Toward a More Nuanced Understanding of New Teacher Attrition

Teacher attrition, especially among new teachers, has been an issue of major concern for policy makers and administrators for many years. Prior research has provided valuable information regarding the teacher and organizational factors associated with attrition from the profession and teacher mobility across schools. Less attention, however, has been placed on quantifying the problem and placing actual differences by teacher and organizational characteristics into perspective. Using more than 30 years of population data on new teacher cohorts from Illinois, the authors provide a more nuanced analysis of new teacher attrition from both the profession and schools. In contrast to conventional wisdom, the authors reveal a stronger attachment to the profession by recent cohorts of Illinois teachers compared to teachers who began during the 1970s. Moreover, the authors find that variation in school-level attrition is substantially greater within school type than across school type. Thus, rather than thinking of new teacher attrition from schools as primarily an urban or disadvantaged school problem, the study results suggest that policy makers and administrators need to be thinking of it as primarily an individual school problem, and thereby work to identify and provide more targeted assistance to schools of all types that are particularly burdened by high teacher turnover.