Giving Compass' Take:

• Chalkbeat examines a trio of new studies from North Carolina that shows negative student outcomes in schools with a high teacher turnover rate during the middle of the school year.

• What does this tell us about the importance of training and retaining quality educators? How can we make sure there is more stability for students, especially in lower-income areas?

• Here's how the most effective principals strategically retain their best teachers.

The consequences of teacher churn were apparent to Esperanza Vazquez, a mother of two from New York City.

“I had an experience with my son where he had a new teacher every week in math,” she told Chalkbeat recently. “That doesn’t help students.”

Now new research backs up Vazquez’s experience, documenting for perhaps the first time the steep consequences for students after teachers leave a classroom in middle of the school year.

The finding comes in a trio of new studies focusing on North Carolina. Together, they suggest that ill effects of teacher turnover identified in previous research may be driven largely by midyear departures; that those consequences extend even to students in the same grade whose teachers stay on; and that midyear turnover may be more common than previously thought, especially in schools serving more students of color and those from low-income families.

“While it is possible for turnover to be beneficial for school systems, an extensive body of research points to the ways that teacher turnover disrupts … the continuity of a child’s learning experiences, particularly in underserved schools,” write researchers Gary Henry of Vanderbilt and Christopher Redding of the University of Florida in one of the papers.

Read the full article about teacher turnover hurting students by Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat.