Teacher attrition has been remarkably stable over time

You have to squint to see any long-term trends

In December, NCES released results of their latest national survey on teacher mobility. They found that, among public school teachers who were working in the 2020-21 school year, 8% moved to a different school (“movers”) and another 8% had left the profession (“leavers”).

NCES has been doing the same surveys intermittently for the last 35 years, but it may surprise some folks to see just how stable the rates have been over time. Here are the teacher "mover” rates that NCES has found over time:

1988-89: 7.9%

1991-92: 7.3%

1994-95: 7.2%

2000-01: 7.7%

2004-05: 8.1%

2008-09: 7.6%

2012-13: 8.1%

2021-22: 7.9%

I suppose you could squint at this and ask what was happening in 1994, but there’s just not a lot of change there.

Now here are same rates for the percentage of public school teachers who "leave” the profession, by year:

1988-89: 5.6%

1991-92: 5.1%

1994-95: 6.6%

2000-01: 7.4%

2004-05: 8.4%

2008-09: 8.0%

2012-13: 7.7%

2021-22: 7.9%

There is (slightly) more of a pattern here. The national teacher leaver rate rose almost 3 percentage points from 1988 to 2004. When I looked into this increase in the past, I attributed it mostly to changing demographics within the profession as Baby Boomers started to retire.

But note that the teacher “leaver” rate has been more or less flat for two decades. This is pretty remarkable. We’ve been through No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and COVID-19, and it’s… all basically a wash. (In July last year NCES released its data on principal turnover and found not much change there either.)

It’s possible the NCES data are just out of date. Their survey looked at teachers in 2020-21 who returned for the 2021-22 school year. And by now you may have read about the historic high in teacher turnover in the fall of 2022. When Dan Goldhaber and Roddy Theobald looked at 39 years worth of teacher turnover data in Washington state, they found that total teacher turnover, including people who left the profession (in blue in the graph below), who left teaching but stayed in education (green), or who switched schools (red), was indeed at all-time highs in the fall of 2022.

But look carefully at their chart, above, and note a couple things. One, the 2022 peak is not that far above the last peak, in 2007. And two, note that the percentage of teachers who left the teaching profession (in blue) fluctuated between about 6-8% for the whole time period.

Was 2022 a COVID-induced blip or the start of a big surge higher? Given the relative long-term stability, I’m betting on the former. As evidence in favor of that interpretation, the national data from BLS is showing turnover rates among all public education employees are down a bit from last year. And, as I wrote in a recent piece for The 74 Million, “new data out of Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina all show teacher turnover rates were down slightly in 2023.” These states are showing 1-2 percentage point declines from the highs of 2022.

I’d like to see more data to confirm these states aren’t outliers, but for now at least it doesn’t seem like we’re breaking out of the longer-term patterns.