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

What is the challenge?

High teacher turnover undermines student achievement, and replacing teachers consumes valuable staff time and resources. Given the considerable time, energy, and costs of finding replacement teachers and providing them with training and support, teacher turnover affects school districts’ bottom lines. This financial toll may hit even harder if districts face tighter budgets in coming years.

Turnover is one of the key causes of teacher shortages because most open positions each year are created by teachers leaving the profession before retirement. Only about one fifth of teachers leaving their profession are retiring; other leavers cite reasons like pursuing other careers, needing a higher salary, and dissatisfaction with teaching or their specific position. Teacher retention can be addressed with the right policies and resources.

What is the cost of teacher turnover?

LPI’s calculator, “What’s the Cost of Teacher Turnover?,” provides an interactive way to estimate the financial cost of teacher turnover, with estimated costs for districts of different sizes according to their student enrollment. The per-teacher estimates are based on studies that calculated the financial costs of the separation, recruiting, hiring, and training activities associated with teacher turnover in nine districts. These studies indicate that turnover can cost nearly $25,000 per teacher in large districts, on average. Practitioners and policymakers can estimate the cost of teacher turnover in their school or district and then use those data to make informed investments in policies that attract, support, and retain a high-quality teacher workforce.

What are recommended strategies for reducing teacher turnover?

Local, state, and federal education leaders and policymakers have an important role in addressing high teacher turnover and perennial staffing difficulties. Research points to the following key strategies.

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 length of time in the profession.
   
• Develop residency programs to recruit candidates into high-need teaching fields and locations. Residents work for a full year as paid apprentices to expert mentor teachers while engaged in rigorous coursework 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 and loan forgiveness programs and covering preparation costs.

Expand and Strengthen Support for New Teachers. New teachers who are mentored and 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 mentor teachers and support them by compensating them for their time.

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

• Invest in developing high-quality principals by providing them with professional learning opportunities that support their ability to create the productive, collaborative work settings important to teacher retention.
   
• 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.
   
• Provide opportunities for teacher leadership by involving them in instructional decision-making and school policymaking.

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 when they assume mentoring and leadership roles.
   
• Equalize students’ access to well-qualified teachers through equitable school funding strategies and by providing stipends to teachers in high-need fields and schools.
   
• Increase net compensation through tax credits, housing subsidies, and student loan–forgiveness programs.

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2024 Update: What’s the Cost of Teacher Turnover? (fact sheet) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.