Nationwide, teachers are more likely to stay in their classrooms this year compared to last, new research suggests—but broader turnover trends don’t do much to help individual district leaders plan for staffing next year.
A new tool aims to change that by using local economic and administrative data to forecast district-level teacher retention trends.
“Just knowing 12% of your teachers are going to be gone next year,—well, what does that mean?” said Joshua Bleiberg, an assistant professor of education policy at the University of Pittsburgh, who co-created the dashboard. “Understanding whether your turnover is going to be higher or lower compared to previous years, or to your neighboring districts, is more important.”
Such data could help districts compare their benefit offerings with others located nearby, or pinpoint problems that seem to result in more teachers leaving.
Bleiberg and Tuan Nguyen, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Missouri, analyzed data on school spending, local labor markets, and other economic indicators from 2000-2025, combined with district turnover data from all 50 states from 2003-2025.
It was no easy feat to estimate teacher turnover rates in the nearly 13,300 public school districts included in the dashboard, as states do not report report turnover data in the same way. The researchers used a combination of state-reported teacher turnover data (in 1- to 3-year averaged rates), public-records requests, government employee records, and in some cases by comparing annual district new hires to teachers with less than a year of experience. All these data were compiled, analyzed and used to create an index for predicting trends and changes in local teacher turnover.
Based on those data, the dashboard predicts local turnover. It can compare it both to districts’ own patterns and to those of competing school districts.
The projections have a significant benefit, because the most comprehensive teacher turnover data, from the federal National Teacher and Principal survey, typically lags by several school years. (The most recent data, for example, is from 2021-22.) Other gauges, like the research group RAND, Corp.'s annual teacher surveys, measure teacher intentions and morale, not actual departures, which can be driven by broader school funding or economic changes.
A working paper published in October with data from the new dashboard finds teacher turnover stood at about 14.6% by 2025-26, but is predicted to decline to 13.2% in 2026-27.
Teacher labor trends can run counter to those in other parts of the local economy. In the first few years of a recession like the one in 2007-2009, the researchers found, teacher shortages increase even though teacher turnover rates decline. Infusions of federal and state money may drive this counterintuitive trend. Economic stabilization initiatives often include more school spending, such as the pandemic stimulus that pushed billions to school, which both increases the number of positions open in schools and makes teaching look more secure.
That can create pent-up motivation from teachers who want to change jobs, researchers found. Coupled with shrinking school budgets when the recovery aid ends, the pent-up desire for change often creates a spike in turnover for teachers—but it tends to come a few years after major job changes happen in other fields.
“That’s why the big spike in teacher turnover you see after the Great Recession [from 2007 to 2009] was not in 2010, but in 2012,” Bleiberg said.
The more than two decades of data also show that while large urban districts may have higher numbers of teachers coming and going in any given year, their overall turnover rates remain more stable over time. Small and rural districts often have to cast a wider net to bring in new teachers.
In those small, far-flung places, he said, “losing even one teacher is a much larger shock”
