Teacher Turnover before, during, & after COVID

Before COVID, the shortage of qualified, skilled teachers was among the top challenges facing education leaders. And with the stress of the pandemic, survey data showed that almost half of the public school teachers who left the profession since March 2020 cite COVID-19 as the main reason. As school systems ramp up hiring for next fall, concrete data on actual teacher turnover is scarce. To fill in that gap, Education Resource Strategies (ERS) worked with six district partners -- all large, urban districts, spread across the country -- to understand their actual teacher turnover patterns in 2020. In the six districts ERS studied, teacher turnover declined from an average of 17.3 percent over the prior three years, to 12.6 percent in 2020. Students in the highest-poverty schools experienced the greatest "increase" in staff stability compared to prior years. With new federal funding, state, district, and school leaders should be exploring how to use stimulus dollars in ways that improve the teaching job. Districts and schools can build toward making teachers' jobs more rewarding, collaborative, and sustainable by investing in the kinds of structures and conditions that matter most -- such as competitive compensation with opportunities to grow over time, supportive school leadership, sufficient time for collaboration, and teaching loads that make it possible to build relationships with their students and adjust approaches to meet their needs.