Ten percent of teachers who began their careers in 2007-2008 left teaching after their first year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But attrition then leveled off, and five years into their careers, 83 percent were still teaching.
That figure — indicating that just 17 percent of new teachers left their jobs in the first five years — stands in stark contrast to the attrition statistic that has been repeated (and lamented) for years: That between 40 percent and 50 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first five years.
The higher estimate, which has become a fixture in education debates, comes from the work of Richard Ingersoll, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading scholar on the nation’s teacher workforce.
But Ingersoll’s famous estimate was just that — an estimate. A “crude approximation,” he said in an interview Wednesday, made necessary by the fact that no one had tracked a cohort of new teachers over time to see how long they stayed in the classroom.