The proportion of teachers who leave the classroom involuntarily — for either budgetary or performance reasons — is not insignificant. Of the teachers who left after their first year, for example, 27 percent left involuntarily.
- Older teachers who began their careers after age 30 were more likely to leave the profession within five years than younger teachers, and men were more likely to leave than women.
- Teachers who entered the profession via an alternative certification program (such as Teach for America) were more likely to leave the profession than those who went through traditional training programs. In 2011-2012, for example, about 21 percent of teachers with alternative certification were not teaching anymore, compared with 16 percent of teachers with traditional training.
- Teachers who spend their first year in higher-poverty schools (where more than 50 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch) are slightly more likely to leave the profession than those who spend their first year in lower-poverty schools. But the data do not say how many of those teachers who began in high-poverty schools then transferred into more affluent schools within their first five years. Such transfers have contributed to particularly high turnover in many of the nation’s neediest schools.
- The new findings offer some information about teacher mobility — i.e., how often teachers who stay in the profession move among schools. But the study does not say how many first-year teachers are still teaching in the same building five years later. Isaiah O’Rear, who has managed the study for the National Center for Education Statistics, said a future report will take a closer look at how new teachers move from school to school.
Article Appeared @http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/04/30/study-new-teacher-attrition-is-lower-than-previously-thought/