About six years ago, one of my MSEd students, Ashwini Pawar, wrote her thesis on this question.
You cannot find Rudolf Steiner saying that teachers should take a class for so many years—“several,” yes. Precisely eight? No. And Mark Riccio has suggested that even Steiner’s conception of elementary school was really only seven years (the eighth year a requirement of Swiss school law).
So Pawar examined ten years of class teaching at six different Waldorf schools and discovered that only 1 in 4 teachers actually takes a class in a Waldorf school from first through eighth grade.
She also asked about what led to teachers leaving a class—burn-out, family changes (moving, childbirth), termination? This is much harder to assess. Teachers don’t necessarily leave for one reason alone. Teachers don’t necessarily confess to burn-out, or, especially, to being fired. Schools and administrators, too, on the advice of their lawyers, won’t necessarily discuss employee termination. And, even if they would, teachers are often allowed or asked to resign before actually being fired. Regardless, as far as Pawar could tell (in my recollection—I’m sorry to say I didn’t keep a copy of her thesis), reasons for leaving a class teaching job were roughly half positive—having a child, for instance—and half negative—burning out or being fired.
In this, Waldorf school teachers mirror all teachers. Approximately half of all teachers leave the profession within the first five years. (Research by Richard Ingersoll.) It’s not a job for everyone, Waldorf or not.
What does this mean? Waldorf schools might do well to avoid presenting this ideal as a reality. If parents are “sold” on the ideal, and, in the process, unhealthily attached to a particular teacher, it can be a real blow to their affection for the school if a teacher leaves midstream. This assumes that schools continue to hold it as an ideal—at least a few Waldorf schools now deliberately divide elementary faculties between lower elementary and middle school.
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