Unlike the current study, the federal report that Ingersoll used didn’t track what happened to individual teachers after the first year. His finding was based on yearly approximations. The frequently cited statistic that “half of new teachers leave after five years” stems from a 2003 study, also using federal data, by Richard Ingersoll, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, who concluded that between 40 and 50 percent of teachers didn’t return for a sixth year of teaching – one year longer than the new study. The most exhaustive study of teacher attrition to date, the study followed 1,900 teachers, with follow-up paper questionnaires and contacts by phone. The totals include teachers who were let go and subsequently didn’t find a job teaching in another district. The longitudinal study, “Public School Teacher Attrition and Mobility in the First Five Years,” found that 10 percent of new teachers in 2007-08 didn’t return the following year, increasing cumulatively to 12 percent in year three, 15 percent in year four and 17 percent in the fifth year. This may be true in some districts, in some regions, but it wasn’t a nationwide trend in the five years studied, 2007-08 through 2011-12. Not extensively reported, the study conflicts with the widely held perception that new teachers experience a high turnover rate. Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics made the new finding in a study released in April. It’s 17 percent, according to the new research.
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