In a recent report, the National Commission on Teaching and AmericaÆs Future (NCTAF) concluded that the teacher shortage in the United States is not due to a lack of qualified teachers but rather due to schoolsÆs failure to retain teachers. As the report stated, ô[o]ur inability to support high quality teaching im many of our schools is driven not by too few teachers entering the profession, but too many leaving it for other jobs (NCTAF, 2003, p. 6). Thus, the report concludes that teacher retention has become a national crisis that undermines teacher quality and causes teacher shortages (NCTAF, 2003, p. 8).
The extent of the problem of teacher retention can be seen in troubling trends over the last two decades. Though it might come as a surprise to many people who vaguely recall hearing about a ôteacher shortageö over the last few years, the report found that the supply of teachers actually increased ôdramaticallyö during the 1990s. For example, the report notes that the graduation rate of new teachers grew 90 percent between 1984 and 1999. The problem, however, is that the attrition rate of new teachers increased even more dramatically.
In 1999-2000, schools hired 232,000 teachers who had not been teaching the year before. But the next year, the schools lost 287,000 teachers - a net loss of 24 percent (NCTAF, 2003, p. 8). In fact, the report analyzed data from the National Center for Education Statistics and concluded that approximately one-third of new teachers leave the profession within the first three years. That number grows to one-half within the first five years (NCTAF, 2003, p. 10). In low-income urban schools, the attrition rate is even more alarming: almost one-third higher than that of all other schools (NCTAF, 2003, p. 10).
As the report notes, the most long-term effect of high attrition rates among teachers is the erosion of teaching quality and student achievement (NCTAF, 2003, p. 14). In low-income sc...