Employee turnover is a key area for public administration research, but one about which there is much still to be learned. Insights from an extensive body of research on employee turnover in a specifi c area of the public sector-public education-contributes to the understanding of employee mobility in public organizations more generally. Th e authors present a conceptual framework for understanding employee turnover that is grounded in economic theories of labor supply and demand, which have formed the foundation of many studies of teacher turnover. Th e main fi ndings of this body of work are documented, noting connections to the literature on public employee turnover, lessons that can be learned, and potential new areas for empirical inquiry for scholars of turnover in the public sector. Practitioner Points• An extensive research base on turnover among public school teachers can be useful for policy makers, practitioners, and researchers interested in the factors that lead some public employees to remain in their positions or organizations while others leave. • Public employee turnover has both labor supply and labor demand dimensions, meaning that fully understanding turnover requires consideration of both the factors that aff ect employees' work decisions, such as compensation and working conditions, and the factors that aff ect organizations' staffi ng decisions, such as budget reductions and connections between performance appraisal and job dismissal. • Aside from considering supply and demand, research on teacher turnover suggests a number of other insights for investigating public employee turnover more generally, including the importance of diff erentiating mobility and attrition, of gathering data on actual turnover and not just turnover intention, and of considering a wide variety of employee and organizational factors.O ver the past few decades, researchers have built a robust literature on turnover and mobility among public school teachers. Th is research base is large enough, in fact, to have sparked both synthetic review articles and meta-analyses summarizing its fi ndings (e.g., Borman and Dowling 2008; Guarino, Santibañez, and Daley 2006). A notable feature of the development of this literature is that, despite the fact that public school teachers are the most numerous public employees, it has occurred quite apart from the growth of the public administration literature on turnover among public employees more generally. Authored primarily by researchers in the fi elds of education and economics and published in journals aimed at those audiences, teacher turnover studies rarely seem to inform (or to be informed by) research into public sector turnover. Th e failure of these two bodies of work to speak to one another is unfortunate given similarities between schools and other public organizations, between teachers and other public professionals (Lipsky 1980), and even between annual rates of employee turnover in the two areas, which recent estimates place at 13 percent to 14 percent for federal emp...

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Law enforcement officers (often called school resource officers or SROs) are an increasingly common feature in schools across the United States. Although SROs’ roles vary across school contexts, there has been little examination of why. One possible explanation is that SROs perceive threats differently in different school contexts and that the racial composition of schools may motivate these differences. To investigate this possibility, this study analyzes interviews with 73 SROs from two different school districts that encompass schools with a variety of racial compositions. Across both districts, SROs perceived three major categories of threats: student-based, intruder-based, and environment-based threats. However, the focus and perceived severity of the threats varied across districts such that SROs in the district with a larger proportion of White students were primarily concerned about external threats (i.e., intruder-based and environment-based) that might harm the students, whereas SROs in the district with a larger proportion of Black students were primarily concerned with students themselves as threats. We consider how these results relate to understandings of school security, inequality among students, racially disparate experiences with school policing, and school and policing policy.

Teacher victimization is a relatively understudied phenomenon that the literature suggests may contribute to teacher turnover. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between teacher reports of victimization and teachers leaving the school and the profession. Using nationally representative data (n = 104,840) from the Schools and Staffing Survey, we examine the extent to which being threatened or attacked by students predicts higher rates of teacher turnover and whether this relationship differs due to factors that may promote teacher resilience. We utilize conditional multinomial logistic regression, implicitly controlling for school-by-year fixed effects. Findings suggest that perceived victimization predicts an increased probability of leaving the school and profession. School-level promoters of resilience are found to mitigate this relationship. We discuss ways schools can mitigate the impact of victimization. This work contributes to a nascent body of literature on teacher victimization and informs a policy lever by which turnover may be reduced.

Measuring race and ethnicity for administrative data sets and then analyzing these data to understand racial/ethnic disparities present many logistical and theoretical challenges. In this chapter, we conduct a synthetic review of studies on how to effectively measure race/ethnicity for administrative data purposes and then utilize these measures in analyses. Recommendations based on this synthesis include combining the measure of Hispanic ethnicity with the broader racial/ethnic measure and allowing individuals to select more than one race/ethnicity. Data collection should rely on self-reports but could be supplemented using birth certificates or equivalent sources. Collecting data over time, especially for young people, will help identify multiracial and American Indian populations. For those with more complex racial/ethnic identities, including measures of country of origin, language, and recency of immigration can be helpful in addition to asking individuals which racial/ethnic identity they most identify with. Administrative data collection could also begin to incorporate phenotype measures to facilitate the calculation of disparities within race/ethnicity by skin tone. Those analyzing racial/ethnic disparities should understand how these measures are created and attempt to develop fieldwide terminology to describe racial/ethnic identities.

Attracting and retaining teachers can be an important ingredient in improving low-performing schools. In this study, we estimate the expressed preferences for teachers who have worked in low-performing schools in Tennessee. Using adaptive conjoint analysis survey design, we examine three types of school attributes that may influence teachers’ employment decisions: fixed school characteristics, structural features of employment, and malleable school processes. We find that teachers express a strong preference for two malleable school processes, administrative support and discipline enforcement, along with a higher salary, a structural feature. Estimates indicate these attributes are 2 to 3 times more important to teachers than fixed school characteristics like prior achievement. We validate our results using administrative data on teachers’ revealed preferences.

The recent influx of police officers into US public schools has reshaped the context and frequency of children's interactions with police. Yet we know little about how the presence of these officers in schools impacts the legal socialization of students, and whether youth of color might be affected or socialized in different ways than white youth. In this study, we analyze data from interviews with school police officers as well as focus group data from school staff, parents, and students that shed light on how school police interact with youth. In particular, school police officers discussed their desire to build relationships with students that instill trust in police among students. Officers discussed their efforts to teach students that police should be trusted and relied on, and that negative views of policing and involvement with the justice system are the result of a negative news media and individual citizens' criminality, respectively. Importantly, officers discussed how they devote particular attention to imparting these lessons on youth of color and others who may see police in a negative light. We consider how these outreach efforts, what we call acting as police ambassadors, might have different impacts on youth of color compared to white youth, given existing racial disparities in interactions with police.

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