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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.
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.
Alternatively Certified Among First-Year Teachers
Alternatively certified teachers come into the profession with less coursework and student teaching, which generally predict high rates of leaving particularly when they teach in schools with high proportions of students of color.
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.
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.
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.
Alternatively Certified Among First-Year Teachers
Alternatively certified teachers come into the profession with less coursework and student teaching, which generally predict high rates of leaving particularly when they teach in schools with high proportions of students of color.
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.
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.
A major factor in the need for more teachers and teacher shortages is high rates of teacher turnover. These high rates adversely impact student achievement in both math and English language arts and have a large financial cost for school districts. With a teacher shortage, an increasing number of classes are taught by out-of-field teachers, which short changes student learning and makes it harder to retain these teachers. The teacher shortage increases educational inequity: In general, high rates of turnover have a larger detrimental effect on the achievement of low-performing and Black students; teacher attrition and out-of-field teaching is greater at higher poverty schools; and teachers serving special needs students have the highest number of vacant positions.
Teacher Salaries
The length of time teachers stay in teaching depends on salaries and opportunity costs, which are the salaries teachers forgo by staying in teaching instead of moving into a different field. Higher teacher base salaries reduce the achievement gap between White and Black students as well as between White and Hispanic students by raising test scores more for those minority students. It also helps with recruiting by attracting higher-achieving college students to the education field.
