About Teacher Turnover Calculations

Understanding the Cost of Replacing a Teacher

Replacing a teacher requires significant resources and personnel time. Although the costs within a district or school can vary substantially, the most significant costs are those associated with separation, recruiting and hiring new teachers, and training replacements. Below is a list of activities that are often associated with replacing a teacher, all of which have related financial and personnel costs.

* Denotes a high-leverage recruitment and retention strategy.

SEPARATION COSTS

Standard practice

Removing teachers from payroll and health plans and processing eligible refunds of retirement contributions
Paying substitutes to cover for mid-year departures
Conducting exit surveys*

RECRUITMENT AND HIRING COSTS

Standard practice

Advertising open positions
Traveling to job fairs and interview sites
Responding to inquiries from prospective candidates, corresponding with applicants, and drafting offer/rejection letters
Scheduling site visits and conducting interviews*
Conducting criminal background checks, health record checks, credentialing checks, and reference checks
Adding new teachers to payroll and benefit programs

Additional activities

Designing and developing advertisements and recruitment web pages
Working with teacher preparation programs to identify strong candidates*
Coordinating recruitment activities with state programs
Traveling overseas for recruitment
Offering new hires signing or relocation bonuses, housing and moving allowances, and rent or day care subsidies
Meeting with candidates and members of search committees
Completing affirmative action paperwork
Purchasing equipment for digital fingerprinting
Archiving teacher records

TRAINING COSTS

Standard practice

Introducing new hires and teacher transfers to school goals and governance procedures
Coordinating and staffing mentoring programs and related forms of structured induction, including stipends for mentors and payments to substitutes who replace mentors with reduced teaching loads*
Onboarding workshops and professional development activities*

Additional activities

Holding welcome events to integrate new hires into the school community
Providing new-employee orientation
Traveling to training sessions and professional meetings
Instructing new hires on the goals and specific elements of the state’s testing programs
Training mentor teachers
Paying substitutes while teachers attend training activities
Reducing teaching loads for beginning teachers
Reimbursing tuition and fees for additional induction or professional development

A note about our district estimates

To derive our estimates, we averaged individual estimates from several studies[i] by district type and adjusted each estimate for inflation. These averages by district type provide an approximate plausible value to help districts and their stakeholders begin to understand their own costs.

[i] Barnes, G., Crowe, E., & Schaefer, B. (2007). The cost of teacher turnover in five school districts: A pilot study. National Commission on Teaching and America's Future; Milanowski, A., & Odden, A. (2007). A new approach to the cost of teacher turnover. Seattle, WA: School Finance Redesign Project, Center on Reinventing Public Education; Shockley, R., Guglielmino, P., & Watlington, E. J. (2006). A national crisis in teacher education: What are the costs? Pearson Education.