Burgess, Michael (2020-07). Teacher Recruitment and Retention and the Minority Teacher Shortage among Latinx Teachers in the United States and Mexico. Doctoral Dissertation.
Thesis
"Teacher Recruitment and Retention and the Minority Teacher Shortage among Latinx Teachers in the United States and Mexico" uses both quantitative and qualitative analysis to examine Latinx teacher retention in Mexico and the United States. The first article "Teacher Attrition and Job Dissatisfaction in Mexico: Why Do Mexican Teachers Leave the Profession?" analyzes data on teacher recruitment, preparation and retention from OCED'S Teaching and Learning International Survey to comparing school climate factors that influence job satisfaction and teacher retention in Mexico. While researchers have studied many factors related to teacher dropout in the United States and Western Europe, research on teacher dropout in Latin America and especially in Mexico is much more limited. The results showed effects by gender, years of experience, age, and discipline problems, relationships between students and teachers, and perceptions of collaboration in both job satisfaction and work regret. The second article "Job satisfaction and teacher attrition among Latinx teachers in the United States: a quantitative analysis" examines and compares the recruitment and retention of Latinx and White school teachers and attempts to empirically ground the debate over minority teacher shortages. A large gap persists between the increasing percentage of Latinx students in U. S. schools and the percentage of Latinx teachers in the U. S. school system. While efforts to recruit minority teachers have been largely successful, turnover rates among minority teachers have been significantly higher than among White teachers. However, most of the research on minority teacher retention has grouped all minorities into one non-White category. Thus, this research used empirical data to determine which organizational conditions are most strongly related to Latinx teachers' decisions to stay in teaching or to leave the profession. The data in this article showed that classroom autonomy, influence in site-based decision-making and having an effective supportive principal were very strong factors influencing job satisfaction and teacher retention among Latinx teachers. The third article "Stories of living and stories of leaving: a Latinx autobiographical narrative inquiry" uses narrative inquiry to flesh out the relationship between school organizational factors and Latinx teacher retention and job satisfaction as experienced in my own career. In this article, qualitative analysis, specifically autobiographical narrative inquiry is used to fill in the details of how and why various factors influence Latinx teacher job satisfaction in teacher retention. Between 1997 and 2017, I worked for one of the largest Metropolitan school districts in the United States Southwest. I began as a bilingual first grade teacher and later became a campus principal in the same district. In this article I focused on my "stories of living" and "stories of leaving" (Craig, 2014) as well as account for the "stories of living" and "stories of leaving" of my teacher colleagues. I corroborate the stories of teacher attrition in this article with quantitative analyses of minority teacher retention data along with written accounts of teacher retention in the district I worked in.
