Panel Paper:
Principal-Teacher Race Match and Teacher Turnover
Thursday, November 8, 2018
Jefferson - Mezz Level (Marriott Wardman Park)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Teacher turnover has long been a challenge for K-12 public schools. Beyond the financial costs associated with advertising, screening, interviewing, and hiring new candidates; and the investment of time and resources required at the school level to ensure new teachers are adequately trained on school policies and procedures, research has demonstrated that teacher turnover has negative impacts on student achievement (Kraft, 2015; Ronfeldt, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2013). Teacher turnover is particularly concerning in places where there is low representation of minority teachers to begin with, a challenge that has received renewed attention in recent years in light of a burgeoning body of new research that has revealed the benefits of teacher/ student demographic congruence for minority students on a variety of student outcomes, including test scores (Dee, 2004, 2007; Egalite, Kisida, & Winters, 2015), school suspensions (Lindsay & Hart, 2017), academic perceptions and attitudes (Egalite & Kisida, 2017), student attendance (Holt & Gershenson, 2015), and even the likelihood of school dropout (Gershenson, Hart, Lindsay, & Papageorge, 2017). Investigating the causes and consequences of teacher turnover is also relevant for staffing high needs/hard-to-staff schools.
This study uses rich administrative data from North Carolina to examine the effects of principal-teacher demographic matching on teacher turnover in public elementary, middle, and high schools in the state of North Carolina. To our knowledge, it is the first study to look the combined effect of race and gender congruence between teachers and principals and how that may play a role in teacher turnover decisions. An additional contribution of this study is the inclusion of survey data to investigate teacher working conditions alongside demographic match and the ability to compare across charter and traditional public school contexts.
