Latest news with #DanGoldhaber
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Teacher Turnover Spiked During COVID. But It's Now Fallen for 2 Years in a Row
According to the latest data, teacher turnover rates have been coming down for the last two years. That finding comes from a hodgepodge of state documents and research reports. With the caveat that those sources may count things in slightly different ways and at different time periods, the pattern that emerges is consistent. In fall 2020, the country was still in the thick of the COVID pandemic. The economy was on uncertain footing, many schools stayed remote and teacher turnover rates fell. That is, more educators stayed put. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter But as the world began to open up, teachers started leaving in higher numbers, first in 2021 and then again in 2022. That fall, the country hit modern highs in the percentage of teachers leaving their positions. Related But those moves were temporary. Last year, Wall Street Journal (and former 74) reporter Matt Barnum found that teacher turnover rates fell in 2023 for each of the 10 states for which he was able to find data. Not all the changes were big, but the trends were all falling. For fall 2024, the current school year, I was able to find data from six states: Colorado, Delaware, Arizona, Texas, South Carolina and Massachusetts. All but Texas experienced year-over-year declines in teacher turnover. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics' Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey shows similar trends nationally. For a broad category that includes all state and local government education employees, employee quit rates surged in 2022, fell in 2023 and then decreased again in 2024. Similarly, the American School District Panel from RAND found turnover rates falling among teachers and principals in the fall of 2023 and 2024. Notably, the biggest declines were seen in the places where turnover had surged the most during the initial pandemic years. You could squint at the data closely and note that turnover rates are still a bit higher than where they were pre-pandemic. But zoom out, and the numbers look broadly similar to historical trends. For example, Dan Goldhaber and Roddy Theobald looked at teacher turnover rates in Washington state from 1984-85 to 2021-22 and found that total turnover, including teachers who left the profession, switched schools, or left teaching but stayed in education, has ranged from about 14% to 20% in Washington since the mid-1980s. It did indeed hit a modern peak (of 19.8%) in 2021-22, but Goldhaber and Theobald's more recent work in Washington showed turnover was again starting to fall in 2023. How should we put these figures in context? First, despite its recent surge, public education has maintained lower quit rates than any other industry except for the federal government. In any given month, less than 2% of public education employees leave their jobs, compared with rates twice that high in the private sector. Within public education, teachers tend to have lower turnover rates than other employees do. Colorado, for example, has published turnover data by role since 2007. The chart below shows the results. Teachers (in red) tend to have similar turnover rates as principals (light blue), but those are much lower than the turnover rates in other roles. Paraprofessionals, in dark blue, typically have turnover rates that are 10 to 15 percentage points higher than teachers do. How should we square this with soft data coming out of teacher surveys? Those results are messier, but they could fit the same basic trajectory. One high-quality study out of Illinois found that teacher working conditions worsened substantially from 2021 to 2023. And research looking at a range of survey and pipeline indicators suggested that the state of the profession was at 50-year lows as of data ending a couple years ago. More recently, Education Week's Teacher Morale Index showed a significant rebound in 2024-25 over the prior year. Related None of this is to say that policymakers should be content with the status quo. And indeed, there continue to be problem spots. Rural schools, those in low-income areas and certain teaching roles, especially in special education, tend to have higher turnover rates than others. But those call for more specialized and tailored solutions rather than universal policies. Moreover, policymakers can at least take heart that the worst of the teacher turnover surge appears to be in the rearview mirror.
