Teacher Retention and Satisfaction with a Servant Leader as Principal.

Background of the Study In 1994, Secretary of Education, Richard W. Riley, projected that the United States would need to hire 2 million teachers in order to fill all of the teaching slots left behind by retiring Baby Boomers. By 2004, the United States beat that goal by hiring approximately 2.25 million teachers. During that same decade, the United States lost 2.7 million teachers. Of the teachers who began teaching in public schools in 2007 or 2008, about 10 percent were not teaching in 2008-09, and 12 percent were not teaching in 2009-10. As large numbers of teachers exit the profession, concerns arise in how to ensure an adequate work force of strong, high quality teachers. Researchers suggest that it takes three to seven years for a novice teacher to become a high-quality teacher. Yet, over one-third of all teachers exit the profession within the first five years. (O'Rourke, Catrett, & Houchins, 2008). According to the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF), one-third of all teachers leave the profession because they feel they have no administrative support and they are not satisfied with their job/work environment. How we change that? Could school leaders who are servant leaders impact teacher satisfaction and retention in the profession? What is Servant Leadership? Robert Greenleaf (2002) defines servant leadership as leadership that focuses on serving the employee, the customer, and the community. Serving them is priority number one. Servant leaders aspire to serve first, and then they make a conscious choice to lead. According to Greenleaf (2002), the question each servant leader must ask when gauging his or her own success as a servant leader is, Do those who are served grow as persons; they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? (p. 27). Servant leadership is built on the idea that a leader should subordinate his or her self-interest for a higher purpose. That higher purpose is the improvement and building-up of the people in the organization (McCuddy & Cavin, 2008). The dynamics of leadership are staying power, vision, and values. They make up the engine called leadership. Developing and fine-tuning this engine should become the primary duty of leaders of institutions (Greenleaf, 2002). Servant leaders have a number of common characteristics, including, * Love: Showing others agape love, the tie that binds servant/follower relationships. According to Patterson (2003), agape love means to do the right thing, at the right time, and for the right reasons (p. 3). * Humility: The ability to acknowledge personal deficits and to not be boastful about personal strengths. Humility allows servant leaders to take advice from others because they are aware that they not have all of the answers. It guides the servant leader away from dictatorial leadership toward a shared leadership. * Altruism: Helping someone just because help is needed, doing unto others as you would want them to unto you. * Vision: The ability to paint a mental picture about the direction of an organization and individual members of the organization. The servant leader has the ability to look at an individual and see potential that is not evident to others. * Trust: A basic building block of relationship development between the leader and all other stakeholders. It is the foundational block for the culture of an organization. Trust allows for workers in an organization to be able to make mistakes, and at the same time, to know that such mistakes are learning experiences for the organization. * Empower: Giving up the power and letting others take charge as needed. It is about educating them concerning what the power can do. * Service: Giving of one's time, talent, and, sometimes, one's belongings so that the interests and needs of others might be met. …