Mobility-Related Teacher Turnover and the Unequal Distribution of Experienced Teachers in Turkey.

The unequal distribution of high-quality teachers across schools, districts and regions has been an overriding concern in national education policies all over the world. Despite various policy interventions, a fair distribution of high-quality, experienced teachers has not been fully realized in most countries. This disparity in teacher distribution has been primarily explained as an issue of teacher turnover. Studies investigating teacher turnover consistently report that low-income, low-achievement, minority, and rural students are subjected to higher teacher-turnover rates and therefore more likely to be exposed to inexperienced, less-qualified, and/or out-of-field teachers (Barbieri, Rossetti, & Sestito, 2011; Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2005; Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2002; Luschei & Carnoy, 2010; Sass, Hannaway, Xu, Figlio, & Feng, 2012; Scafidi, Sjoquist, & Stinebrickner, 2007). Teacher turnover refers to the mobility of teachers across schools, here referred to as mobility-related turnover, or the attrition of teachers from the teaching profession altogether, here referred to as attrition-related turnover (Ingersoll, 2001; Ingersoll & Merrill, 2012). Mobility-related teacher turnover that leads to an unequal distribution of experienced teachers across regions has been a longstanding policy issue in Turkey, pervading policy agendas for decades (Ozoglu, 2010). This issue has recently been addressed in the 9th Development Plan of Turkey that covers 2007 through 2013. This plan calls for a more equitable distribution of teachers across regions and settlements (Devlet Planlama Teckilati, 2006). Despite such policy-level awareness, there has been no scientific research that the author is aware of which investigates the issue of turnover and its consequences, particularly the regional imbalances of experienced teachers in Turkey. The current study attempts to fill this gap by exploring the issue of mobility-related teacher turnover experienced in less-developed regions of Turkey through both quantitative and qualitative inquiries.Unlike many other studies conducted in decentralized systems to analyze teacher mobility across schools within a district or across districts within the same region, both qualitative and quantitative analyses in this study focus on countrywide teacher mobility across provinces and regions. Given that there is no research on the issue of mobility-related teacher turnover in Turkey, first provincial-level descriptive analyses were performed using countrywide assignment and transfer data of teachers to reveal the extent of the problem of mobility-related turnover in Turkey. As part of the quantitative analysis, provincial level correlational analyses were also employed to investigate the relationship between socioeconomic development levels and mobility-related turnover rates, as well as the relationship between the rate of mobility-related turnover and student performance on centralized tests. Moreover, in order to make sense of the results of the descriptive analyses and also to explore the reasons and negative consequences of mobility-related teacher turnover experienced in less-developed eastern regions of the country, an exploratory qualitative inquiry was conducted through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with school principals from these regions.This paper starts with an overview of the existing literature on the causes and effects of teacher turnover. It later provides a brief description of the teacher employment system in Turkey to facilitate a better understanding of the context of the study. The two subsequent sections present the methods and findings of the quantitative and qualitative inquiries. The paper concludes with exploring possible policy implications for alleviating the issue of chronic teacher turnover experienced in the less-developed regions of Turkey.Causes and Effects of Teacher TurnoverResearch on teacher turnover usually focuses on teachers who stay in the profession but move to different schools, and/or on teachers who leave the profession altogether (Ingersoll & May, 2012). …