This is the third post in a series on retaining teachers. The prior post looked at the data on teacher turnover and why it matters. This post explores the factors that contribute to high turnover.
Addressing the problem of teacher turnover—and the negative effects on students, teachers, and schools that come with it—requires looking deeply at its root causes. This post explores those root causes using data available, mostly from surveys; later posts in this series will feature perspectives and stories directly from teachers.
Much of the data on why teachers leave comes from a major national survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics every three to four years. Teachers are asked whether they left their job or the profession at the end of the last year and if so are asked—among a list of about 25 possible reasons—to indicate the extent to which each reason played a role.
On a state level, Minnesota’s teacher licensure reporting system also collects data on public school teachers who move on, however the reason for leaving is filled in by school administrators who select from a smaller set of nine possible reasons. As such, state data provides less detail than national data on reasons for leaving.
Finally, a number of schools and districts track data on turnover and the reasons for it at a local level, through surveys, exit interviews, and more. For example, Minneapolis Public Schools recently presented some of its internal data on retention as part of an internal working group on retaining teachers of color.
Synthesizing across several of these national, state, and local sources—and reviewing several meta analyses—we break down teachers’ reasons for leaving into three main buckets for the purposes of this series:
In the remainder of this post, we review these three buckets, and the primary reasons within each of them.
First, one important caveat: none of these reasons stand alone; several reasons may together contribute to a teacher’s ultimate decision to leave. Evidence for the relative importance of each reason varies greatly based on which survey, which study—and of course which teacher—you consult. In general, we placed reasons with greater evidence of importance lower in the list below. Future posts in this series will tease out more about the relationships between these reasons, and their relative magnitude.
Teachers leave their jobs for reasons mostly independent of either the profession as a whole or their specific workplaces. Those include:
This second bucket of reasons includes those which may apply differently by school or district context, but generally affect all teachers. Those include:
The third and final bucket of reasons includes those specific to a given district or school. Those include:
So far, this post has considered reasons for teacher turnover in aggregate. In practice, the extent and causes of turnover vary based on school demographics, as well as by teachers’ backgrounds and identities.
In disaggregating the data, we see that the school-level factors described above contribute to higher-than-average turnover among teachers in high-poverty schools and those serving students of color. Namely, turnover in Title 1 schools is nearly 40 percent higher than in non-Title 1 schools. And, in schools where more than half of students are students of color, turnover is a staggering 70 percent higher than those where 10 percent or fewer of students are students of color. These discrepancies have major implications for educational equity.
Relatedly, teachers of color—who are two to three times more likely than their white peers to teach in schools serving primarily students in poverty and students of color—are also more likely to experience these challenging school-level working conditions. For example, according to a 2015 survey of the 430 educators of color in Minnesota, the top four reasons for leaving included dissatisfaction with administration, a sense of racial isolation, lack of mentoring and support, and lack of influence and autonomy—all school-level factors.
Later posts in this series will explore the inequitable effects of teacher turnover in greater detail, through synthesis of research and by holding up personal stories.
The next post in this series pivots from looking at the challenge to exploring solutions. In particular, it looks more closely at the school-level reasons described above—including leadership, school climate, and teacher influence—and what we know from research works to foster positive and healthy workplaces where talent thrives.
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We are grateful to the McKnight Foundation for their generous financial support for this series.