Chapter 30
Attracting, Preparing, and Retaining
Teachers in High Need Areas: A Science
as Inquiry Model of Teacher Education
Cheryl J. Craig, Paige Evans, Simon Bott, Donna Stokes
and Bobby Abrol
30.1 Introduction
In Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries,
teacher retention and attrition is an increasing problem. The theme appears often in
the literature from the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, the United States, Israel and
Norway, among other nations. Even Finland with its leading Programme for
International StudentAssessment(PISA) scores and focus on teacher profession-
alism has retention and attrition issues. According to a background Australian
Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) report,“...
teaching is becoming...a career of‘movement in and out’and the‘out’may be
permanent”(Skilbeck and Connell 2003 , pp. 32–33).
Perhaps nowhere in the world is the teacher attrition problem more advanced
than in the United States. Major urban centers like Houston and Philadelphia lose
50 – 70% of beginning teachers in 4–6 years, baby boomer teachers are retiring
earlier than anticipated, and the most recent teacher satisfaction survey indicates
that one-third of those teachers remaining in the workforce plan to leave soon
C.J. Craig (&)
Texas A&M University, College Station, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
P. EvansD. StokesB. Abrol
University of Houston, Houston, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
D. Stokes
e-mail: [email protected]
B. Abrol
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Bott
Swansea University, Swansea, Wales, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
©Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017
M.A. Peters et al. (eds.),A Companion to Research in Teacher Education,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4075-7_30
455