Making Sense of Teacher Turnover: A Mixed-Methods Exploration of Why Teachers Leave

Abstract

Background/Context:

High teacher turnover has directed a great deal of scholarly attention toward the connection between teacher retention and teacher working conditions. Prior work has identified a set of key working conditions associated with teacher retention, including supportive school leadership, school safety, a collaborative professional community, a manageable workload, and autonomy. These working conditions are often identified using Likert-based surveys, which allow for the analysis of large and representative samples but cannot fully show the nuance of teachers’ experiences.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study:

This study examines why teachers leave their positions and how these reasons for leaving appear differently in Likert-style fixed-response questions and free-response questions. This comparison can reveal important distinctions in teachers’ understanding of how their working conditions can contribute to their turnover that may be hidden in simpler surveys.

Research Design:

This study takes advantage of teacher exit surveys administered by a large urban district that included both fixed- and free-response questions about why teachers left their positions. I use a convergent mixed-methods design to examine how reasons for leaving converged and diverged across question types across the entire sample and within individual teachers.

Conclusions or Recommendations:

I find confirmatory evidence that, when given the opportunity to describe their reasons for leaving in their own words, many teachers identify the same general categories of reasons as identified in Likert questions: school leadership, evaluations, workload, personal reasons, pay, and student behavior. Additionally, teacher free responses add new shades of meaning to our understanding of working conditions. The outsized importance of school leadership, already well established in prior literature, was strongly tied to the influence of school leadership on other aspects of teacher work that are generally considered as separate working conditions. Teachers who left because of student behavior concerns had diverse and often contradictory proposed policy solutions to increase student safety, and teachers who left for personal reasons like retirement or having children were still responsive to more malleable aspects of their work. Finally, many teachers were concerned about their workload, specifically unnecessary work added by school and district policy.