Teacher turnover affects all students' achievement, study indicates
When teachers leave
schools, overall morale appears to suffer enough that student
achievement declines—both for those taught by the departed teachers and
by students whose teachers stayed put, concludes a study recently presented at a conference held by the Center for Longitudinal Data in Education Research.
The impact of teacher turnover is one of the teacher-quality topics
that's been hard for researchers to get their arms around. The
phenomenon of high rates of teacher turnover has certainly been proven
to occur in high-poverty schools more than low-poverty ones. The
eminently logical assumption has been that such turnover harms student
achievement.
But a couple years back, two researchers did an analysis that showed, counter-intuitively, it's actually the less- effective teachers, rather than the more- effective ones, who tend to leave schools with a high concentration of low-achieving, minority students. It raised the question of whether a degree of turnover might be beneficial, since it seemed to purge schools of underperforming teachers.
When reporting on that study, I played devil's advocate by pointing out that it didn't address the cultural impact of having a staff that's always in flux. The recently released CALDER paper suggests I may have been right in probing this question.
