Teacher Attrition

Teacher Evaluations And Turnover In Houston

We are now entering a time period in which we might start to see a lot of studies released about the impact of new teacher evaluations. This incredibly rapid policy shift, perhaps the centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s education efforts, was sold based on illustrations of the importance of teacher quality.

The basic argument was that teacher effectiveness is perhaps the most important factor under schools’ control, and the best way to improve that effectiveness was to identify and remove ineffective teachers via new teacher evaluations. Without question, there was a logic to this approach, but dismissing or compelling the exits of low performing teachers does not occur in a vacuum. Even if a given policy causes more low performers to exit, the effects of this shift can be attenuated by turnover among higher performers, not to mention other important factors, such as the quality of applicants (Adnot et al. 2016).

A new NBER working paper by Julie Berry Cullen, Cory Koedel, and Eric Parsons, addresses this dynamic directly by looking at the impact on turnover of a new evaluation system in Houston, Texas. It is an important piece of early evidence on one new evaluation system, but the results also speak more broadly to how these systems work.

The IMPACT Of Teacher Turnover In DCPS

Teacher turnover has long been a flashpoint in education policy, yet these debates are rife with complications. For example, it is often implied that turnover is a “bad thing,” even though some turnover, as when low-performing teachers leave, can be beneficial, whereas some retention, as when low-performing teachers stay, can be harmful. The impact of turnover also depends heavily on other factors, such as the pool of candidates available to serve as replacements, and how disruptive turnover is to the teachers who are retained.

The recent widespread reform of teacher evaluation systems has made the turnover issue, never far below the surface, even more salient in recent years. Critics contend that the new evaluations, particularly their use of test-based productivity measures, will cause teachers to flee the profession. Supporters, on the other hand, are in a sense hoping for this outcome, as they anticipate that, under the new systems, voluntary and involuntary separations will serve to improve the quality of the teacher workforce.

A new working paper takes a close look the impact of teacher turnover under what is perhaps the most controversial teacher evaluation system in the nation – that used in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). It's a very strong analysis that speaks directly to policy in a manner that does not fit well into the tribal structure of education debates today.

New Teacher Attrition And The Recession

The Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study (BTLS), a terrific project by the National Center for Education Statistics, tracks a nationally representative cohort of beginning teachers (those who started in 2007 or 2008) through their first five years and documents their turnover outcomes. Results from this survey have been trickling out every year (see our post here), but the most recent report presents outcomes from these teachers’ first four years.

The headline story, as reported in the Washington Post, was that roughly 17 percent of these new teachers had left the profession entirely within their first four years. A number of commenters, including the Post article, hastened to point out that the BTLS estimates are far lower than the “conventional wisdom” statistic that 40-50 percent leave the profession within the first five years (see here for more on this figure; also see Perda 2013 for a similar five-year estimate using longitudinal data). These findings are released within a political context where teacher attrition (somewhat strangely) has become a contentious political issue, one which advocates tend to interpret in a manner that supports their pre-existing beliefs about education policy.

Putting this source of contention aside, the BTLS results clearly show that new teacher attrition during these years was far lower than is often assumed, and certainly that teachers are not fleeing the classroom at a greater clip than in previous years. This is important, and cannot be "explained away" by any one factor, but we should still be careful about generalizing too strongly these findings beyond this particular time period, given that the BTLS cohort of teachers entered the classroom almost precisely at the time that the "great recession" began. This is, of course, not a new or original point – it was, for instance, mentioned briefly in the Post article. And it's hardly groundbreaking to note that labor market behavior does not occur in a vacuum. Still, given all the commentary about the BTLS results, it may be worth reviewing briefly.

Teacher Turnover At Success Academy Charter Schools

A recent New York Times article about the Success Academies, a large chain of New York City charter schools, focuses a great deal on the long working hours and heavy stress faced by teachers at these schools. The article reports that three Success Academy (SA) schools had teacher turnover rates above 50 percent. Officials from the network, however, dispute these figures, which they say are inflated by the fact that many teachers who leave SA schools simply transfer to other SA schools (i.e., they are counted falsely as leaving SA when they are in fact staying within the network).

In fact, SA officials claim that, when one account for these intra-network transfers, their true turnover rate across all their schools ("attrition from the network," in the article) between June 2013 and June 2014 was 17 percent, which is far lower than many critics suggest. Now, on the one hand, these ongoing debates about teacher turnover at SA schools, which have been occurring regularly for years, are a little strange. It is clear that SA teachers work unusually long hours in high stress, tightly regulated environments, and do so for salaries that are lower than those offered by most other professional jobs with similar working conditions. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that turnover would be high; indeed, high teacher churn, like student mobility, is in many respects part of the model of schools such as the Success Academies (and, of course, some turnover, such as that among poorly performing teachers or those who are not a good fit for their schools, can be beneficial).

On the other hand, however, SA officials are making an empirical claim about turnover at their schools, one that includes an interesting and somewhat unusual angle (intra-network mobility). And this claim is very easy to examine with teacher-level data that we happen to have available via a public records request. So, let’s take a quick look at turnover at SA between 2012-13 and 2013-14 (the latest year-to-year transition we have).

Update On Teacher Turnover In The U.S.

Every four years, the National Center for Education Statistics provides the public with the best available national estimates of teacher attrition and mobility. The estimates come from the Teacher Follow-Up Survey (TFS), which is a supplement to the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), a much larger national survey of teachers that is also conducted every four years. Put simply, the TFS is a sub-sample of SASS respondents, who are contacted the following year to find out if and where they are still teaching.

