Based on media accounts and the rhetoric of politicians, one might think teachers are fleeing their profession in droves, whether because they are underpaid, overworked, or simply dissatisfied.
Like most good stories, this one holds some kernels of truth. For example, high-quality surveys from RAND find that teachers report higher levels of job-related stress and burnout than other working adults.
And yet, the objective data on teacher behavior tell a rather different story. Contrary to warnings of a profession in decline, schools employ more teachers than ever, both in raw numbers and especially in per-student terms. Moreover, teachers aren’t “fleeing” the profession under any normal definition of the word. According to the most recent federal data, just 8.4 percent of K–12 teachers who taught in 2020–21 left the profession before the start of the next school year. Broken out by school type, the rate was a bit lower for public school teachers (7.9 percent) and a couple points higher for those working in private schools (11.7 percent).
How do these rates of teacher turnover compare to workers in other fields? In a 2007 study, Doug Harris and Scott Adams found that teachers behaved similarly to other well-educated professionals. They reported that teachers had lower rates of turnover compared to social workers, about the same as accountants, and slightly higher than nurses.
With all the shifts in education policy over the last two decades, not to mention Covid-19 and other societal changes, do these patterns still hold? How does teacher turnover compare to other professions today?
To tackle these questions, we set out to replicate and update the Harris and Adams analysis. Using the same methodology, we compiled national data spanning more than 40 years. We find that, while there have been some fluctuations year to year, the rate at which teachers leave the profession has been remarkably stable through the decades. Teachers continue to leave their chosen profession at lower rates than social workers leave theirs. Teacher turnover also looks pretty similar to the rate at which nurses leave nursing and is close to the rate at which accountants leave accounting.
In short, policymakers should understand teacher turnover as similar to that of other well-educated professionals—that is, relatively low. As such, policymakers would be better off isolating trouble spots in specific districts, schools, and subjects, and responding accordingly, rather than treating turnover as a generic problem. Similarly, rather than seeing turnover as something that should be avoided at all costs, policymakers should pursue strategies to enhance teacher quality by rewarding the best teachers over efforts to retain all teachers regardless of skill and effectiveness.
