Who Leaves? Teacher Attrition and Student Achievement

Donald Boyd, Pam Grossman, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb and James Wyckoff

No 14022, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Almost a quarter of entering public-school teachers leave teaching within their first three years. High attrition would be particularly problematic if those leaving were the more able teachers. The goal of this paper is estimate the extent to which there is differential attrition based on teachers' value-added to student achievement. Using data for New York City schools from 2000-2005, we find that first-year teachers whom we identify as less effective at improving student test scores have higher attrition rates than do more effective teachers in both low-achieving and high-achieving schools. The first-year differences are meaningful in size; however, the pattern is not consistent for teachers in their second and third years. For teachers leaving low-performing schools, the more effective transfers tend to move to higher achieving schools, while less effective transfers stay in lower-performing schools, likely exacerbating the differences across students in the opportunities they have to learn.

JEL-codes: I21 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

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