Today the Illinois Education Research Center (based at SIU-Edwardsville) released a new report, Leaving Schools or Leaving the Profession: Setting Illinois' Record Straight on New Teacher Attrition.

The report counters the endlessly repeated statistic that half of all teachers leave within their first five years, pointing out that 1/3 of teachers who leave in the first five years ultimately return to teaching, and if these returners are accounted for, the rate of loss shrinks to 27%. (The rate could actually be even less, given that they were unable to track teachers to schools in other states or to private schools).

Interestingly, they found that highly educated teachers were most likely to leave their initial schools and the profession generally. While new teachers with masters degrees have tended to be a small proportion of the teaching force, the study points out, "as more academically strong teachers are recruited to disadvantaged schools, we can expect attrition rates to increase unless other conditions for working and learning also improve."

Oops, says the Chicago Sun Times. CPS has gone out of its way in the last ten years to increase the number of new teachers pulled from selective colleges and holding advanced degrees.

But here's the rub. New teachers with just such qualifications are among the most likely to leave...

Why are the best and brightest more likely to leave? For starters, they could face culture shock working in schools that may look far different from the ones they attended.

Plus, they are attractive to other schools -- be they more advantaged ones or suburban schools with higher top pay scales.

Susan Kurland, a CPS principle quoted in the Sun Times story offered another explanation:
"Possibly people with higher ACTs have higher expectations for themselves, and they find the failure to be more overwhelming than someone else. It's brutal."

If we (as teachers, as professional development providers) are committed to attracting well-educated critical thinkers to this profession, this study suggests that we need to be deliberate about how we go about keeping them in the profession. As someone who came into teaching with a masters degree from a fancy school, and left after four years, this all cuts very close to home for me and leaves me wondering what such measures would look like, and how to do this in a way that doesn't leave a bad taste of elitism in everyone's mouth.

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