Teacher Pensions Blog

We tend to talk about teacher retention as a national problem. The stat that “half of all teachers leave within 5 years” may have seeped into public consciousness, but it’s not true today and was never quite right anyway.

We also intuitively understand that teacher retention varies across districts and schools. We need to spend more time grappling with the consequences of those variations—teacher turnover affects everything from student learning to teacher retirement savings—but we also need to spend more time quantifying where it exists and what it looks like.

To see how much teacher experience levels vary across states, I ran the table below from NCES’ Schools and Staffing Survey. Each column shows the percentage of the state’s teacher workforce falling into various bands based on the number of years they had served in public schools. The data come from the 2011-12 survey administration, so they represent each state’s teaching workforce in that particular school year.

Nationally, 23.6 percent of the nation’s public school teachers had five or fewer years of experience. The largest category was teachers with 11-20 years of experience; slightly less than one-third of all public school teachers fell into that group. Fourteen percent of teachers had 21-30 years of experience, and another 5.7 percent had 31 or more years of experience.

Although state totals tended to cluster around the national averages, there are some extreme outliers on either end. Delaware, Louisiana, Alaska, Mississippi, Maryland, Arizona, the District of Columbia, Utah, and Hawaii all had comparatively inexperienced workforces. On the other end, Montana, Vermont, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, North Dakota, Wyoming, and South Dakota had relatively more experienced teachers. Other states, like Rhode Island and Nevada, had higher concentrations of teachers in that middle band of experience, meaning they had comparatively few newcomers and few long-term veterans.

 

Percentage of Teachers By Experience Levels (full-time, public schools only)

State

5 years or less

6-10 years

11-20 years

21-30 years

31 or more years

Alabama

19.5

25.4

33.7

16.0

5.5

Alaska

30.2

19.6

33.5

11.9

4.8*

Arizona

32.7

25.7

25.2

12.5

3.8*

Arkansas

26.2

18.3

29.3

15.7

10.4

California

19.6

24.6

37.3

13.0

5.5

Colorado

27.0

25.8

35.5

8.2

3.5*

Connecticut

21.5

22.5

34.0

12.9

9.1*

Delaware

30.0

23.3

28.7

13.5

4.4*

District of Columbia

34.8

25.4

23.7

9.8*

6.4*

Florida

25.8

26.7

28.0

14.9

4.6

Georgia

19.4

26.5

35.5

14.2

4.3

Hawaii

43.0

29.1*

15.4*

10.5*

2.0*

Idaho

25.2

20.1

31.6

17.9

5.2*

Illinois

25.9

25.7

30.1

13.5

4.8

Indiana

24.3

16.4

31.4

14.9

12.9

Iowa

20.3

21.5

29.8

17.3

11.1

Kansas

26.2

18.8

28.2

18.9

7.9

Kentucky

24.7

23.3

34.0

15.3

2.7*

Louisiana

30.1

18.3

27.9

15.8

8.0

Maine

17.6

18.9

33.7

17.8

12.0

Maryland

32.6

21.0

25.4

14.9

6.1

Massachusetts

26.5

25.7

31.0

11.7

5.0*

Michigan

18.9

25.6

38.1

13.9

3.6

Minnesota

21.2

21.3

36.1

15.4

6.0

Mississippi

30.2

25.3

27.5

12.7

4.3*

Missouri

27.2

25.9

29.0

14.0

3.9

Montana

25.5

19.4

27.7

16.8

10.6

Nebraska

24.0

17.8

31.7

16.4

10.0

Nevada

17.6

30.7

36.1

12.4

3.2*

New Hampshire

22.0

26.1

27.7

15.6

8.6

New Jersey

23.3

24.8

33.8

13.6

4.5

New Mexico

21.6

24.0

33.8

16.2*

4.3

New York

16.5

26.4

38.9

14.3

3.8

North Carolina

24.8

24.8

31.1

16.1

3.2*

North Dakota

24.8

16.0

28.0

20.6

10.6

Ohio

19.6

21.3

37.0

15.4

6.7

Oklahoma

25.2

17.6

33.7

16.1

7.3

Oregon

23.0

28.7

29.5

15.4

3.5*

Pennsylvania

22.4

26.0

32.1

13.1

6.3

Rhode Island

18.6

27.5

39.1

13.5

1.4*

South Carolina

21.0

23.1

28.8

16.8

10.3

South Dakota

21.7

14.5

31.7

20.6

11.5

Tennessee

28.9

20.6

29.6

15.1

5.7

Texas

26.6

27.8

26.6

13.9

5.0

Utah

36.6

24.2

20.1

13.4

5.7*

Vermont

23.2

16.3

33.0

18.2

9.4

Virginia

22.4

25.6

28.0

15.7

8.3

Washington

21.4

21.9

30.3

18.8

7.6

West Virginia

27.8

20.2

25.7

18.9

7.4

Wisconsin

24.3

19.2

37.2

14.3

5.0

Wyoming

21.3

16.1

30.9

17.0

14.6

National Average

23.6

24.3

32.0

14.4

5.7

*Interpret with caution. Sample size is too small to provide stable estimates.

To be clear, these results are not just about teacher retention rates. They also reflect hiring trends. States that hire more teachers than they lose through attrition will tend to have a less experienced workforce, even if their retention rates for individual teachers stay the same. (This is a big part of the why the national teacher workforce has changed so dramatically. As districts cut pupil/teacher ratios from almost 19:1 in the early 1980s down to almost 16:1 today, they hired many more teachers than they lost. By making the choice for lower pupil/ teacher ratios and class sizes, it was inevitable that we’d end up with a less-experienced workforce.) I’ll come back to this distinction in subsequent posts.

These figures are merely a snapshot in time and do not indicate how each state’s workforce is changing over time. But the data suggest that some states should be investing much more heavily in teacher recruitment and retention efforts, while other states may have a harder time dealing with the coming retirements of the Baby Boomer generation.

Policymakers would be wise to consult this sort of data to set priorities within their states or school districts. While we tend to talk about the “teaching profession” as monolithic, there are significant differences across and within states.