 I am delighted to see you all here today. Welcome, I'm Linda Darling-Hammond, President of the Learning Policy Institute, and delighted to welcome you to this briefing on teacher turnover. This is cosponsored by the Council for Chief State School Officers, the National Association for State Boards of Education, and the National Conference of State Legislatures, organizations that are all concerned with this issue of teacher recruitment retention, supply and demand, and it will feature research by one of our leading LPI researchers, Desiree Carver-Thomas, and commentary from students, teachers, local board members, and state policymakers. And today we're going to be discussing a new report by LPI on teacher turnover, why it matters and what we can do about it. And I want to just frame this by noting why this is so important. Teacher turnover is actually the silent source of teacher shortages, which many of us have been experiencing all across the country. Districts and schools have been continuing to struggle to meet the growing demand for qualified teachers. Since about 2012, when the layoffs that had been common during the recession ended, the teacher workforce has grown by about 400,000 teachers and districts have been seeking to reclaim the positions that they had previously cut during the recession and replace the teachers who have left. And they're kind of trying to climb this hill every year and replace those who leave through the leaky bucket. But even with intensive recruiting inside and outside of the country, you've seen news reports about that. More than 100,000 classrooms are being staffed this year by instructors who are unqualified for their jobs. That we just did a review of state teacher workforce reports across the country and just in the 31 states that keep some data, we found 82,000 positions filled by underqualified teachers and additional thousands of unfilled vacancies. And if you kind of pro-rate that across the country, it's well over 100,000. Vacancies filled by people who are not prepared for the jobs. And as we know, that's almost always disproportionately affecting students in low income schools, in high minority schools, the students who most need sophisticated skills and capable teachers are the ones who experience the revolving door of teachers who are both underprepared and most likely to leave. And so this problem is in high relief for me right now because I just finished a study of teaching in five high achieving countries around the world. It's out in a version called Empowered Educators looking at China, Singapore, Finland, Canada, Australia. Where there are surpluses of teachers where teachers tend to stay in the profession for a career or teachers come in with free or virtually free preparation in high quality programs, lots of mentoring, support systems from the very beginning. And where in that lifelong career, they're engaged in lots of collaboration with each other and able to make teaching the kind of career that is a high status, strongly appreciated well-served profession. So as we will hear the situation is very different in many states in the U.S., there is a lot of variability, but we'll also hear about solutions. So I'm going to get the festivities going by introducing my colleague Desiree Carver-Thomas who is the lead author for this report. And Desiree is a former New York City school teacher and then a policy graduate from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley for which those of us at Stanford forgive her because the quality of her work warrants that respect. And after Desiree presents the results of this study, we'll hear from two panels examining the current context in the schoolhouse and the state house. I'm instructed to tell you that the hashtag is keep our teachers, so please tweet away. And Desiree, please join us at the podium. Thank you. Good morning. Last year LPI released a report, a coming crisis in teaching that investigated teacher supply demand and shortages nationally. And we found that there was a teacher shortage and projected that the shortage would worsen if trends in teacher supply or demand didn't change. So one of the driving trends that we found in that report was teacher attrition, teachers leaving the field. So we wanted to understand that better. Why do teachers leave their schools either to leave the profession or to move schools? Where does that happen? And how can we reduce that? So we looked at the most recent national survey data from the schools and staffing survey and teacher follow-up survey to answer those questions. So this is what one Washington D.C. teacher had to say about why she left teaching. She says, over the course of four years, my school's administration steadily expanded the workload and workday while barely adjusting salaries. More and more major decisions were made behind closed doors and more and more teachers felt micromanaged rather than supported. And as you'll see, the concerns that this teacher, Sarah, brings up are not uncommon among teachers leaving the field. But first, why does teacher turnover matter? So one of the major reasons teacher turnover matters is that it drives shortages. So like Linda mentioned, we recently estimated that schools across the country were short about 100,000 teachers last year. And we went through and looked at publicly available data from states on their underqualified teachers in classrooms. And that's how we arrived at that estimate. These are teachers who are often only able to be hired when a fully qualified teacher isn't available. So that's what makes it a strong indicator of shortages. And as the beginning of this school year began, we've seen news stories that indicate that in many states, shortages aren't letting up. In fact, in Metro Nashville, students had to take online courses because the school district hadn't been able to hire enough math, science, special education, career tech, foreign language teachers by the beginning of the school year. So this pie graph shows national demand for teachers in 2016. And the shaded red area represents the number of vacancies created by teacher attrition, teachers leaving the classroom. And as you can see, almost all of the demand for new teachers is due to teacher attrition. And in this graph you can see in yellow, the amount of pre-retirement attrition. Basically teachers who are leaving before retirement age. So that accounts for most of the demand for new teachers due to attrition. Only a third of the demand for new teachers is due to retirements. So this suggests that if we could reduce the level of pre-retirement attrition, we could substantially reduce the demand for new teachers and that would go a long way towards solving