Giving Compass' Take:

• Education Next examines a recent report about the high turnover rate among public school teachers and attempts to identify the causes, including a lack of resources.

• How might funders help find solutions? What can we do to train and retain high-quality K-12 educators across the US?

• Here's what teachers in Los Angeles are thinking about as a strike looms.

During the news lull between Christmas and New Years, the Wall Street Journal published an alarmist piece about the high rate of teachers and other public educators quitting their jobs. Reporters Michelle Hackman and Erick Morath examined Labor Department data on employee turnover during the first ten months of 2018 and found that educators were exiting at the rate of 83 per 10,000 per month, which would work out to almost one in ten over the course of a full year. This, they noted, was the most since job departures began getting tracked in 2001, although they cautioned that it didn’t necessarily mean all were quitting public education altogether; some number of them were changing schools, relocating, etc.

It’s worrying, though, especially when this turnover is combined with the teacher shortages that many districts (and charter and private schools) are facing, creating an absolute inability to fill some jobs with qualified individuals.

Yet making sense of these data requires some context and additional explanation. The journalists provided a bit of the former when they noted that the overall rate of turnover among all American workers during that period — 231 per 10,000 per month — was almost triple the rate for public educators. This, too, turns out to be a seventeen-year high. And it’s a lot worse in other fields. Whereas close to 2 percent of educators quit monthly, other state and local employees have been leaving their jobs at almost twice that rate; for those in the “leisure and hospitality” fields, it’s closer to thrice.

Read the full article about addressing high rates of teacher turnover by Chester E. Finn, Jr. at Education Next.