Dear Commons Community,

Matthew Di Carlo, a senior research fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute in Washington, D.C., does a fine analysis of teacher attrition in a recent blog posting. The graph above presents the percentage of public school teachers, in each year, who left the profession (“leavers”) or switched schools (“movers”), along with the total of the two rates (“total turnover”). The mover rate is relatively flat — roughly 7-8 percent in each year. There was a considerable rise in the leaver rate between 1991-92 and 2004-05 — about three percentage points.  The graph is from the Teacher Follow-Up Survey (TFS), which is administered every four years to a nationally representative sub-sample of educators from the Schools and Staffing Survey. Di Carlo’s analysis of the data and specifically as to why did the leaver rate increase during this time is:

“One plausible explanation would be increasing retirements among baby boomer teachers. This seems to have made a difference, but, judging by the TFS breakdown by reasons for leaving, it does not come close to explaining the full increase.

The other common explanation for this rise in teacher attrition/mobility, as mentioned above, is new policies, most notably test-based accountability regimes, that have proliferated since that time. This is impossible to prove using simple descriptive statistics, but it bears mentioning that the beginning of the increase in the leaver rate predates NCLB, the most significant of these policies, by about ten years…

…It is, however, very important to note that the trend itself may be changing. You’ll notice in the graph above that the leaver and mover rates begin to drop back down between the 2004-05 and 2008-09 school years. This may be due, at least in part, to the fact that the recession was just getting started toward the end of this time period, as employees in general are of course less likely to leave jobs when the labor market is unfavorable. Moreover, it is plausible, if not likely, that the next round of the TFS, which will be released rather soon, will show that the rate dropped down even further, as the recession took hold.”

The entire posting provides additional analysis on the issue and provides a number of resources for readers wanting to delve further.

Well-done!

Tony