A growing body of research has documented the uneven distribution of teacher quality across and within school districts. This paper focuses on the effect of the seniority-based transfer rules in collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) on teacher sorting. Specifically, as the seniority-preferred transfer rules in CBAs allow the more experienced…

Each year, SC TEACHER administers the SC Teacher Exit Survey to public K-12 classroom teachers who are not renewing their teaching contracts. The survey is designed to offer insights into how working conditions and other factors relate to teachers' decisions to either teach in another school district or leave the classroom. This report highlights…

This report is the first in a series of annual reports the Michigan legislature mandated in December 2020. The purpose of this report is to summarize available state administrative data to begin to quantify the teacher shortage, provide a baseline from which future comprehensive data analysis can begin, and most critically, to provide…

Allegations of sexual misconduct may prompt districts to enter into non-disclosure or settlement agreements with alleged perpetrators in exchange for a recommendation. Non-disclosure settlements typically limit how much information districts can share with other districts. This process, often referred to as "passing the trash," can be…

The media suggest that accountability pressure increases teacher stress and drives teachers away from teaching, resulting in teachers leaving disadvantaged schools that serve larger proportions of poor and minority students. However, no prior work has systematically examined the changes in the national trends of teacher turnover in response to No…

In Texas, and some other states, there is a documented shortage of physics teachers, in terms of both number and qualifications. The shortage in Texas is due as much to teachers leaving the field (attrition) as to a lack of teachers entering. There are efforts under way to prepare more and better-qualified physics teachers who will stay in the…

Since the 2009-10 school-year, the Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA) at Stanford University administered Teacher, Assistant Principal (AP), and Principal surveys as part of San Francisco Unified School District's (SFUSD's) evaluation of the Quality Teacher and Education Act (passed as Proposition A 2008). The findings from these surveys…

Collective bargaining is common in American public education, but its consequences are poorly understood. We focus here on key contractual provisions--seniority-based transfer rights--that affect teacher assignments, and we show that these transfer rights operate to burden disadvantaged schools with higher percentages of inexperienced teachers. We…

This survey report contains the results of the 2009-10, 2010-11, and 2011-12 Principal Surveys conducted by Stanford's Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA). The surveys were administered to principals in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). This report appears in two parts, each highlighting some of the aggregated responses…

I investigate the importance of the match between teachers and schools for student achievement. I show that teacher effectiveness is higher after a move to a different school, and I estimate teacher-school match effects using a mixed effects estimator. Match quality can "explain away" a quarter of, and is as economically important as,…

For the 2013 study, "Transfer Incentives for High-Performing Teachers: Final Results from a Multisite Randomized Experiment," researchers examined the impact of the Talent Transfer Initiative (TTI) on students' reading and mathematics achievement in 10 school districts. The TTI enabled principals of low-performing schools to provide…

This report describes how many teachers transferred or changed jobs in AISD, remained at their schools, or left the school district after the 2013-2014 school year, along with characteristics of teachers in each group. Separate research brief and executive summary were published. [For the Research Brief, see ED626818. For the Executive Summary,…

Discussions of teacher turnover usually focus on "how many" teachers leave schools each year, without regard for their performance in the classroom. This oversimplification masks the real teacher retention crisis: not only a failure to retain enough teachers, but a failure to retain the "right" teachers. This executive summary presents findings of…

"Transfer Incentives for High-Performing Teachers: Final Results from a Multisite Experiment," examined the impact of the Talent Transfer Initiative (TTI) on both student achievement and teacher retention in 10 school districts across seven states. The initiative gave bonuses to high-performing teachers for them to transfer to and stay…

"Irreplaceables" are teachers who are so successful they are nearly impossible to replace, but who too often vanish from schools as the result of neglect and inattention. To identify and better understand the experience of these teachers, the authors started by studying 90,000 teachers across four large, geographically diverse urban school…