A recent study published by Karen DeAngelis and Jennifer Presley takes a closer look at new teacher attrition. We have all heard the claim that 50% of new teachers leave the profession within their first five years of teaching, but is this really true? DeAngelis and Presley found some surprising and interesting new perspectives in their research. They found that though much attention had been given to the topic, little real effort has been given to “quantifying the problem and placing actual differences by teacher and organizational characteristics into perspective.”
Using over 30 years of data from Illinois, the authors tracked the annual cohorts of new teachers (starting with the 1970-71 school year) through the 2005-2006 school year. They used the data to calculate the 5-year attrition rates (the percentage of each cohort that left the Illinois public schools during the first five years of teaching) and the return-adjusted attrition rates (the 5-year attrition rate adjusted for the percentage of teachers from each cohort who returned to the Illinois public schools following an absence of at least one year). The authors also differentiated between leavers, those who exited the public school system, and movers, those who changed schools within the public school system in the first five years.
They found that from1971-1978, 40% of teachers left the Illinois school system within their first five years of teacher and did not return. From 1987-2001, only 27% left altogether—a stark contrast to the fifty percent usually heard. Overall, the data from Illinois and several other states (such as Georgia, Florida, Oregon, Wisconsin, among others) indicate that the return-adjusted attrition rates have been closer to 30-40% since the early 1990s.
The authors also found that teacher attrition is more of a concern at the school-level than at the overall “profession” level. Attrition rates at the school level look much different than those at the professional level—i.e., movers are more common than leavers. Unsurprisingly, new teachers that come from stronger academic backgrounds tend to have the highest overall attrition rate (3.2 out of every 10 teachers with an ACT score above 25 leave, as opposed to 2.4 out of 10 with a score below 18).
Overall, the researchers do not find that the teaching profession is in as dire straits as many believe. In fact, it seems that since the 1990s new teachers are more dedicated to their profession than new teachers from earlier decades. There is a net loss of 20-40% of new teachers within the first five years, but this seems to have more to do with ineffectiveness rather than disillusionment. They also found that “it is not the case that entire subpopulations of schools (e.g., urban schools or schools with high percentages of minority and/or disadvantaged students) suffer from alarmingly high rates of new teacher attrition.” Though there are schools that have alarmingly high attrition rates, the factors related to the problem do not appear to be student characteristics.
In sum, the authors recommend that policymakers and administrators “view new teacher attrition as primarily an individual school problem and work to identify and provide targeted assistance to schools of all types that are particularly burdened by high teacher turnover,” rather than enact broad policies for entire districts or school systems.
To learn more, please visit https://www.aplu.org/document.doc?id=3208
