Research Design and Methodology on Factors That Lead to Teacher Retention

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Recommended: Teacher retention and its impact on academic performance

During the past fifteen years the attrition rate has grown to over 50% with the turnover rate at almost 17% per year nationally (Teaching and America’s Future, 2007). Finding teachers isn’t always the problem, especially in today’s economy with high quality teachers easier to find than in years past. The problem isn’t finding the teachers, but rather keeping them in our schools. It is especially difficult to keep them in schools that are high-poverty, high-minority, and low-performing schools. We can’t close the student achievement gap due to the inability to close the teacher quality gap (2007).

Novice teachers, or those in their first five years of teaching, have an exceptionally high turnover rate. Ingersoll found that half of all teachers leave within their first five years of service (2003). It is over this span of time that teachers learn the most about the art of teaching (Ingersoll, 2003). Districts many times spend the most money on teachers during this five year phase. Those teachers that aren’t able to create a sense of success with students are less likely to find teaching a rewarding profession and have a higher rate of turnover (Johnson & Birkeland, 2003). While the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) has created a cost calculator to estimate the actual teacher turnover costs to schools and districts, the calculator doesn’t include the largest cost which is lost teacher quality and effectiveness (2007).

Within the local district, retaining teachers is and has been a very difficult endeavor. Over 10% of the teaching staff leaves the district each year and many are novice teachers. This does not include the number of staff that moves between buildings. There is not only a cost to hire new st...

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...d State University, Blacksburg, VA, 2005). http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-11152005-172907/unrestricted/final.pdf

Ingersoll, R. (2003). Is there really a teacher shortage? Seattle, WA: Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy.

Johnson, S. M., & Birkeland, S. (2003). Pursuing a “sense of success”: New teachers explain their career decisions. American Educational Research Journal, 40(3), 581-617.

Mertens, D. M. (2005). Research and evaluation in education and psychology: Integrating diversity with quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, (2007). The high cost of teacher turnover. Retrieved May 5, 2011, from http://www.nctaf.org.html

Trochim, M. K. (2002). Research methods knowledge base. Retrieved May 6, 2011 from http://www.trochim.human.cornell.edu/kb/.html

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