Sometimes, when a teacher quits, administrators can do little to stop them, like when a great teacher hits retirement age or needs to move out of state for a spouse’s job. But in many other cases, school leaders have significant power to stem teacher turnover.
That’s one of the conclusions of a new study on teacher turnover released today. Researchers from the education consulting group ERS analyzed teacher-turnover data from 2020 to 2025 in six states—Connecticut, Georgia, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington state—to identify not only teachers who leave their districts or profession but those who switched roles within their schools or districts, a factor often left out of turnover calculations.
Their findings suggest that while teacher turnover has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, better district planning and more support for special education and early-career teachers could make for more stable staff in the long term, particularly in low-income schools.
ERS’s analysis aligns with other recent turnover studies from researchers and media organizations. It finds that after a brief dip in turnover in the first months of 2020, the number of teachers leaving the classroom rose significantly in the first years of the pandemic and have been slowly stabilizing since then.
ERS found annual teacher turnover in the states it studied declined from 20% to 16% on average from 2021-22 to 2024-25. ERS did not have pre-pandemic data, but other recent studies by the RAND Corp. and Learning Point Associates found teacher resignations and retirements remain higher than in 2019.
As noted in the chart above, teachers who left their states—or the profession entirely—made up the largest share of turnover, about 4 in 10 exits. But a significant share of teachers simply moved to other roles in their own schools or districts.
Such shifts can look different for administrators depending on the role they serve. “If I’m a district chief of HR just thinking about the pipeline I need to fill, if a teacher moved from one school to another in my district, that’s a job I don’t need to refill,” said Tara Anderson, an ERS researcher and the author of the analysis. “But if I’m a principal and 30% of my teachers are leaving my school every year, that is a huge deal to the learning of the kids in my building.”
The researchers found the effects of teacher turnover on a school’s overall staff culture and capacity compounded over time, particularly in high-poverty schools.
In addition to tracking annual teacher turnover in their district and school, Anderson recommended that district and school administrators track trends in the stability and experience levels of their staff over time. Ongoing turnover shapes school culture and the supports that teachers have in building a community of practice, she noted, since teacher churn eats away at both relationships among teachers and institutional memory.
It can be helpful for school and district leaders to have centralized processes for tracking individual staff members’ responsibilities for school improvement initiatives, professional learning communities, mentorships, and other roles to prevent disruptions when staff leave, Anderson said.
Building sustainable staffing
For more than 30 years, special education has remained the most chronically hard-to-staff teaching area. More than a third of districts reported unfilled positions, as of the 2024-25 federal data.
Many of these teachers don’t leave the classroom altogether, the ERS analysis noted, but move into general education or other roles at their school.
Pennsylvania had the lowest average special education turnover among studied states in 2024-25, at 16%. That state instituted statewide programs following the pandemic aimed at encouraging special education teachers to remain in their specialty. In particular, the state has encouraged more mentoring and support for early career special education teachers, who frequently reported feeling isolated and bogged down with paperwork.
Overall, Anderson advised districts to rethink the job duties and supports of teachers in their first three years. Those teachers were at least 7 percentage points more likely to leave their classrooms than more experienced teachers. In particular, early-career teachers were more likely to change districts than any other group and nearly as likely to leave the state or profession (10%) as teachers at retirement age (11%).
“In schools across the country, in most places across the country, the job of a first-year teacher looks exactly the same as a job for a teacher with 10, 15 years of experience,” Anderson said.
Leaders should consider tailoring support not just on experience but on how teachers were prepared to enter the classroom. Across states, Texas consistently had the highest turnover, particularly among early-career teachers. In part, that high figure was driven by teachers who entered the field via emergency and alternative certification leaving more quickly than those who came to the profession via traditional teacher-preparation programs.
