What Happens When Large Numbers of Teachers Quit a School? And What Can Be Done?

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Teacher departures and shortages are a persistent problem in schools. Nationwide, approximately 16% of teachers leave each year — 8% move to other schools and the other 8% quit the profession entirely. Yet, these averages can mask a deeper staffing crisis at high-poverty schools, where turnover rates are even higher. 

Consider Newton High School, located in a large metropolitan area in Texas, where an alarming 39% of teachers left their positions between spring 2020 and fall 2021. The principal hired replacements, many of whom were new to teaching, and then worked to build trust and a collective vision among her staff. Yet, before the next school year, another 43% of Newton’s teachers quit, restarting the cycle. Over four years, the high school lost and replaced 88% of its staff, leaving only 12% of the teachers who started teaching in the 2019-20 school year remaining by 2022-223. 

What happens to a school community when large numbers of teachers leave? High turnover negatively impacts student academic performance, in part because of the loss of human capital: When teachers leave, they take their knowledge and skills with them. This is especially damaging to schools when the replacement is less experienced, which is often the case in high-poverty schools.

Turnover can also erode the social capital— the relationships and culture — that holds a school together. We designed a four-year longitudinal study of four high schools to investigate how turnover influences how teams work together; what happens to reform efforts, which often take years to reach fruition; and, perhaps most importantly, what schools are doing, or could be doing, to cope with negative effects.

Turnover weighs down schools. Strong relationships and shared culture are important if schools are to improve by engaging in ongoing inquiry and revising their practices from year to year. When teachers leave, these bonds weaken. Teachers lose close colleagues, making it harder to collaborate on curriculum or seek trusted advice and support. As one teacher at Newton said, “It’s building those relationships again, and then they leave.”

This can discourage teachers from investing in relationships, further accelerating turnover, and disrupts teamwork as well. Teachers spend valuable meeting time just getting on the same page, which limits their ability to learn from past lessons that were effective and to reflect on which instructional strategies worked, and why. One Newton teacher said her team “can’t build anything because we can’t keep people here for more than one year. You’re constantly starting over from scratch.”

But schools can adopt strategies to mitigate these harmful effects. One strategy is to track team progress from year to year. For example, at Rivera High School, which had high turnover among English teachers, well-organized calendars and a shared bank of lesson plans gave educators an alternative to reinventing the wheel multiple times, as they had in the past. New teachers could draw from this resource rather than starting from scratch. This helped them improve instruction and overall student learning experiences.

Another effective strategy is maintaining stability in teacher teams whenever possible. Principals can unintentionally make the problem worse by shifting teacher assignments frequently — a form of within-school churn. Even a single teacher’s departure can have big ripple effects, eroding team progress from the prior year.  The most stable teams we observed could build upon the previous year’s work to reach new heights. 

Of course, schools can only do so much to mitigate the harmful effects of turnover — the issue also requires action from policymakers. The problems caused by teacher turnover are not equally distributed across schools: turnover disproportionately impacts schools serving low-income students and children of color. It’s a systemic problem that exacerbates and perpetuates inequality between schools. Schools that have high turnover rates should receive additional funding to help stabilize their teaching and administrative staff. Accountability measures must also be adjusted: Rather than punishing schools for turnover-related issues, policymakers should offer targeted support. Additional public transparency around turnover data is needed to reveal the depth of teacher losses — which are obscured by the typically reported annual turnover rates. 

Our data were collected before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, which might have exacerbated turnover. In fact, today, a wider number of schools are experiencing high rates of turnover that was — prior to the pandemic — once unique to higher-poverty schools. But we believe our findings apply even when turnover is less severe because our study demonstrates that even the loss of one to two teachers can have a detrimental impact.

To be sure, some turnover can be good for schools, as when new teachers bring fresh perspectives or disgruntled educators leave. However, we found few instances of this in our study. Instead, we saw high rates of turnover break up social networks, erode trust and diminish institutional knowledge. Turnover prevents schools and districts from implementing long-term improvements that engender hope and optimism in parents, policymakers and community members. You simply cannot build a house on shaky ground. It is past time to recognize and address this problem head-on and create stable, thriving learning environments that empower students and teachers to succeed. 

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