Recognizing Culture Stress as a Key Contributor to Teacher Attrition in Urban Public Schools

For three years my wife and I were aid workers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia which is a post genocide nation known for its heat, poverty and cultural extremes. Though that time will always be in my long-term memory as an experience that was rare and beautiful there were certainly significant challenges as we worked to acculturate to that nation. I remember simply not wanting to venture outside to buy groceries for fear of not speaking the language or being caught in a situation in which my language was not sufficient or when the simple task of buying credit for my cell phone was an intimidating proposition. After a couple of years those fears dissipated and we could easily navigate the nation and the city so well so that I could operate there with as much confidence as I could maneuver around my home culture but it was not a quick process to get to that point. However, I remember that many of our expat friends in Cambodia constantly reminding of culture stress is simply tension felt by an individual as they acclimate to a new culture and way of living. If culture stress is not addressed and mitigated then it can eat away at the individual until their only option is to default back to their home culture which alleviates the stress. In Cambodia my wife and I would make our apartment a "little America" every weekend by streaming NFL games, eating American food and connecting with friends and family in the States through Skype. Often all we were doing was reorienting to what was familiar to us after a week of disorienting cross-cultural work. This reorientation was how we mitigated our culture stress and allowed us to thrive in an environment that was entirely different than what was familiar to us. When we moved back to the States I never imagined I would again endure that same level of culture stress but I suggest that this stress not only exists in the States but it is a significant reason for why many teachers leave the profession in America's urban cores.

In my first six months working in Denver Public Schools I often approached work with an unsettling tension that I could not define. I could not define for myself the feeling I had on Sunday evenings heading into Monday mornings. It was not the typical feeling of the impending Monday blues it was much more than that and much harder to rationalize. What I realized was that I was experiencing, like I did overseas, was a level of culture stress based on having to alter how I interacted and engaged from what was normal in my household and far different than the foundation I built as I grew up in a culture vastly different than the one I was working in. I was experiencing culture stress but never imagined that was possible just 50 minutes from the town in which I was raised. This labeling might contentious but I want to make it clear that I am not making a judgement that one culture is better or worse than another -  it is simply different. As a white teacher who grew up in a majority white community I was experiencing a vastly different culture than what I knew to be the norm as I interacted with my black and latino students and families. When I walked into the building the way I spoke, how I approached conflict or praise and even my mannerisms and body language changed over time. The way I used sarcasm, how I unintentionally promoted power in my language and how unintentionally linked good behavior to academic acumen was the manifestation of my values and were not at all honoring the unique and entirely different cultural practices of my students. Like an aid worker navigating a foreign nation and making it home, I was doing what it took to make myself feel a part of my new community and comfortable in my surroundings while working to make my cultural values clear but not static to my students.

In book the book Star Teachers author Martin Haberman explains that many of the most successful teachers in high poverty school are able to acculturate to the school's and community's culture even to the point of changing language patterns and vocabulary. What he is suggesting is that teachers who are successful in cross-cultural work are able to switch their language, actions and instruction to bridge the cultural gap between themselves and their students. This manipulation of cultural familiarity is especially important in large urban school districts, like Denver Public Schools, in which the teaching staff does not typically look like the students in the seats.A recent article in Chalkbeat Colorado explained that within Denver Public Schools 78 percent of students are racial minorities but 74 percent of teachers are white This is a clear cultural difference that policy makers and school leaders discuss but the key piece that we are all missing in this discussion is that in the current state there are clear cultural differences between teachers and students and because of this difference there is, without a doubt, cultural stress that leads to why so many teachers leave in their first year or years in these classrooms. I believe that teacher attrition and burnout it not just because of a heavy workload or the strain put on educators because of policy shifts, rather much of this attrition is due to teachers unable to mitigate the effects that cultural stress has on their daily work and therefore they return to, perhaps subconsciously, schools and communities that that are more familiar to them and the cultural norms they associate with. This is a difficult trend to name but I do think that giving teachers the ability to become literate in how students with different backgrounds communicate, initiate or deescalate conflict, view authority and engage with their respective family units would be as valuable as a professional development cycle as helping students write compelling arguments or how to annotate and dissect a complex text.

For the last four years at my current school I have been working with colleagues to determine why some teachers have been able to continue the work, why others opt to find another school and why some do not make it past the first few weeks. Often this discussion is anchored in work ethic, fortitude or simply that some teachers just have a certain personality profile. I think that elements of this discussion are true but I absolutely believe that many teachers leave the work because they are facing a tension that cannot be named and a feeling that is not easily explained. This tension can be a result of the demanding workload or ever changing professional expectations but adding cultural stress as a key contributor to why some teachers leave cannot be dismissed. Until schools in urban areas allow for a discussion on cultural differences between students and teachers and deliver strong and intentional professional development on how to bridge the gap between these differences then they will continue to suffer through the cycle of hiring in hopes that they have the makeup to make it. There are many contributing factors to teacher attrition but perhaps none is more influential than the tension created by cultural differences and culture stress in the classroom.

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