2When given the opportunity, many teachers choose to leave schools serving large concentrations of poor, low-performing and non-white students (Boyd et. al., 2005;Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2004;Scafidi, Sjoquist, & Stinebrickner, 2005). While a substantial research literature has documented this phenomenon, far less research effort has gone into understanding what features of the working conditions in these schools drive this relatively higher turnover rate (see Loeb, Darling-Hammond and Luczak (2005) for an exception to this). Excessive teacher turnover can be costly and detrimental to instructional cohesion in schools (National Commission on Teaching and America 's Future, 2003). Consequently, many policies, such as mentoring programs and retention bonuses, have aimed to stem teacher attrition, particularly at those schools that experience high teacher turnover. Yet, without a better understanding of the reasons teachers leave, these approaches may not be as effective as they could be at reducing detrimental attrition. This study contributes to our understanding of teacher attrition by modeling the relationship between teacher turnover and school contextual factors -including teachers' influence over school policy, the effectiveness of the school administration, staff relations, student behavior, safety, and facilities.Using a unique dataset that combines longitudinal survey data with district administrative files, we find that school administration plays a particularly important role in teachers' career decisions. In what follows, we briefly review relevant prior research to motivate our study, describe our data and methods, and present the results. The final section discusses the implications of these results, limitations of the study, and directions for future research.
Background and Motivation