The ‘Great Resignation’ as Research Context: Educational, Organizational, and Individual Realities in Flux

by Etienne LeGrand and Sharon Ravitch

As LeGrand and Ravitch observe, changes in academic life at the school level are influencing career decisions for educators of children and youth. Dr. Sharon Ravitch is a regular Methodspace contributor and served as Mentor in Residence, March 2022. She is the co-author with Nicole Mittenfelner Carl of Qualitative Research: Bridging the Conceptual, Theoretical, and Methodological, Second Edition.

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“The new crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born;
in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” — Antonio Gramsci 

“Liberated relationships are one of the ways we actually create abundant justice, the understanding that there is enough
attention, care, resource, and connection for all of us to access belonging, to be in our dignity, and to be safe in community” — Adrienne Maree Brown

What’s the ‘Great Resignation’ got to do with qualitative research?

In qualitative research, context is everything—understanding how context mediates human experience and meaning making is a methodological pursuit. A researcher’s understanding of context shapes  the study’s research design which, in turn, shapes its findings. The inseparability of methods and findings means that how researchers design and conduct research shapes the data we collect and therefore what we can know (Ravitch & Carl, 2021). In this time of sweeping change, reality is in flux for organizations and the people within them. Given the central tenets of qualitative research—working to understand the subjectivity and situatedness of experience and meaning making—this moment of radical flux has significant methodological implications (Ravitch & Carl, 2021).

The rapidly changing nature of organizational life requires that researchers become newly curious about how shifting societal norms and personal conditions shape our research. Temporality—the ways that time both mediates and constitutes context—is a vital research consideration. The very definition of qualitative validity is rigorous attention to meaning in context, thus researchers must foreground temporality both conceptually and methodologically (Ravitch & Carl, 2021). Rapid change is now part of all research contexts no matter what the topic is. In this post, Etienne LeGrand, a seasoned educational consultant and executive doctoral student in the Mid-Career Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, reflects on her current dissertation research on the critical role of executive leadership in establishing technologically adaptive learning organizations that are conditioned to optimize human performance.

Temporality as Research Context: The Educator Exodus

The ‘Great Resignation’ has hit the U.S. education sector hard with the promise of a growing exodus to come (Quilantan, 2022). This phenomenon is being experienced in many European countries, Australia, and parts of Asia, albeit differently due to underlying labor and economic conditions (Horowitz, 2022). Within the United States, working in schools has become an increasingly unattractive employment option for everyone involved in the education of children. The twin pandemics of COVID-19 and structural racism have strained an already outdated, dysfunctional public education system. Even before this, schools were struggling within a racially unjust and socially reproductive schooling system. And, just when it seemed like things couldn’t get any worse for Black and Brown students in U.S. schools, our government’s simultaneously carceral and neglectful pandemic response lit a fuse on a ticking social time bomb waiting to go off.

Working in education has never been more challenging or less fulfilling. Leaders, teachers, and board members are harassed about health and safety protocols and second-guessed about what books should be read and lessons taught. Educating children has increasingly become a stress-inducing, unfulfilling proposition that undermines what attracted so many and supported engagement essential to continued employment in the sector (Quilantan, 2022). Politics surrounding education and staffing challenges are exacerbated by the traumas of the moment, making it even more difficult to lead, teach, and learn. To make matters worse, despite working in stressful conditions, teachers earn about 20% less than other professionals with similar education and experience (Hadavi, 2020). Nationally, 25% of superintendents have left this past year compared to the typical turnover rate of 14-16% (American Association of School Administrators, 2022). From teachers to bus drivers, food service workers to maintenance staff, principals to superintendents, people are leaving the education sector in droves. Some have been forced out and others have resigned as political tensions over masking, school reopening, and issues of injustice led to a breaking point of dissatisfaction in the role (Gilreath, 2021). 

In addition to devaluation around compensation, educators often work in organizational cultures that are inequitable, don’t value their knowledge, limit their autonomy, do not offer adequate professional development opportunities, and fail to appreciate their contributions. This matters for educators, staff, and, most of all, for students since instability in the education workforce has deleterious consequences for student experiences and learning outcomes. The Labor Department reports that ~143,000 education sector employees quit in December 2021 and job openings jumped by 58,000 (Quilantan, 2022). Simply put, the U.S. education sector is not a humanizing place to work or learn.

Leaders and District Cultures in Flux: Etienne’s Dissertation Research

My dissertation research is an inquiry into the leadership behaviors superintendents demonstrate to drive their districts’ culture and performance. The premise for this research is that how people in an organization behave and how they are treated is directly linked to the results they can produce (Pathiranage, et al., 2020). As ‘CEO’ of their school district, superintendents have the staff responsibility and authority for the success of their organization. How a superintendent assumes the leadership obligation to care for and harness the potential contributions of those they lead is essential to producing the outcomes they seek.

