Education Report Roundup

Teacher Attrition

By Stephen Sawchuk — September 27, 2011 1 min read
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Teacher attrition among first-year teachers may be as high as 10 percent, according to a new data analysis from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.

It’s the first release of data from a study begun a few years ago to track the career paths of beginning teachers from 2007 and 2008. It reflects the first three years of data on the original cohort of 2,000 teachers.

Among the findings:

• Almost a 10th of teachers who began teaching in 2007 or 2008 were not teaching the following year.

• In 2009-10, three-quarters of the teachers stayed in the same school they had taught in during the previous year; and

Of those beginning teachers who were assigned a mentor, 8 percent were not teaching in the following year, compared with 16 percent of those without a mentor.

A version of this article appeared in the September 28, 2011 edition of Education Week as Teacher Attrition

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