NCREL Policy Issues
Issue 12, November 2002
The Impact of Alternative Certification in the Midwest
Explore Teacher Turnover
More than 50 percent of beginning teachers left the school district that hired them within their first five years of teaching, according to a 2002 NCREL research study on teacher turnover in four Midwestern states conducted by Neil D. Theobald and Robert S. Michael. The research is based on new longitudinal data that contains information on the career histories of 11,787 novice teachers. Unique to the existing research to the topic, Theobald and Michael's study compares three types of novice teachers: teachers who taught continuously in the same district ("stayers"), those who transferred to another school district or districts within a state but remained in the state all five years ("movers"), and those who left public school teaching in a state and did not return ("leavers").
Visit NCREL's new interactive Web resource on the Teacher Quality Web site at www.ncrel.org/quality/mobility/turnover.htm to view the individual state reports generated from the study, and to use the data tool to generate customized graphs and comparisons of new teacher turnover in four states.
