Education Next – Chad Aldeman
“We tend to talk about teacher retention as a national problem. The stat that “half of all teachers leave within 5 years” may have seeped into public consciousness, but it’s not true today and was never quite right anyway. We also intuitively understand that teacher retention varies across districts and schools. We need to spend more time grappling with the consequences of those variations—teacher turnover affects everything from student learning to teacher retirement savings—but we also need to spend more time quantifying where it exists and what it looks like. To see how much teacher experience levels vary across states, I ran the table below from NCES’ Schools and Staffing Survey. Each column shows the percentage of the state’s teacher workforce falling into various bands based on the number of years they had served in public schools. The data come from the 2011-12 survey administration, so they represent each state’s teaching workforce in that particular school year.”(more)