Title: Teach for america teachers' careers
Description: Today, more than ever, teachers play an important role in student progress. Teacher quality has decreased over time, however, and low-income children, often taught by the least-qualified teachers, pay the greatest price. Teach For America (TFA) addresses these problems by recruiting high-achieving college graduates to teach in schools serving predominantly low-income students. TFA has grown substantially, spawning numerous replicas and attracting increasing numbers of applicants. The retention of TFA teachers had never been studied longitudinally and on a national scale until now, however. My dissertation asks whether, when, and why TFA teachers voluntarily leave their initial, low-income placement schools and the teaching profession altogether. I examine whether their retention varies by gender, race, and the presence of a teacher in one's family. I further investigate whether TFA teachers are at lower risk for voluntarily leaving their placement school and teaching if they teach only one grade at the elementary level or only one subject that matches their college major at the secondary level. Based on an online survey I administered to 3 entire TFA cohorts (n=2029), this longitudinal, retrospective study uses discrete-time survival analysis, which permits more robust conclusions than conventional methods, and focuses on voluntary turnover, which many previous quantitative studies of teachers' careers were unable to do.

Overall, 61% of TFA teachers remained in teaching and 44% remained in their initial placement schools more than two years. Females, Blacks, and Latinos were generally at lower risk than males, Asians, and Whites teachers to voluntarily leave their initial placement schools or the profession. Black respondents who were related to a teacher had an especially low conditional probability of voluntarily resigning from the profession. Teachers with single-grade or -subject assignments were generally at lower risk of voluntarily leaving their school or resigning than those with multiple assignments. In-field math and social studies teachers' risk of voluntarily resigning from the profession was lower than that of out-of-field teachers of these subjects, but in-field science teachers' risk was higher than that of their out-of-field counterparts. This study provides important information to practitioners and policy-makers working to retain TFA and other promising teachers. It also begins to answer larger questions about whether, on a national scale, TFA teachers remain in their schools and teaching long enough to improve low-income children's education.
Subjects: Teacher turnover, Case studies, Teachers, Recruiting, Job satisfaction, Teacher-administrator relationships
Places: United States