Giving Compass' Take:

• Researchers from the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research have found that novice teachers are more likely to have difficult workloads than experienced teachers. 

• How can funders help schools to better distribute their workloads? 

• Learn more about the challenges that new teachers face. 

In recent years, conversations about teachers have largely focused on teacher recruitment (e.g., Maranto & Shuls, 2012; Will, 2017), identifying effective teachers (e.g., Burnette, 2017; Hanushek & Rivkin, 2012), and holding teachers accountable for outcomes (e.g., Burnette, 2017; Dee & Wyckoff, 2015). While attention to these concerns stems directly from evidence about the importance of high quality teachers for students’ short- and longer-term outcomes (e.g., Chetty, Friedman, & Rockoff, 2014; Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge, 2016; Kraft, 2017) and concerns about teacher shortages (e.g., Dee & Goldhaber, 2017; Podolsky, Kini, Bishop, & DarlingHammond, 2016), these discussions often gloss over considerations of teacher retention and development. Retention and support of teachers, especially novice teachers, has critical implications for school operations and, in turn, student learning and achievement. For instance, teacher turnover imposes strains on school operations (Ronfeldt, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2013) and district resources (Milanowski & Odden, 2007). Because early-career teachers are substantially more likely to exit their schools and districts than are their more experienced colleagues (Keigher, 2010), efforts to improve novice teachers’ working conditions and support them through their first years of service are particularly important. A growing literature documents that novice teachers often experience more difficult initial working conditions and school contexts than do their more senior colleagues (Feng, 2010; Goldhaber, Lavery, & Theobald, 2015; Kraft & Papay, 2014), and that these contexts are likely associated with early-career teachers’ success and persistence in their jobs and the profession (Feng, 2010; Kraft & Papay, 2014). However, for the most part, efforts to characterize these contexts and isolate their most salient features suffer from limitations in the administrative datasets used and from potential biases stemming from reliance on teachers’ self-reports.

We find that relative to veterans, novice teachers, and especially teachers in their first two years in the classroom, are placed in classrooms and schools with higher instructional loads, less homophily, and lesser-qualified colleagues, though we find few differences in their professional cultures as measured by aggregate survey responses. Further, we find that, on average, teachers in placements with higher levels of instructional load have smaller contributions to student achievement on standardized tests, lower evaluation ratings, and lower attendance. Improvements in all four of our context measures uniquely predict higher levels of teacher 3 retention, due primarily to lower levels of school switching for veterans and lower rates of district exit among novices. Importantly, as with most of the extant research on novice teacher development, because they are not identified from exogenous variation in teachers’ contexts these results do not have a clear causal interpretation. Nevertheless, results point to avenues for future work and potential levers for change available to policymakers and school administrators.