Study finds late-hired teachers likely to leave
By Sarah D. Sparks/Education Week
Teachers hired after the start of the school year are twice as likely to leave their schools—or the profession altogether—within a year, leading to higher staffing costs for districts that delay their hiring, according to a statewide study of teachers in Michigan. In what is believed to be the first study to connect teacher turnover to the timing of teachers’ hiring, researchers from Michigan State University, in East Lansing, and Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., used Michigan’s state longitudinal personnel database to study 9,306 core academic teachers hired at more than 5,000 schools statewide between 2003-04 and 2007-08. The study, presented at the annual Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness meeting in Washington this month, found 12 percent of those teachers started work at least once after class had already begun for the year. (more...)