shortages. Indeed, if we could cut our attrition rate in half to be comparable with other high achieving nations, we could virtually eliminate shortages across the country. So attrition drives teacher shortages and that has an impact on teacher quality and student achievement. When districts have a hard time filling vacancies, they may cancel courses, increase class sizes, staff classes with long-term substitutes, all of which undermines student achievement. But often they hire underprepared teachers. So not only are teachers without full preparation generally worse for student outcomes, they act as a band-aid solution. Research indicates that teachers without full preparation leave at two to three times the rates of fully prepared teachers, creating the leaky bucket phenomenon that further contributes to shortages. So I've been talking about the role of attrition, but our report is about turnover generally. So attrition is those teachers who are leaving schools. Turnover refers to both those leaving schools and those switching schools. So about 8% of teachers leave the profession each year. Again, that's about double the rates in high achieving countries like Finland and Singapore. And then another 8% switch schools each year. So it's important to note that while we're reducing attrition, could go a long way to solving shortages, reducing turnover is also very important. When a teacher leaves a school, even to teach in another school, the effect on the students in that school is the same as if that teacher had left the profession. And when teachers switch schools at high rates, it exacerbates the shortages in the schools where that most often happens. So there's quite a bit of variation in turnover across the country. We see that in states, there are states with turnover rates lower than 10%, states with turnover rates higher than 20%. We notice higher turnover rates in the South overall. There's also variation across districts. Based on our analysis, teachers in cities tend to have higher turnover rates and also in some rural areas as well. Math, science, special education, English language development, all have especially high turnover rates. And these are subjects that have some of the most critical shortages. These teachers tend to enter the field with less preparation. And especially in the case of math and science teachers, tend to have better opportunities for more lucrative work. Many states are using the new ESSA law as an opportunity to provide comprehensive and rigorous college and career-ready curriculums. But that can be significantly hindered without a skilled and effective educator workforce. So how can schools be prepared to, how can schools prepare students for college level math if they're having a hard time hiring math teachers and keeping the ones that they have? High turnover is especially pronounced in Title I schools that serve more low, students from low-income families. Not only that, turnover is even higher among math and science, special education and English language development teachers in Title I schools. And especially high, oops, especially high among teachers who entered teaching through an alternative certification pathway. Teachers who are also more likely to teach in Title I schools. So because of their higher turnover rates, teachers in these schools end up having fewer years of experience, stay at their schools for fewer years on average. We see similar trends in schools that serve majority students of color. Turnover rates are higher overall and they're even higher in critical shorted subjects like math and science, special education, alternative certification teachers are most likely to teach in these schools but are more than twice as likely to leave them than to leave teachers, leave schools with few students of color. So with such high turnover rates, teachers in these schools have been at their schools fewer years on average and have less teaching experience. All in all, schools serving students of color, students from low-income families have the highest turnover rates and the least experience. And this is a huge disservice to our students because students really benefit from being in schools with a stable workforce and from learning from experienced teachers. Teachers of color tend to teach in high turnover schools. Teachers of color make up about 18% of the teacher workforce but three and four work in schools with serving the most students of color which as I mentioned, also tend to have high turnover rates. They're also twice as likely to enter the field through an alternative certification pathway which again is associated with higher turnover rates. But looking at a turnover in a statistical model that controls for several factors, we see comparable turnover rates between teachers of color and white teachers who may be teaching in similar settings. And finally, turnover has costs. Turnover can affect teacher quality when schools resort to hiring underprepared teachers or inexperienced teachers. High turnover can affect staff cohesion, collaboration and the transfer of institutional knowledge and common solutions to mitigating shortages like cutting courses, hiring substitute teachers, hiring underprepared teachers, all undermine student achievement. And finally, there are financial costs to recruiting and training new teachers, estimated at the high end as much as $21,000 for each to replace each new teacher in an urban district. So I'm going to demo a calculator tool that we just released last week that helps districts to calculate what the cost of turnover could be based on several research estimates. So the first demo I'll show you is in Prince George's County. And this is if you know how many teachers have left a district. So I know that in Prince George's County, 1,197 teachers left. So I can enter that in in the top field. So that's happening. And I don't know the cost of turnover in that district specifically, but I can enter an estimate based on the research for either a rural district, a suburban district, or an urban district. And as you can see, the estimate is about $21,000 per teacher for a total of over $25 million of cost to the district. And the number below $25 million, 12 million, 12.6 million is if you could cut the turnover rate in half. So like I mentioned earlier, if we could cut attrition in half, we could eliminate shortages. We could also save or reinvest quite a bit of funds. So now I'll show you what this would look like in Oakland, California. So I don't know how many teachers left there. So I'll use the let us help you tab. I do know that there are 2,796 teachers in the district. So I will enter that in. If you don't know that, there's a link where you can find the number