Careers in Motion: A Longitudinal Retention Study of Role Changing Patterns Among Urban Educators
Download
PDF (808 KB, 58 Pages)
Karen Hunter Quartz, Kimberly Barraza Lyons, Katherine Masyn, Brad Olsen, Lauren Anderson, Andrew Thomas, Joanna Goode, Eileen Lai Horng
Teacher retention, especially of qualified teachers within high poverty schools, has been an issue of local, national and international concern. Prominent school staffing research regards attrition as a dichotomous variable measurable at the system level - stay in versus leave the teaching profession. A variety of researchers have complicated this approach by including school migration patterns alongside attrition from teaching to capture the organizational costs of teachers moving from school to school. Utilizing data from a six-year longitudinal study of over a thousand highly qualified urban educators in their first through ninth career year, this paper extends existing retention research to include a new category of career movement - role changing. The authors document the proportion of teacher career movement that is attributable to leaving teaching versus moving into a variety of non-teaching professional roles in the field of education. In this paper, they present evidence that describes these role changing patterns and analyzes them, using qualitative and quantitative data, within the broader context of teacher professionalism and career advancement. The authors argue that movement among roles within the educational workforce is an essential piece to the retention puzzle and that better understanding of this movement is essential for crafting policies and incentives to keep highly qualified educators rooted in careers that serve the nation's most underserved students.