| John Luczak
Stanford University
Who will teach in the 21st century? Beginning teacher training routes and attrition rates
FINAL REPORT:
Empirical studies have shown that certain factors (e.g., teacher characteristics, salaries, working conditions) influence teacher attrition. There is a new sense in policy circles in recent years that teacher preparation and induction programs may also have an effect on teach attrition rates. However, few studies have examined the influence of preparation and induction on attrition, and much of this research has not been very well designed. My comprehensive model included a number of contextual lenses that accounted for life cycle/career stage factors, working conditions, and school-level characteristics. In addition, the study also took into account interaction effects between teacher characteristics, preparation, and induction in order to determine if different types of teachers are better served by different preparation and induction experiences.
The study's sample consisted of first-year public school teachers (N = 2,219) who completed the 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). The existence of a new question on training routes provided a unique opportunity to use the SASS data to delve into this topic for the first time. Initial plans were made to examine the impact of different training routes (e.g., alternative routes vs. traditional routes) on teacher attrition, but there was significant variation in the type of training teachers received in each route. Therefore, the study focused on the actual preparation experiences of these teachers, which were combined into one teach preparation power rating. A similar power rating was created based on a teacher's induction experiences, and a number of logistic regression models were used to measure the influence of preparation, induction, and other factors that previous research had found to influence teachers' attrition decisions. The preparation power rating was significant in all of the models, which the induction power rating became less significant once working condition factors were added to the final model. Several teacher and school-level characteristics were also found to influence attrition, including the subject area and gender of teachers, whether or not they had a master's degree in a subject area, the percentage of minority students in a teacher's school, and their salary.
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