Panel Paper:
Where Did All the Teachers Go? Identifying Patterns of Teacher Attrition By Preparation Pathway and School Type
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
decreases the overall quality of teachers in the workforce, and amplifies inequity in schools. This
study investigates patterns of new teacher persistence using a database of 186,746 new teachers
in Texas over 15 years. We linked this dataset to several state and national data sources1 in order
to calculate their odds of persistence over five years. We estimated a series of logistic models to
calculate the odds of new teacher persistence controlling for preparation pathways and school
types. Preliminary results show that at the school level, there is a 1/3 chance that a new teacher
will persist five years in an urban school, which falls to a 1/4 chance in a hard-to-staff school. If
a teacher is traditionally certified, they have an 18% higher likelihood of persisting five years at
their initial school relative to alternative preparation paths. In hard-to-staff schools, the strongest
predictors of persistence are traditional certification and teaching in a traditional public school
versus a charter school. Results suggest that nontraditional certification pathways may in fact
exacerbate the current teacher shortage rather than ameliorate it. Ongoing analysis will focus on
patterns of migration across schools and districts as we identify the strongest and weakest chains
of teacher production and retention.
