About Teacher Turnover Calculations

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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.

Featured Resources

Report

Teacher Turnover: Why It Matters and What We Can Do About It

Aug 16 2017
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As students return to school this year, many will be in one of the more than 100,000 classrooms across the country staffed by an instructor not fully qualified to teach. This shortage of qualified teachers is almost entirely due to teachers leaving the profession and about 2/3 of teachers who leave do so for reasons other than retirement. This study looks at who is leaving, why, who is impacted, and policy considerations.
Interactive Tool

Understanding Teacher Shortages: 2018 Update

Aug 24 2018
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How states experience the teacher shortage depends on their unique mix of policies, conditions, and even cost of living. This interactive map provides a state-by-state look at key indicators of teacher supply and demand and the equitable distribution of teachers. States and the District of Columbia receive a teaching attractiveness rating, based on compensation, teacher turnover, working conditions, and qualifications, and a teacher equity rating, based on the distribution of uncertified and inexperienced teachers.
Report

Solving the Teacher Shortage: How to Attract and Retain Excellent Educators

Sep 15 2016
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High rates of teacher turnover contribute to shortages and undermine academic progress. This report reviews an extensive body of research on teacher recruitment and retention, identifies key factors that influence decisions to enter, stay in, or leave the profession, and offers evidence-based recommendations for local, state, and federal policymakers.