account program. We collaborate with the Department of Education to produce the annual report for that program — reports on who's using the accounts and for what purposes, what they're spending the money on, and their test scores. We're planning an evaluation that will look at the academic effects of the program: how those EFA students are performing relative to those who stay in traditional public schools, as well as the competitive effects on traditional public schools. We've got a pretty wide-ranging evaluation that will really dig into the data and look at the outcomes of that program across a number of different dimensions — from academic achievement to competitive effects to financial effects.
Josh McGee is associate professor and 21st Century Endowed Chair in Education Accountability and Transparency at the University of Arkansas. Gema Zamarro is professor and 21st Century Endowed Chair in Teacher Quality at the University of Arkansas. They visited the Carver Center for Public Radio this spring.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
