This paper estimates the effects of a school accountability policy on year-to-year teacher mobility in publicly and privately managed low-performing schools in Chile. As school ranking depends on the institution's relative position according to a set of variables and their corresponding thresholds, we use a multivariate regression discontinuity…

Is there a shortage of special education teachers in America's public schools? If so, why? And how can policymakers fix it? The first question sounds like an easy one. Yes, there is a shortage of special education teachers. In 2023-24, more than half of districts and 80 percent of states reported such a shortage. If you doubt the self-reported…

This paper presents the results of qualitative research on academic inbreeding in Czech higher education, the first of its kind. Its focus is on exploring the significance of academic inbreeding, its types, practices, and possible solutions. The research for this paper was done among academic staff at eight institutions of higher education in the…

We use 35 years of data on public school teachers in Washington to calculate several different measures of teacher attrition and mobility. We explore how these rates vary over time and their relationship with the state unemployment rate. Annual rates of teacher attrition from the workforce have been between 5% and 8% for each of the past 35 years,…

Teacher attrition, or teachers voluntarily leaving the field, has been a persistent problem in United States public schools and serves as one of the primary drivers of the urgent teacher shortage crisis. Mitigating teacher attrition requires a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of why teachers leave the field. This dissertation employs three…

K-12 educational systems are currently facing the issue of special education teachers leaving their positions prematurely and the struggle to retain highly qualified special education teachers. The attrition rate of special education teachers continues to rise due to the demands placed on this group of teachers, such as behavior and discipline…

One potentially fruitful application for human capital analytics is to support policies and practices that might reduce undesirable teacher turnover. Teacher turnover can be harmful to student achievement and faculty cohesiveness and can exacerbate teacher shortages. This article describes an attempt to build a human capital analytics tool to help…

Teacher turnover has adverse consequences for student achievement and imposes large financial costs for schools. Some have argued that high-stakes testing may lower teachers' satisfaction with their jobs and could be a major contributor to teacher attrition. In this paper, we exploit changes in the tested grades and subjects in Georgia to study…

Non-teaching staff comprise over half of all school employees and their turnover may be consequential for school operation, culture, and student success, yet we lack evidence documenting their attrition. We use 11 years of administrative data from Oregon to examine mobility and exit among teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals, and other…

Background: Early childhood teachers play a key role in creating positive teacher-child relationships, which are shown to promote child outcomes. However, turnover rates of early childhood teachers are strikingly high, which may compromise the quality of teacher-child relationships. Lack of early childhood education program policies (i.e., wage,…

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, whole-school reforms will continue to be a prominent strategy for improving student outcomes in low-performing schools. As reform models have proliferated, so has research evaluating the impact in reform schools. However, previous evaluations have rarely examined unintended spillover effects in nonreform…

Teacher turnover is an issue of national significance and has worsened since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Teacher-directed violence and teacher turnover can significantly impact school life for students, staff, and communities. Using Wang and Degol's school climate framework, we examined school characteristics that contribute to…

Situated against teacher demand problems worldwide, rising teacher turnover and declining teacher education enrollment have rendered the state of South Carolina a region commonly described as facing a "teacher shortage crisis." This paper reports results from an evaluation of the Rural Recruitment Initiative (RRI), a state-level teacher…

In this paper, we critically examine the way in which scholars have traditionally defined and problematized attrition. Through a series of examples of large-scale intervention impact studies, we share insights about the sources and consequences of attrition that expand our notion of how and why attrition occurs. We also discuss potential steps for…

This study explores the linkages between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation in teachers who are regulated by a career ladder policy in Chile. This work pays attention to specific components of this policy: salary increase, promotion, standards, performance evaluation, and feedback. We shed light on the motivational pattern that emerges from…