A driving question in this inquiry is, How do superintendents inspire employees to collaborate and work together toward common goals?  Goleman et al. (2002) suggest that the most effective leaders are those who are socially and emotionally competent. When leaders model relationality and emotional intelligence, they influence others to become adept at using their emotional knowledge of self and others to inform healthy choices that produce bottom-line effects, such as decreased absenteeism, increased productivity, and decreased worker compensation (Cherniss & Adler, 2014). My dissertation research explores the ‘rules of the road’ and ‘guardrails’ that superintendents establish through their district’s culture. These may include trust, diversity, respect for differences and curiosity, teamwork and mutual support, continuous learning and knowledge development, and appreciative and constructive feedback. These driving leader values inform how employees (and students) are expected to behave and make decisions. My dissertation explores what leaders do to establish these conditions, how they hold people accountable, and how the culture of a district interrelates with its key functions such as hiring and operations, in addition to instruction, to fuel learning for students and adults alike.

I have worked as a leadership and culture-shaping consultant and education writer for 15 years. Within this work, I’ve been curious about what effective leaders do to move their people and organizations forward in positive and productive directions. How do effective leaders develop trusting and authentic relationships centered on learning and improvement that get results? There is a strong relationship between the superintendent and school district culture—the behavioral side of the school house that has been largely overlooked in previous education reform initiatives (McAdams & Zinck, 1998). Superintendents transmit culture by what they pay attention to, measure, and control. The primary role of a superintendent is to focus on their people—from principals to custodians—to develop and empower them. My dissertation explores this.

In 2020, I conducted an exploratory pilot study of seven district superintendents to understand 1) the ways they perceive their districts’ culture and its influence on academic and organizational performance and 2) what they were doing to leverage their culture toward these aims. Three primary findings emerged: 1) culture was conceptualized as processes and procedures, including curriculum, not specifically people, 2) most participants believe their influence on culture is constrained by their physical proximity to employees (and limited to teachers), and 3) there is a distant awareness of the link between district culture and academic and organizational performance and limited know-how about how to establish and sustain it. Based on these findings, my dissertation examines the ways superintendents model core values and behaviors to establish their desired district culture and align the culture with key functions, such as instruction and hiring, as a strategy to facilitate learning, optimize human potential, and create a healthy and humanizing workplace. 

Moving Forward

Street art from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The Great Resignation illuminates, in technicolor, that employees are not responsive to outdated command-and-control leadership approaches that overlook their wellbeing. One emergent learning is that financial compensation is an insufficient motivator for the sustained engagement and productivity needed to achieve organizational goals. New research on the Great Resignation among Fortune 500 companies finds that toxic culture is a more reliable predictor of attrition, 10.4 times more powerful than compensation (Sull et al., 2022). Toxic cultures fail to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and create conditions in which workers feel disrespected and underappreciated. 

Across industries in the U.S., 41% of employees ‘strongly agree’ that they know what their company stands for and what differentiates it from competitors. Less than half of employees—4 in 10—‘strongly agree’ that their company’s mission makes their job feel important (Gallup, 2018). This disconnect from organizational purpose has direct consequences for everyday work. Working in education offers an opportunity to do deeply meaningful work, yet workplace experiences often undermine this important source of inspiration. Superintendents need access to leading-edge research that informs their efforts to improve the health of their district cultures and taps into people’s intrinsic motivations and sense of purpose—the ultimate source of inspiration and transformation. 

References

Cherniss, C., & Adler, M. (2014). Promoting Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. Association for Talent Development.

Gallup (2018). Gallup’s Approach to Culture: Building a Culture that Drives Performance.    File:///Users/allisonmiller/Downloads/Gallup_Approach_Culture_Building_Culture_Drives_Performance.pdf.           

Gilreath, A. (2021). Do Fraught School Board Meetings Offer a Glimpse into the Future? The 

Hechinger Report. Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2002). Primal leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence. Harvard Business School Press.    

Hadavi, T. (2020). 2020 Has Shone a Light on the Importance of Good Teachers, but Many are Paid Less than a Living Wage in the U.S. CNBC.com.     

Horowitz, J. (2022). The Great Resignation is Taking Root around the World. CNN Business.

McAdams, R. & Zinck R. (1998). The Power of Superintendent Leadership in Shaping School District Culture: Three Case Studies. Educational Research Service.

Quilantan, B. (2022). The 'Great Resignation' Leaves Schools Reeling. Politico. February 7, 2022.

Pathiranage, Y.,  Jayatilake, L., & Abeysekera, R. (2020). A Literature Review on Organizational Culture towards Corporate Performance. International Journal of Management, Accounting & Economics 7(9).

Ravitch S. M. & Carl, M. N. (2021). Qualitative Research: Bridging the Conceptual, Theoretical, and Methodological. (2nd Ed.). Sage Publications.

Sull, D., Sull, C., & Zwieg, B. (2022). Toxic Culture is Driving the Great Resignation. MIT Sloan Management Review. 

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More posts from Dr. Sharon Ravitch and her doctoral students