Turnover Amongst Early Childhood Teachers

Although stability is particularly important for very young children, early childhood educational settings are likely more unstable than K-12 schools, in part due to low public funding for early childhood education (ECE). Daphna Bassok, Anna Markowitz, Katharine Sadowski, and I provide statewide estimates of turnover for ECE teachers, using unique administrative data from the state of Louisiana. We find that about one-third of ECE teachers observed are no longer teaching at the same program the following year; in comparison, about one-fifth of K-12 teachers leave their school each year. We are unable to find the majority of teachers leaving their program at another publicly-funded ECE program in Louisiana, suggesting that, in most cases, leaving the program results in workforce exit. We also note that teachers who leave have lower scores on a measure of classroom quality (the CLASS) than teachers who stay.

In another paper (published version here, public version here), we examine longer-term retention patterns, tracing a cohort of ECE teachers observed in the fall of 2016 to the fall of 2019. We find that only 39% of ECE teachers remain at their initial program of observation after three years. These patterns mask large amounts of variability by sector: while nearly half of school-based prekindergarten teachers are observed at the same program after three years of teaching, only 30% of teachers at child care centers are observed at the same program after three years. We also note higher levels of turnover for teachers of toddlers and new teachers, regardless of sector.