Welcome to the June 8, 2005 issue of The Total View

Published by Success Performance Solutions, Written by Ira S. Wolfe

Fifty Percent of New Teachers Leave in 5 Years

Better education is often cited as a critical component to solving the impending shortage of skilled workers. But the lack of enough skilled teachers might be another kink in the workforce armor.

The U.S. Department of Education reports that over the next decade, more than two million new teachers will walk into a classroom for their first day. Unfortunately, as the National Center for Education Statistics found, 666,000 of those new teachers will leave sometime during the first three years of teaching and one million of them will not make it past five years.

School staffing problems are primarily due to a "revolving door" - where too many qualified teachers are departing their jobs long before retirement. Attrition rates of this magnitude suggest that pouring money into recruitment efforts without fixing the retention problem is like pouring more water into a leaky bucket. First you have to fix the holes.

The cost of high teacher turnover and attrition rates is enormous. Every year, American schools spend $2.6 billion on teacher attrition.

Studies show that retirement and increased enrollment account for only a fraction of teacher shortages. Overall, the nation dramatically increased its supply of teachers during the 1990s and generally produces enough teachers to meet each year's new needs.

- Between the end of the 1999-2000 and the beginning of the 2000-2001 school years, about 67,000 teachers retired, accounting for only 24 percent of the 278,000 turnover and only 12 percent of the total turnover of 546,000 during that period. Rather, the data show that the demand for new teachers, and subsequent staffing difficulties, are primarily due to pre-retirement teacher turnover.

- According to a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) survey of 8,400 public and private school teachers, the main reasons for high teacher turnover and attrition rates are with inadequate administrative support (38 percent) and workplace conditions (32 percent).

Teacher recruitment and other supply-side solutions may not only fail to solve the problem, but could also make it worse if recruitment strategies involve lowering teacher standards, or if the effect of increasing teacher supply is to deflate salaries or erode working conditions.

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Ira S. Wolfe. 2005 - All Rights Reserved. Reprints and other distribution by permission only.

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