The conventional wisdom among many commentators, particularly those critical of test-based accountability and recent education reform, is that teacher attrition (teachers leaving the profession) and mobility (teachers switching schools) are on the rise. As discussed in a previous post, this was indeed the case, at least at the national level, between the 1991-92 and 2004-05 school years, but ceased to be true between 2004-05 and 2008-09, during which time attrition and mobility was basically flat. A few months ago, results from the latest administration of the TFS, which tracked teachers between 2011-12 and 2012-13, were released, and it’s worth taking a quick look at the findings.

As you can see in the graph below, the proportion of public school teachers who left the profession entirely (“leavers”), as well as the proportion who switched schools (“movers”), were again relatively flat between 2008-09 and 2012-13 (and the change is not statistically significant).

How Boston Public Schools Can Recruit and Retain Black Male Teachers

Our guest author today is Travis J. Bristol, former high school English teacher in New York City public schools and teacher educator with the Boston Teacher Residency program, who is currently a research and policy fellow at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) at Stanford University.

The challenges faced by Black male teachers in schools may serve as the canary in the coalmine that begins to explain the debilitating condition faced by Black boys in schools. Black males represent 1.9% of all public school teachers yet have one of the highest rates of turnover. Attempts to increase the number of Black male teachers are based on research that suggests these new recruits can improve Black students’ schooling outcomes.

Below, I discuss my study of the school-based experiences of 27 Black male teachers in Boston Public Schools (BPS), who represent approximately 10 percent of all Black male teachers in the district. This study, which I recently discussed in Boston’s NPR news station, is one of the largest studies conducted exclusively on Black male teachers and has implications for policymakers as well as school administrators looking to recruit and retain Black male educators.

Here is a summary of the key findings.

Is Teacher Attrition Actually Increasing?

Over the past few years, one can find a regular flow of writing attempting to explain the increase in teacher attrition. Usually, these explanations come in the form of advocacy – that is, people who don’t like a given policy or policies assert that they are the reasons for the rise in teachers leaving. Putting aside that these arguments are usually little more than speculation, as well as the fact that they often rely on highly limited approaches to measuring attrition (e.g., teacher experience distributions), there is a prior issue that must be addressed here: Is teacher attrition really increasing?

The short answer, at least at the national level and over the longer term, is yes, but, as usual, it’s more complicated than a simple yes/no answer.

Obviously, not all attrition is "bad," as it depends on who's leaving, but any attempt to examine levels of or trends in teacher attrition (leaving the profession) or mobility (switching schools) requires good data. When looking at individual districts, one often must rely on administrative datasets that make it very difficult to determine whether teachers left the profession entirely or simply moved to another district (though remember that whether teachers leave the profession or simply switch schools doesn’t really matter to individual schools, since they must replace the teachers regardless). In addition, the phenomenon of teachers leaving for a temporary period and then returning (e.g., after childbirth) is more common than many people realize.

Teacher Retention In An Era Of Rapid Reform

The Center for American Progress (CAP) recently released a short report on whether teachers were leaving the profession due to reforms implemented during the Obama Administration, as some commentators predicted.

The authors use data from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), a wonderful national survey of U.S. teachers, and they report that 70 percent of first-year teachers in 2007-08 were still teaching in 2011-12. They claim that this high retention of beginning teachers, along with the fact that most teachers in 2011-12 had five or more years of experience, show that “the teacher retention concerns were unfounded."

This report raises a couple of important points about the debate over teacher retention during this time of sweeping reform.

Opportunity To Churn: Teacher Assignments Within New York City Schools

Virtually all discussions of teacher turnover focuses on teachers leaving schools and/or the profession. However, a recent working paper by Allison Atteberry, Susanna Loeb and James Wyckoff, which was presented at this month’s CALDER conference, reaches a very interesting conclusion using data from New York City: There is actually more movement within NYC schools than between them.*

Specifically, the authors show that, during the years for which they had data (1997-2002 and 2004-2010), over 50 percent of teachers in any given year exhibited some form of movement (including leaving the profession or switching schools), but two-thirds of these moves were within schools – i.e., teachers changing grades or subjects. Moreover, they find that these within-school moves, like those between-schools/professions, appear to have a negative impact on testing outcomes, one which is very modest but statistically discernible in both math and reading.

There are a couple of interesting points related to these main findings.

Teacher Turnover In DCPS

Teacher turnover – the rates at which teachers leave the profession and switch schools – is obviously a very important outcome in education. Although not all turnover is necessarily a “bad thing” – some teachers simply aren’t cut out for the job and leave voluntarily (or are fired) - unusually high turnover means that schools must replace large proportions of their workforces on an annual basis. This can have serious implications not only for the characteristics (e.g., experience) of schools’ teachers, but also for schools’ costs, cohesion and professional cultures.

According to the most recent national data (which are a few years old), annual public school teacher turnover is around 16 percent, of which roughly half leave the profession (“leavers”), and half switch schools (“movers”). Both categories are equally important from the perspective of individual schools, since they must replace teachers regardless of where they go. In some subsets of schools and among certain groups of teachers, however, turnover is considerably higher. For instance, among teachers with between 1-3 years of experience, turnover is almost 23 percent. Contrary to popular opinion, though, the relationship between school poverty (i.e., free/reduced-price lunch rates) and turnover isn’t straightforward, at least at the national level. Although schools serving larger proportions of lower-income students have a larger percentage of “movers” every year, they have a considerably lower proportion of “leavers” (in part due to retirement).

This national trend, of course, masks considerable inter-district variation. One example is the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS).