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Teacher Turnover
Although teacher turnover can have benefits, such as improving the quality of the teacher workforce with the departure of ineffective educators, it also carries costs including reducing student achievement in those classrooms and the school as a whole. This can result from lower teacher quality, disruptions of instructional continuity, and a loss of sustained relationships among faculty, students, and the community. It is also expensive to recruit, hire, and train new teachers.
Teacher Race Diversity
Students of color benefit over the short and long run when taught by a same-race teacher in terms of test scores, attendance, suspensions, and high school graduation. Having a teacher of color results in similar impacts for White students. For Black students particularly, having even one same-race teacher delivers these outcomes. The effect on college aspirations and enrollment from early race-matching of students and teachers is as large as a significant class-size reduction.
Teacher Gender Diversity
Boys do not exhibit higher academic achievement when assigned to male teachers. There are large, positive effects for female student math achievement from having a female math teacher. A gender-diverse teaching staff helps students by allowing them to observe men who are non-violent and whose interactions with women are positive. It also provides the opportunity to learn from teachers who they perceive as being similar to themselves. This may promote feelings of school belonging, which can reduce disruptive behavior.
Inexperienced and First-Year Teachers
Early-career teachers are generally not as effective as those with more experience. Teachers’ academic effectiveness increases significantly with additional experience during the first several years in teaching.
Out-of-Field Teachers
Out-of-field teaching–teaching a subject that is not your specialty or teaching an age group you are not trained to teach–affects subject integrity and disrupts classroom management, which can in turn harm student satisfaction and learning outcomes. For teachers, it is an additional workload and stressful, and particularly for early-career teachers, teaching out of field increases their risk of leaving the profession.
