Teacher Retention in Charter Schools

Teacher Retention in Charter Schools



CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Introduction

When given the opportunity many teachers choose to leave schools serving poor, low performing and non-white students (Boyd, Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2005; Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2004; Scafidi, Sjoquist, & Stinebrickner, 2005). While a substantial research literature has documented this phenomenon, far less research effort has gone into understanding what features of the working conditions in these schools drive this relatively higher retention rate (see Loeb, Darling- Hammond, & Luczak, 2005 for an exception to this). Excessive teacher retention can be costly and detrimental to instructional cohesion in schools (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 2003). Consequently, many policies, such as mentoring programs and retention bonuses, have aimed to stem teacher attrition, particularly at those schools that experience high teacher retention. Yet, without a better understanding of the reasons teachers leave, these approaches may not be as effective as they could be at reducing detrimental attrition. This study contributes to our understanding of teacher attrition by modeling the relationship between teacher retention and school contextual factors - including teachers' influence over school policy, the effectiveness of the school administration, staff relations, student behavior, safety, and facilities. Using a unique dataset that combines longitudinal survey data with district administrative files, we find that school administration plays a particularly important role in teachers' career decisions. In what follows, we briefly review relevant prior research to motivate our study, describe our data and methods and then present the results. The final section discusses the implications of these results, limitations of the study, and directions for future research.

Background and Motivation

Across the United States, approximately half a million teachers leave their schools each year. Only 16 percent of this teacher attrition at the school level can be attributed to retirement. The remaining 84 percent of the teacher retention is due to teachers transferring between schools and teachers leaving the profession entirely (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2008). In New York City alone, over 5,000 teachers left their schools in 2005 - with eight percent of teachers transferring to another school and ten percent leaving the New York City school system. Recent literature has begun to investigate the complexities of teacher retention, making important distinctions such as among exits from teaching, transfers within districts, and transfers between districts as well as between teachers leaving permanently and those leaving and later returning (DeAngelis & Preseley, 2007; Johnson, Berg, & Donaldson, 2005). In general, previous teacher retention research has focused either on the relationship between retention and teachers' own characteristics (i.e., what types of teachers are more likely to leave) or between retention and school characteristics (i.e., what types of schools experience higher teacher retention).

Teacher background characteristics and work experience consistently predict retention. For example, retention is higher among young and old teachers compared to middle-aged ones (see Guarino, Santibanez, & Daley, 2006; Johnson, Berg, & Donaldson, 2005); and among less experienced teachers compared to more experienced ones (see Ingersoll, 2001; Marvel, Lyter, Peltola, ...