A recent, and disturbing, Gallup poll indicates that teachers experience a sharp drop in professional engagement over the first six years of their career. From Education Week:

K-12 teachers in the U.S. tend to become less engaged at work after their first year, according to a just-released Gallup poll. For educators with between six months and a year of teaching, professional engagement is at 35.1 percent. But that figure goes down to 30.9 percent for teachers who have been on the job for one to three years, and it continues to drop for teachers in their third to fifth year.

A decrease in enthusiasm or optimism about one's profession from the outset to the onset of a career's realities is understandable, and many other professions included in the poll also experience declines in engagement. What makes the decline for teachers so alarming is that their professional engagement drops more sharply than that seen in many other professions:

The Gallup research indicates that this pattern is similar with other occupations-but it's notable that "the measurable decline in engagement by years of experience is smaller for those in other types of jobs [than for teachers]."

How can we improve educator engagement? Teaching is an extremely demanding job as well as an extremely stressful one. One thing we should be considering in Texas creating a better incentive structure for educators. Our teachers are compensated on salary schedule, a pay scale that rewards longevity over excellence. It's a model that encourages educators to stay in the teaching field, and little else. Might Texas experience a spike in teacher engagement, in teachers striving for excellence, if there were opportunities for great teachers to be more rewarded for their merit? While it is difficult to say for certain, what is definitively true is that our current reward system does little to encourage engagement or excellence.

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