For a long time, we’ve
heard about the damage done by teacher turnover. Often, the thinking is that
schools struggle to replace the teachers who leave with replacements who
perform at least as well or better.
And while it is true
that high turnover can really hurt a school, it turns out that the damage is
largely caused by the ripple effect of a teacher leaving, mainly the amount of
grade switching that occurs. A new working paper
from Eric Hanushek, Steven Rivkin, and Jeffrey Schiman measures the broader
impact of teacher turnover in a large school district in Texas.
When a teacher leaves a
school, the remaining teachers often have the opportunity to move around,
selecting what might be considered ‘better’ grades and leaving the more
‘difficult’ grades to be taught by newer teachers. Not only do the new teachers
have to deal with the more difficult assignment, but the teachers who switch
grades, as some other recent research
has found, are also less effective, at least in their first year teaching the
new grade.
Not as new but always
worth restating: Hanushek et al. again
find that the weaker teachers were more likely to leave their schools than
strong teachers, which means that unfocused efforts to reduce turnover are not
necessarily in the best interest of schools.
