Teacher mobility, or teacher turnover, has long garnered warranted attention as a critical educational equity gap. And the unprecedented interruptions to school-based learning and the trials of navigating remote and hybrid instruction due to the Covid-19 pandemic have heightened concerns about the stability of the teacher workforce and the potential of a pending teacher shortage across the U.S., state of Pennsylvania, and locally in Allegheny County.
Using personnel records from the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE), this Allegheny County Education Research (ACER) project, takes a closer look at teacher mobility in the region by examining six years of data leading up to the pandemic.
Key findings:
- On average, 12% of Allegheny County public school teachers were mobile in a year, similar to the state overall, but lower than the national average. The county average includes a wide range among school districts that averaged from 3% to a high of 30% teacher mobility, and individual schools that averaged from 1% to 41%.
- Early career educators and late career educators were the most mobile.
- Teachers of color in Allegheny County experienced higher teacher mobility than White educators.
- Students of color and students with economic disadvantage were disproportionately enrolled in schools with higher teacher mobility.
- Schools with higher average teacher mobility rates had lower average passing rates on all state standardized tests.
- Allegheny County charter schools had higher teacher mobility rates than district schools, and these trends held across each band of teacher tenure.
- Nearly half of all teachers who exited their schools in Allegheny County left public-school teaching in the state of PA while more than one third of mobile teachers moved to another school within the same district.
We discuss implications for policy and practice including a list of suggestions for educational leaders to reduce teacher mobility and eliminate the consequential disparities for students. Readers can also take a close look at teacher mobility for individual schools and districts in the county, which are available for download in an Excel file accompanying the report.
