Gone After Five Years? Think Again

Common wisdom says as many as half of new teachers quit after five years. The half-dozen Education Week profiled starting out are still teaching, though only two are in needy schools.

Cleveland

How many teachers stay, especially in the schools that need them most? The question has attracted widespread attention as policymakers have recognized that expert teaching is the most important school-related factor in student achievement. Data show that poor and minority students assigned to ineffective teachers lag significantly behind their peers, a problem that compounds over time. By the same token, disadvantaged students can catch up if they have several effective teachers in a row.

Education Week has reflected the concern about teaching, publishing an edition of its Quality Counts report in 2003 on “hard-to-staff” schools . As one of the reporters, I followed six aspiring teachers from the Cleveland area—all interested in working in an urban setting, all promising—to see where they would land and why.

This month marks five school years since they took those first jobs in the profession. Estimates of the percentage of new teachers nationwide who quit in that time span range from at least 30 percent to close to half. In fact, “half of new teachers leave in their first five years” has become the conventional—if exaggerated—wisdom. Less cited, but still widely documented, is that teachers in high-poverty, low-performing schools are more likely to leave for another school than their peers...