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Want to be a skilled, successful teacher? Of course. Who doesn’t?

But how do you get there? Is it perfecting lessons late into the night? Keeping more binders, entering more data, even if you are exhausted and sick by December? If all your colleagues work as hard as you, isn’t that what makes a great school?

Rather than driving yourself harder and harder, possibly without getting where you want to be, consider flipping this around. Maybe what makes a good teacher is an effective school.

A building where teachers are well supported in the classroom and a school that has a long-term commitment to the children and families of that community may be the prerequisite for strong teaching.

Encountering the opposite

A front-page story in The New York Times in August showcased a charter school in Texas that cultivates a “highly driven workforce.” And they don’t mind if teachers leave after just a couple of years, when, in an administrator’s words, second-year teachers conclude, “OK, I’ve got this, what’s the next thing?” It’s a national trend, the story suggests, and maybe we should “embrace the change.”

The story got hundreds of mostly angry comments from educators. New teachers should be part of a dynamic staff mix, one Massachusetts educator wrote, “but an approach focused on building a staff composed only, or even mainly, of young teachers is horribly misguided, as anyone who knows anything about public education should know.” A New York teacher scoffed, “Just what our kids don’t need — more instability in their lives.” And a San Diego teacher warned, “That’s not how relationships are made. And we need relationships in schools. We need consistency, not constant change. Sad. Sad. Sad.”

New teachers certainly bring welcome ideas and energy, but conclusive new research shows that high teacher turnover depresses student performance. Children in stressed neighborhoods benefit from stability. The heroically driven performer may not be what they need.

School turnover reduces learning

In “How Teacher Turnover Harms Student Achievement,” authors Matthew Ronfeldt of the University of Michigan, Susanna Loeb of Stanford and James Wycoff of the University of Virginia find there is a causal relationship between high levels of teacher turnover — and New York City has high turnover rates — and lower student achievement. Using a huge New York City data set of 4th- and 5th-graders over eight academic years, they show that increased turnover in a school actually predicts lower student test scores in both ELA and math, even after controlling for poverty, poor school leadership and other factors.

And here’s the standout finding: Scores dropped schoolwide. In schools with high turnover, performance was depressed even in classrooms where the teachers stayed.

The authors considered two explanations. The first was that departing effective teachers were replaced by less effective ones. And indeed, if the replacements are novices, there is abundant evidence — such as the chart at bottom left — that new teachers do not reach their full potential until they have put in about five years.

But that doesn’t explain why scores dropped schoolwide. Instead, the authors believe that high turnover has a disruptive influence on the whole school community, forcing the existing staff to orient all the newcomers and constantly restart projects and programs.

“Turnover may be a broader organizational influence that reaches beyond leaving teachers, replacement teachers and their students,” they wrote. “Where turnover is considered to have a disruptive organizational influence, all members of a school community are vulnerable, including staying teachers and their students.”

Staff cohesion and community

In the traditional view, “effectiveness is thought to be something that individual teachers bring with them (or not),” in the authors’ words. But two decades of research, most prominently by Anthony Bryk and colleagues in Chicago but also by many others, show that staff cohesion and community are tightly tied to student engagement and achievement. In this worldview, it is high-functioning schools that produce strong, successful educators.

New York City has more than double the proportion of highly effective math and ELA teachers as the rest of the state, according to the state’s new “growth scores” based on the last two years of grade 3-8 standardized tests. In 2013, as the table below shows, 11 percent of city teachers were rated highly effective and another 78 percent were effective. Despite a drumbeat of criticism, the city’s teacher workforce is already strong.

But many of its schools are not. They deal with troubled kids and families; they lack resources; and they are isolated from the community. Turning them around requires reconnecting to the community and creating a stable environment for the students. From such investments come strong schools and strong teachers.