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2024 Update: What's the Cost of Teacher Turnover?

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Let’s Talk: Starting a Conversation About Teacher Turnover

High teacher turnover undermines student achievement, and replacing teachers consumes valuable staff time and resources. Turnover also has an important impact on teacher shortages because most open positions each year are created by teachers leaving the profession before retirement. The research used to create the teacher turnover calculator indicates that larger districts can, on average, spend nearly $25,000 on replacing a departing teacher when school and district expenses related to separation, recruitment, hiring, and training are factored in. High turnover can have additional fiscal impacts, as the investments made for hiring do not pay their full dividend when teachers leave within a few years.

This tool can be used to estimate the cost of teacher turnover in a school or district and to inform local conversations about how to attract, support, and retain a high-quality teacher workforce. High-leverage strategies are highlighted below. For more details on the methodology of the calculator and the underlying studies used to estimate the cost of teacher turnover, please see the technical supplement.

Ways to Reduce Teacher Turnover

Local, state, and federal education leaders and policymakers all have an important role to play in addressing high teacher turnover and perennial staffing difficulties. Research points to the following strategies as key to building a strong and stable teacher workforce. 

Strengthen Preparation — Teachers with comprehensive preparation stay in teaching longer.

  • Partner with local teacher preparation programs to identify and develop talented candidates through comprehensive preparation, which increases teachers’ efficacy and makes it more likely they will remain in the profession.
  • Develop residency programs to recruit candidates into high-need teaching fields. Residents work for a full year as paid apprentices to expert mentor teachers while earning a credential, and pay back the investment with a term of service to the sponsoring district.
  • Create Grow Your Own programs, which recruit individuals from the community and provide financial support as they prepare to become teachers.
  • Increase state and federal investments to make comprehensive teacher preparation debt-free by expanding service scholarships, improving loan forgiveness programs, and covering the costs of comprehensive preparation.

Expand and Strengthen Support for New Teachers — New teachers who are well supported become effective sooner and stay in teaching longer than those who lack mentoring and support.

  • Increase local, state, and federal investment in quality mentoring and induction programs and provide them free to all new teachers.
  • Offer a reduced teaching load and collaborative planning time to new teachers.
  • Train mentors and support them by compensating them for their time and providing them with an ongoing learning community.

Improve Working Conditions — Working conditions are a key reason teachers stay or leave.

  • Invest in the development of high-quality principals by providing them with professional learning opportunities that support their ability to create the productive, collaborative work settings that are important to retaining teachers.
  • Survey teachers to inform and guide improvements to the teaching and learning environment.
  • Foster greater collaboration by scheduling time for common planning and shared learning opportunities, including the development of professional learning communities.
  • Ensure teachers are involved in instructional decision-making and school policymaking, which provide opportunities for teacher leadership.

Increase Compensation — Compensation matters both to recruitment and retention.

  • Increase salaries to be competitive with other occupations and equitable across districts.
  • Retain experienced teachers by offering additional compensation to teachers who assume mentoring and leadership roles.
  • Equalize students’ access to well-qualified teachers through equitable school funding strategies and by providing stipends to teachers who teach in high-need fields and schools.
  • Increase net compensation through tax credits, housing subsidies, and student loan-forgiveness programs.

For more on strategies to address teacher turnover, see:

Suggested citation: Learning Policy Institute. (2024). 2024 update: What's the cost of teacher turnover? [Interactive tool]. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/2024-whats-cost-teacher-turnover

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