A new report from the Institute of Education Sciences presents new data from a national survey of teachers, which is part of a longitudinal study of public school teachers who began teaching sometime between the school years 2007–2008 and 2011–2012. Of the many findings, six stand out.
- During their second year, 74 percent of beginning teachers taught in the same school as the previous year, 16 percent taught in a different school, and 10 percent were not teaching. By year five, 17 percent of teachers had left teaching.
- The percentage of beginning teachers who continued to teach after the first year varied by first year salary level. For example, 97 percent of beginning teachers whose first year base salaries were $40,000 or more were still teaching in year two of the study, whereas only 87 percent of those with a first year salary less than $40,000 taught for a second year.
- No differences were detected between the percentages of current teachers who started teaching with a bachelor’s degree and those who started teaching with a master’s degree.
- The percentage of beginning teachers who continued to teach was larger among those who were assigned a first year mentor than among those not assigned a first year mentor.
- The percentage of teachers who left the profession involuntarily ranged from 20 percent to 36 percent depending on the year.
- Among the teachers who switched schools between their first and second years, 21 percent moved involuntarily or because their contracts were not renewed. However, among the teachers who switched schools between their fourth and fifth years, 40 percent moved involuntarily or because their contracts were not renewed.
So what should we make of all this? Well, the study confirms several things that we already know: Many beginning teachers leave the school they are working at either because they move to a new school or because they leave the profession entirely, and most teachers who leave the profession do so voluntarily (because they’re dissatisfied).
If we want to retain more of these teachers, the study suggests that there are a couple ways to go about it. We could pay them more, or we could assign them mentors in their first year of teaching (which seems like common sense given that more than half of the teachers who leave the profession do so after their first year).
Finally, one statistic that stood out to me was that 40 percent of fifth-year teachers who changed schools did so involuntarily. I think it’s worth asking how many of these folks are good teachers who were laid off and how many are bad teachers who are just being shuffled from one school to another. Unfortunately, this report doesn’t tell us that.
SOURCE: Lucinda Gray, Soheyla Taie, and Isaiah O’Rear, “Public School Teacher Attrition and Mobility in the First Five Years: Results From the First Through Fifth Waves of the 2007–08 Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study,” U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (April 2015).