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
5 Years Later: My Pandemic Predictions on Learning Loss, Disengagement and More
It turns out that educational disruptions are bad for kids. Perhaps you already knew that? In a series of posts in 2020 and 2021, I wrote about the research on past educational disruptions and predicted what they might mean for children going through COVID-19. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter This month marks the fifth anniversary of the pandemic. What have we learned since then? Here's my analysis of what I got right and what I got wrong: Prediction No. 1: Lost learning time will translate into lost learning. As I wrote in 2021, 'Years and sometimes even decades after a disruption in schooling, researchers are able to detect noticeable differences in student outcomes.' COVID's effects were so large that they showed up immediately. And they were worse for students who missed more school. For example, a recent international analysis in Nature concluded that, 'countries with the shortest closures experienced relatively small losses' and 'countries with the longest closures, experienced losses of … 9 to 12 months of learning.' Here in the States, a team of researchers led by University of Washington economist Dan Goldhaber found that remote instruction was the 'primary driver of widening achievement gaps.' Predictions No. 2 and 3: The losses are likely to be large. Their full extent may not show up immediately, but small losses can grow over time. In 2020 and 2021, I was looking at localized events like an earthquake in Pakistan or teacher strikes in Argentina. Researchers found noticeable negative effects from these events, but there was no modern precedent for the scale and length of the COVID-related disruptions. Related Here in the States, the average student fell behind by the equivalent of half a grade level in math and one-third of a grade level in reading. Today, with federal COVID funding ending, student performance is still far below where it was. Prediction No. 4: Learning losses are likely to be larger in younger children. Based on prior research, I anticipated that kids in middle school and high school might transition to remote learning better than their younger siblings. But it's hard to know which age group ultimately struggled the most. ACT scores for high schoolers fell to 30-year lows, but so did fourth and eighth grade math and reading scores. Curriculum Associates data point to ongoing gaps among younger kids, while NWEA data suggest middle schoolers are the furthest behind. In other words, there's no biggest loser here; achievement is down across the board. Prediction No. 5: Math scores are likely to drop the most. Math skills are generally picked up at school, while in English Language Arts, proficiency is more closely linked to a student's home environment. That shows up in the data: Math scores declined more when students were learning remotely and have shown more signs of recovery since then. Meanwhile, reading scores have continued to decline. That could partly reflect broader societal trends, but state leaders should be looking toward Mississippi and other Southern states for ideas on how to get those back on track. Prediction No. 6: Beyond academic losses, students are at risk of disconnecting from education. In 1916, schools in many parts of the country closed for weeks in the midst of a polio outbreak. Researchers later found that those shutdowns caused some students to drop out of school and never return. More than a century later, COVID magnified this to an extreme, changing the relationship kids had with school and leading to huge spikes in chronic absenteeism. While those rates have come down a bit from their highs in 2022, I didn't anticipate just how much COVID would break cultural norms around school attendance, and how hard it would be for schools to restore those (good) habits. Prediction No, 7: Higher-income students may not suffer any noticeable effects. I underappreciated how much a district's decisions about in-person versus remote schooling would have on all students. The Goldhaber paper found that, 'even at low-poverty (high income) schools, students fell behind growth expectations when their schools went remote or hybrid.' Related Still, higher-income and higher-performing students have managed the post-pandemic recovery better than others. For example, in eighth-grade math, the top 10% of students made noticeable gains from 2022 to 2024, while scores continued to fall for lower-performing students. At the high school level, the percentage of students who took and passed an Advanced Placement test dipped in the wake of COVID but has now surpassed pre-pandemic levels. Similarly, the percentage of high school students who are also taking credit-bearing college courses is hitting all-time highs. In other words, even as average achievement scores are down, many more high school students are finding ways to take more advanced courses. However, this leads to … Prediction No. 8: Low-income and disadvantaged students will suffer the biggest losses. The virus may have been the same, but it did not affect everyone equally. As I noted last year, all kids missed more school in the wake of the pandemic, but those increases varied substantially. For example, the kids with the best attendance records missed about one extra day of school per year, while the kids with the worst absentee rates missed multiple weeks worth of school time. The same trends appear in achievement scores: The bottom has fallen out across a variety of tests, grades and subjects. Prediction No 9: The COVID-induced recession will affect children, families and schools in many ways. The pandemic's effects on students have the potential to be long-lasting. For example, the study of teacher strikes in Argentina found that the children of strike-affected students were more likely than their peers to be held back in school. That is, the effects passed on to later generations. But beyond the students themselves, no one could have anticipated all the downstream effects of the COVID school closures. They are at least part of the story behind public school enrollment declines, families moving away from blue states and urban areas, and declining satisfaction with the nation's public schools, not to mention broader political realignments. Prediction No. 10: Without any action, the losses are likely to have long-term consequences. To its credit, Congress provided states and school districts with $190 billion in 2020 and 2021. As hard as it is to fathom, the best research suggests it would take a lot more money to get kids fully back on track. The achievement declines were that large. The money is now gone, and the national conversation has moved on. But I'm struck by what I wrote a few years ago: that if policymakers don't act to get kids back on track, they will be, 'condemning a generation of children to worse academic and economic outcomes throughout their life.'
