But now federal officials have done just that. They followed a representative sample of teachers who began their careers in the 2007-2008 school year in order to find out what happened to them. And the new findings present such a different picture that they have the potential to change the national conversation about new-teacher attrition, a problem that cascades across issues ranging from student achievement to school district budgets.
“I don’t think it’s that the earlier numbers that people like myself calculated were wrong,” Ingersoll said, explaining that his estimate eventually was buttressed by additional data that put new-teacher attrition in the same ballpark. “The hope is that there’s been an improvement and that teacher attrition has gone down.”
Ingersoll pointed out that comparing the new study to his estimate has an apples-to-oranges problem. His estimate included both public and private school teachers, for example, while the new data includes only public school teachers. His estimate looked at attrition that occurs after the fifth year of teaching, while the new data looks at attrition after the fourth year of teaching.