By the end of their third year of teaching, little more than 1 in 3 novice educators are still teaching in the school where they started their careers—and a quarter of those don’t even wait for the end of the school year to leave.
A new study in the American Educational Research Journal tracks teachers’ leaving month by month in their first three years on the job. It finds students whose teachers left midyear lost 54 days’ worth of academic growth—nearly a third of a school year—compared to students whose teachers stayed all year.
Training mattered: While teachers from university-based education programs were most likely to switch schools midyear, teachers from alternative-training programs were more likely to leave teaching altogether.
