Why are teachers leaving their classrooms?
Each year about 16% of teachers leave their classrooms leaving schools to scramble to fill positions every summer. Half of those teachers leave their teaching career permanently while the other half move schools or districts to go somewhere else. This leaves schools all over the country looking for hundreds of thousands of new teachers every year to fill those positions. This problem is even worse at Title I schools where teachers of all subjects leave at higher rates than teachers at other schools. Why are teachers leaving?
Studies show while there are several reasons teachers choose to leave more than 20% of teachers who leave cite that it’s because they did not have supportive administration.
We need to support our teachers to keep them in school. How can we do that?
“The workplace condition most predictive of teacher turnover
was a perceived lack of administrative support”
Why does teacher turnover matter?
Teacher turnover results in lower achievement for not only students in the classrooms where teachers leave but all students in the school. Teacher turnover rates are highest in our Title 1 schools and schools with a high proportion of minority students. Where our students need it the most, teachers are leaving the fastest.
Rate Your Principal
To solve this problem, TeacherGimbel Corporation is building a website for teachers to rate their principals. This website will help teachers find schools that are a best fit for their teaching journey. It will also create transparency for parents, students, and all invested stakeholders about the administration’s leadership at their school.
Rate Your Principal is a website and app where teachers can get verified at their schools and rate their principals. Principals will get automatically registered in the system based on school records. Teachers will get verified as a teacher at their respective schools in a secure way that respects their privacy. Once a teacher is verified at a school they will be able to answer a series of questions to rate their principal. There will also be space for anecdotes or examples for teachers to input. Teachers will be able to upvote and downvote other ratings at the school if their experiences are similar. Ratings of the principals will be anonymously posted after five ratings have been completed at any given school to ensure the privacy of the teachers. The website will allow teachers to speak honestly about their work experiences to force transparency onto administrators and school districts to do better by their teachers. It will allow teachers to seek out supportive workplaces where they can flourish as educators.
This project is already in the works but still needs some additional funding. With your support, we will make this project a reality. The money that gets donated will be used to hire website developers who can create a robust, large-scale website that will be nationally launched and handle the web traffic of hundreds of thousands of users. It will be used for a large-scale marketing effort to ensure a successful launch that will allow teachers to discover and use this product. It will be used to hire staff to keep TeacherGimbel Corps running and supporting teachers all over the country. Your funding can make this vision happen.