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Teacher departures And shortages are a persistent problem in schools. Nationally, approximately 16% of teachers leave each year – 8% go to other schools and the remaining 8% leave the profession completely. Yet these averages may mask a more serious staffing crisis in high-poverty schools, where turnover rates are even higher.

Consider Newton High School, located in a large metropolitan area in Texas, where an alarming 39% of teachers left their positions between spring 2020 and fall 2021. The principal hired replacements, including many were new to teaching, and then worked to build trust. and a collective vision within its staff. Yet before the next school year, 43 percent of Newton’s teachers resigned, restarting the cycle. In four years, the high school lost and replaced 88% of its staff, leaving only 12% of teachers who started teaching in the 2019-20 school year in 2022-23.

What happens to a school community when a large number of teachers leave? High turnover has a negative impact students’ academic performance, in part because of the loss of human capital: when teachers leave, they take their knowledge and skills with them. This is particularly damaging to schools when the substitute is less experienced, which is often the case in high-poverty schools.

Staff turnover can also erode the social capital – the relationships and culture – that holds a school together. We designed a four-year longitudinal study four secondary schools to study how staff turnover influences the way teams work together; what happens to reform efforts, which often take years to bear fruit; and, perhaps more importantly, what schools are or could be doing to address the negative effects.

Turnover weighs on schools. Strong relationships and a shared culture are important if schools are to improve by engaging in continuous inquiry and reviewing their practices from year to year. When teachers leave, these bonds become fragile. Teachers lose close colleagues, making it more difficult to collaborate on curriculum or find reliable advice and support. As one Newton teacher said, “It’s about rebuilding those relationships, and then they go away.” »

This can discourage teachers from investing in relationships, further accelerate staff turnover, and also disrupt teamwork. Teachers spend valuable time in meetings simply being on the same page, which limits their ability to learn from past lessons that were effective and reflect on what teaching strategies worked and why. One Newton teacher said her team “can’t build anything because we can’t keep people here for more than a year.” You’re constantly starting from scratch.

But schools can adopt strategies to mitigate these harmful effects. One strategy is to track the team’s progress from year to year. For example, at Rivera High School, where English teacher turnover was high, well-organized calendars and a shared bank of lesson plans offered educators an alternative to reinventing the wheel multiple times, as they did through the pass. New teachers could build on this resource rather than starting from scratch. This helped them improve teaching and overall student learning experiences.

Another effective strategy is to keep teaching teams as stable as possible. School principals may unintentionally make the problem worse by frequently changing teachers’ tasks – one form of the unsubscription rate within the school. Even the departure of a single teacher can have a significant impact, eroding the team’s progress from the previous year. The most stable teams we observed were able to build on the previous year’s work to reach new heights.

Of course, there’s little schools can do to mitigate the harmful effects of turnover: this problem also requires action from policymakers. The problems caused by teacher turnover are not evenly distributed across schools: Staff turnover disproportionately affects schools serving low-income students and children of color. This is a systemic problem that exacerbates and perpetuates inequities between schools. Schools experiencing high turnover rates should receive additional funding to help stabilize their teaching and administrative staff. Accountability measures also need to be tailored: rather than punishing schools for problems related to turnover, policymakers should offer targeted support. Greater public transparency on turnover data is needed to reveal the extent of teacher losses – which are obscured by the generally reported annual turnover rates.

Our data was collected before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, which could have exacerbated turnover. In fact, today more schools are experiencing high turnover rates that, before the pandemic, were once reserved for poorer schools. But we believe our findings apply even when turnover is lower, because our study demonstrates that even the loss of one or two teachers can have a detrimental impact.

Certainly, some turnover can be beneficial for schools, such as when new teachers bring new perspectives or disgruntled educators leave. However, we found only few cases of this in our study. Instead, we saw high turnover rates break down social networks, erode trust, and diminish institutional knowledge. Staff turnover prevents schools and districts from implementing long-term improvements that can inspire hope and optimism among parents, policymakers and community members. You simply cannot build a house on unstable land. It is high time to recognize and tackle this problem head on and create stable, thriving learning environments that enable students and teachers to succeed.

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