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Essay on Teacher Attrition: Why Teachers are leaving their Profession?
If we know that good teachers make a difference, why haven’t we achieved high quality teaching in every American classroom? The question is pointed. And for too long it has pointed in the wrong direction for an answer—toward a teacher shortage. The common perception, widely reported in the press, is that we just don’t have enough teachers, especially good ones, to go around. But as often happens, the conventional wisdom turns out to be too conventional and too little wisdom. Our inability to support high-quality teaching in many of our schools is driven not by too few teachers coming in, but by too many going out, that is, by a staggering teacher turnover and attrition rate.
In general, the turnover rate among teachers is significantly higher than for other occupations. The fact is, an alarming and unsustainable number of teachers are leaving teaching during their first few years of teaching. The “No Child Left Behind Act” has stimulated a national effort to find highly qualified teachers for every classroom. But no teacher supply strategy will ever keep our classrooms staffed with quality teachers if we do not reverse the debilitating rate of teacher attrition (Ingersoll, 2001). We need to balance our efforts to prepare high quality teachers with strong strategies to support good teaching in our schools.
Review of Related Literature
Teacher Turnover and Attrition Rates are High The facts about the teacher retention problem speak for themselves. Turnover for teachers is significantly higher than for other occupations. Based on analysis of the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics for the 1999-2000 school year, it is estimated that almost a third of America’s teachers leave the field sometime during their first three years of teaching, and almost half leave after five years..........
