NCES has recently released “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“.
The first results of this nationally representative study that looked at the fates of about 2,000 teachers who were new to the field in 2007 or 2008, and who were followed for five years after that, found that about 17 percent of them were no longer teaching five years later. The new study, out recently from the National Center on Education Statistics, was designed to span longer than typical studies that look at teacher mobility and retention. Some teachers moved from one school to another in that time, or left teaching and came back to it, or were still working in education five years later, just not as a teacher. A teacher’s level of education didn’t seem to have much of an effect on whether they stuck with the profession, but salary did: Teachers who started out making more than $40,000 were more likely to be teaching a year later than teachers who started out making less than that.
Findings from the report include the following:
- Among all beginning teachers in 2007–08, 10 percent did not teach in 2008–09, 12 percent did not teach in 2009–10, 15 percent did not teach in 2010–2011, and 17 percent did not teach in 2011–2012.
- The percentage of beginning teachers who continued to teach after the first year varied by first-year salary level. For example, 89 percent of beginning teachers whose first-year base salary was $40,000 or more were teaching in 2011–12, whereas 80 percent of those with a first-year salary less than $40,000 were teaching in 2011–12.
- In each follow-up year, the percentage of beginning teachers who were currently teaching was larger among those who were assigned a first-year mentor than among those not assigned a first-year mentor (86 percent and 71 percent, respectively in 2011–12).
To view the full report, please visit
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2015337
