Stayers, leavers, lovers, and dreamers: insights about teacher retention

Teacher shortages are not new. Periodically, throughout the past half century, there have been fewer teachers available than were needed, and policy makers at the state and federal levels have responded by stepping up recruitment efforts and issuing temporary teaching credentials to those without qualifications. Three things are new, however: the requirement that teachers in all schools be "highly qualified"; the realization that it is not so much teacher recruitment that is the problem in staffing the nation's K-12 schools but teacher retention; and growing evidence that, similar to every other problem that plagues the nation's schools, the problem of teacher retention is most severe in hard-to-staff schools. In 1999, in an article in Education Week, John Merrow reported that recruitment was both the "wrong diagnosis" and a "phony cure" (p. 38) for the teacher shortage. By 2003, the National Commission on Teaching & America's Future (NCTAF) had announced that teacher retention was a "national crisis" (p. 21). Drawing heavily on Richard Ingersoll's (2001, 2002) analyses of retention and attrition patterns in K-12 schools and on other analyses of large-scale state and national data sets, the NCTAF (2003) report concluded that the teacher shortage was caused primarily by early attrition of those in the teaching pool rather than by insufficient numbers of people preparing to teach. The report also made it clear that the retention problem was most severe in urban and rural schools where there were large numbers of poor and minority students. This editorial highlights five new analyses of teacher retention, which frame the problem in conceptually and methodologically different ways. (1) Due to space constraints, the editorial does not critique the five studies or offer extensive analysis that cuts across them, although this kind of analysis is needed. Rather, the purpose of the editorial is to highlight important insights about retention from each of the five pieces and invite readers to review each of them thoroughly. It's Retention, Not Recruitment: The Need for "Demand-Side" Analyses and Solutions Throughout the past decade, Richard Ingersoll (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004) has conducted a series of studies about the teacher workforce from the perspective of the sociology of organizations, occupations, and work. In many of these studies, Ingersoll uses data from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and its Teacher Follow Up Survey (TFS) to look at patterns and trends in the supply and demand of teachers for the nation's K-12 schools. Ingersoll's analyses challenge the conventional wisdom that the teacher shortage in the United States is due to a simple imbalance between supply and demand caused by large numbers of teacher retirements, increased student enrollments, and an insufficient supply of new teachers. Instead, Ingersoll reveals that it is true that both student enrollments and teacher retirements have increased since the mid-1980s, that most schools now have job openings, and that a significant number of schools have been unable to find enough qualified teachers. However, it is not true that most teachers who leave teaching do so because of retirement, and it also is not true that an insufficient number of teachers is being produced. To the contrary, Ingersoll (2004) argues that although there are not necessarily enough teachers produced in every field, there are overall, "more than enough prospective teachers produced each year in the U.S." (p. 8). Ingersoll argues that the crux of the retention problem is the teacher turnover rate, that is, the number of teachers per year who move from one teaching job to another or leave teaching altogether. As Ingersoll (2004) points out, the sheer size of the teaching force coupled with its annual turnover rate (about 14%) means that almost one third of the teacher workforce (more than one million teachers) move into, out of, or between schools in any given year. …