Me on BAM Radio on Teacher Turnover
I made a brief appearance on Larry Ferlazzo’s BAM! Radio show to talk more about an upcoming piece about why teachers leave high-poverty urban schools.Time was short, so I thought I’d collect here, in one place, many of the interesting data points I came across while thinking about the subject.
The best starting place for questions of teacher turnover is probably this report from the National Center for Education Statistics. They surveyed teachers during the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 school years to look at teacher attrition and mobility during that time period. They classified teachers as “stayers” if they stayed in the same school, “movers” if they moved to a teaching position in a different school, and “leavers” if they left the profession. Here’s what they found:
| Context | Stayers | Movers | Leavers |
|---|---|---|---|
| All public school teachers | 84.5% | 7.6% | 8.0% |
| Charter school teachers | 76.2% | 11.4% | 12.5% |
| City schools | 84.5% | 8.0% | 7.5% |
| ≥75% FRPL | 84.6% | 10.3% | 5.1% |
Interestingly, neither “city” schools nor lower-income schools have noticeably higher rates of turnover than schools generally. Those classifications don’t perfectly capture what’s going on in “high-poverty urban schools” – “cities” seem to be identified mostly in terms of population and FRPL eligibility is a very imperfect proxy for poverty – but they also don’t indicate that schools in poo