of teachers in a district. And I know that 18% of teachers left in the year. So I can enter that in. Again, we have some estimates there that you can use the national average for schools or districts. Again, I will select urban district and I see a total of about $10.6 million. And I wanna emphasize that these aren't the actual costs that these districts paid, but these are estimates that we can use to get a sense of what the cost could be given the attrition rates in these districts. So thank you. So instead of spending $21,000 to replace a teacher who left a school that could amount to millions of dollars, states and districts could direct those funds into residency models to better prepare teachers or competitive compensation packages or high quality mentoring, other strategies that would help to improve teacher quality, which I will get to later. So to recap, why does teacher turnover matter? It drives teacher shortages, which undermine teacher quality and student achievement. Turnover itself also undermines student achievement, even if there are no shortages because of the instability it creates. It's worse in critical shortage subjects and worse for students from low income families and students of color and it has costs, financial and otherwise. So now that we know it matters, why does it happen? Based on our analysis of the survey data, we see that dissatisfaction plays a significant role in teacher turnover. Most teachers express some dissatisfaction with accountability pressures or with administrative support or with working conditions that they were experiencing. Next come family and personal reasons. Again, retirement is just about a third of the reasons why teachers leave. They leave to pursue other jobs and for financial reasons. We see a similar trend for teachers who move schools with even more citing dissatisfaction of some sort. So if teachers are leaving the field and switching schools because they're dissatisfied, states should consider how to improve those conditions. One of the key areas that teachers express dissatisfaction with is administrative support. And we find a significant relationship between administrative support and teacher turnover. When teachers feel strongly that their administration isn't supportive, isn't encouraging, they're more than twice as likely to leave teaching or move schools than when their administrative administration is supportive. Preparation also impacts turnover. So again, in a model that holds several factors, constant teachers who enter teaching through an alternative certification program were 25% more likely to turnover than other teachers. And we see an even greater turnover rate for alternatively certified teachers in school serving students of color. So it's important that teacher preparation programs are adequately preparing teachers for the challenging job of teaching because that makes a difference in turnover. So this is a quote from Sean Sheehan who was last year's Oklahoma teacher of the year and he moved a few hours away to a district in Texas. And a first year teacher in his new district makes $7,500 more than the average teacher in Oklahoma where he was teaching. So of course, teachers don't go into the profession to make lots of money, but being able to take care of themselves and their families does make a difference in recruitment and retention. And in many states, that's difficult. In 30 states, a teacher heading a family four is eligible for several forms of government assistance. So compensation matters. And we see this again in our model that teachers who in districts that offer higher salary schedules have turnover rates 20 to 30% lower than teachers in districts with the lowest salary schedules. So what can we do? We know that compensation matters for teachers and that they'll be more likely to continue teaching when they receive competitive salaries. States can also consider other forms of compensation like service scholarships and loan forgiveness programs. These programs can make teaching an affordable occupation by underwriting the cost of high quality preparation, especially for those teachers who will teach in the subjects and locations where they're most needed. And districts can also consider offering other types of financial incentives like housing incentives and childcare incentives. It's important that it's important that states invest in building the teacher workforce through high retention pathways that prepare teachers who will be successful in the classroom and want to continue teaching through teacher residencies modeled after medical residencies. Residents complete a year long apprenticeship with master teachers in a high need school while completing a coursework for a master's degree. These teachers have extensive hands-on preparation before becoming responsible for their own students. Completors of these programs tend to be more diverse, more competent teachers than other beginners, and they stay in the field longer than their peers. Grow your own programs, build the pool of prospective teachers in the communities where they're needed by recruiting, training and supporting high school students, paraprofessionals after school program staff and other community members. Those teaching in their own communities are more likely to stay in the profession. And once teachers enter the classroom, they benefit from strong mentoring and induction, programs that support them through observation and feedback, time to collaborate with others, reduce workload and other supports to help them to be successful in their early years. And finally, a key issue is administrative training. Administrators are very important to what happens, what the teaching and learning environment is like in a school, and whether teachers choose to stay or leave. So states could invest in their accreditation and licensure systems so that administrations, to ensure that administrators come into schools prepared to create supportive and nurturing work environments and also offer ongoing professional support for administrators. Districts can build leadership pipelines that support district staff with the skills that they need to move from teacher to teacher leader to assistant principal to principal. And many states are taking advantage of the optional 3% leadership set-aside in ESSA to work toward that. So I just wanna close by saying that we have a series of research reports on our little jump drives that you may have received when you came in, also on our website that go into greater depth on the points I've made here. We also have a one-pager on what states can do that's on your jump drive. And we're committed to supporting on these issues. So please feel free to reach out. Thank you.