Imagine you're a school district leader. For a variety of reasons, you want to increase the retention rates of your teachers. Let's say you discover a magic intervention that will boost teacher retention rates by 50 percent, but the intervention can only be applied to one group of teachers. Your choices are to apply this magical intervention to:
A. Teachers just in their first four years on job, or
B. All teachers with 15 or more years of experience.
Which one would you pick? If you care about maximizing retention and limiting turnover, you should pick A.
If this result sounds at all counter-intuitive, consider where turnover rates are highest already. The figure below comes from a recent report from Marguerite Roza at the Edunomics Lab. It shows national turnover rates from the Schools and Staffing Survey, broken down by experience levels.
As the figure shows, turnover is highest for teachers with very little experience. Just on logic alone, districts should focus their interventions on the biggest problem areas. Reducing early-career retention rates by 50 percent would cut them from 13.5 to 6.75 percent. In contrast, reducing turnover rates among teachers with 20-24 years of experience doesn't do much. The same 50 percent reduction for this group would boost retention rates from the already-high 97.8 percent all the way up to 98.9 percent. That's an impressive figure, but it's not much bang for the buck.
But wait, there's even more to this story. Turnover rates are cumulative, so an early-career intervention has positive ramifications for years on end. A teacher who stays for a few years doesn't suddenly become more likely to leave--in fact, the opposite is true. As teachers stay and grow into the profession, they become less likely to leave. A district boosting retention rates for just early-career teachers is likely to see higher cumulative retention than a district focusing its efforts at the back end.
Let's go back to the initial question and run the numbers. Using the same NCES estimates as the base retention rate, Option A focuses the magic intervention solely on four years, the first years of a teacher's career. In Year 1, 100 percent of teachers are affected, 93 percent of teachers are around to receive the intervention in Year 2, etc.
Option B applies the same magic intervention over a wider range of years, to all teachers with 15 or more years of experience. But there aren't that many teachers left by then. Using the same NCES figures compounded year-after-year, only 25 percent of teachers would still be around to receive the magic program. Under this scenario, these teachers become nearly guaranteed to stay, but the vast majority of teachers won't ever experience this stage of their career.
Although this exercise is obviously absurd and only meant as an example--a 50 percent boost in teacher retention rates overnight would indeed be magic--the implications of it should be clear. Late-career incentives, such as large salary increases or backloaded retirement benefits, simply don't have the same potential to shift teacher retention rates as early-career investments. Contrary to current practices, districts should be investing the majority of their retention efforts on early-career teachers.
Taxonomy: