Is Teaching a Family-Friendly Career for Teachers?
With a goal of improving workforce recruitment and retention in education, Laura Rogers has focused her work on making sure adults in schools have the resources they need to be effective educators and leaders.
When her doctoral students flagged the same problem for six consecutive years, it got her attention.
“When I was at the University of Utah, my students—who were often working teachers and working principals—would have to identify an organizational problem, and then we would explore it from different perspectives,” said Rogers. “And every single year, six years in a row, at least one person, if not more, would submit that their organizational problem was something related to either navigating the parental leave policy in their school district or figuring out how to maintain their trajectory as a teacher or school leader after having kids.”
Rogers began wondering: How does having a child affect educators’ career trajectories? Does it play a role in teacher turnover or impact a teacher’s decision to pursue a career in education leadership?
Families and Teacher Retention
Now an associate professor in the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, Rogers picked up the baton from her students and, with $375,000 in funding from the Spencer Foundation, is launching a research project aimed at answering those questions.
According to a recent report from the Learning Policy Institute, teacher turnover remains a major challenge in US schools. Every year, about 15% of teachers leave their school—and about half of that group leaves teaching altogether. The turnover rates for school principals are even higher.
Rogers and her research partners, University of Utah Assistant Professor David Woo and University of Alabama Assistant Professor Anna Moyer, have focused their work increasingly on why this is happening. “The research on teacher turnover focuses so much on what happens in the school—and for good reasons. That’s where we can create change,” Rogers said. “But it seemed to us like having a child is a big enough deal that it should be something that we look more into.”
“Teaching is often considered a family-friendly profession because teachers get summers off, and their work schedules align with the schedules of school-age children,” Rogers said. “But family responsibilities do not turn off during the school year, and the school schedule does not matter if your children are not old enough to go to school yet. Teachers with children might decide that returning to their jobs after having a child is just not worth it.” The team found very little research on how teachers navigate or manage family responsibilities, or how they respond to whether their district offers benefits like paid parental leave.
The mechanisms that are in place to potentially capture that information are also lacking.
Consistently on surveys, teachers cite ‘personal reasons’ for why they choose to leave teaching. And sometimes we don’t get any more information than that. Nobody has asked whether some of those reasons are things the right policies and supports could actually address.LRLaura Rogers
“Consistently on surveys, teachers cite ‘personal reasons’ for why they choose to leave teaching,” Rogers said. “And sometimes we don’t get any more information than that. Nobody has asked whether some of those reasons are things the right policies and supports could actually address.”
Mapping District Benefits and Educators’ Careers
Compared to other working adults, teachers are less likely to have access to key benefits and resources that allow them to balance work and family, such as affordable family health insurance and childcare, schedule flexibility, and paid time off. According to the National Council on Teacher Quality, only a third of teachers have access to paid parental leave. That is up from 18% five years ago, as more states and districts have begun to introduce paid parental leave for teachers as a recruitment and retention tool. And some districts are experimenting with offering other family-friendly resources like on-site childcare.
What is not yet known is whether these investments keep teachers with families in the classroom.
In their project, “Family Friendly for Whom? How Parenting, Paid Leave, and Childcare Access Shape Educators’ Career Trajectories,” Rogers and her team will collect family-friendly benefits data from 1,300 school districts—representing every state and about 10% of all districts in the country.
They will link the benefits information with other local data points, including a cost-of-living index and local childcare expenses. The result will be a publicly available database and data dashboard they hope to provide a clear picture of the family-friendly benefits available to educators, like paid leave, family health benefits, sick days and job flexibility—and the rules for how teachers access them.
Rogers is also interested in understanding if access to benefits influence teachers’ career trajectories.
To examine this, the team will conduct a case study that links state-level employment data with birth data to see how having a child influences teachers’ career outcomes, including retention, job absenteeism—and even their promotion to leadership.
“We know that women take longer to move into leadership positions than men; they do it later in life,” Rogers said. “There may be a lot of systemic bias. But we also wonder whether family responsibilities play a role. Being a principal is really hard. It is an all-encompassing job.”
Understanding the value of benefits like parental leave could offer significant opportunities for tackling the challenges in maintaining the teaching and leadership workforce.
“Students do better when their teacher is in the room, so it’s fair to ask why a district would pay for a benefit that takes a teacher out of it,” Rogers said. “But the question isn’t whether teachers take time off when they have a baby—it’s whether they come back, and whether they stay. In other professions, family-friendly benefits keep people on the job, especially women. Women make up 75% of the teaching workforce. This is worth a serious look.”
With this project, Rogers and her team hope to identify whether family-friendly benefits are an underinvestigated driver of teacher retention, potentially unlocking new levers to keep high-quality teachers and leaders in schools.