Two Years Later: How COVID-19 Has Shaped the Teacher Workforce

Abstract

The unprecedented challenges of teaching during COVID-19 prompted fears of a mass exodus from the profession. We examine the extent to which these fears were realized using administrative records of Massachusetts teachers between 2015–2016 and 2021–2022. Relative to prepandemic levels, average turnover rates were similar going into the fall of 2020 but increased by 17% (from 15.0% to 17.5%) going into the fall of 2021. The fall 2021 increases were particularly high among newly hired teachers (31% increase) but were lower among Black and Hispanic/Latinx teachers (5% increases among both groups). Gaps in turnover rates between schools serving higher and lower concentrations of economically disadvantaged students narrowed during the first 18 months of the pandemic. The same holds true for gaps in turnover between schools serving higher and lower shares of Black and Hispanic/Latinx students. Together, these findings highlight important differences in teachers’ responses to the pandemic across subgroups and the need to improve early-career retention to ensure long-term stability within the teacher workforce.

Educator Turnover Has Markedly Increased, but Districts Have Taken Actions to Boost Teacher Ranks: Selected Findings from the Sixth American School District Panel Survey

“…1 This increase corresponds to roughly an extra 114,000 teachers leaving their position nationally compared with the previous school year. 2 The national uptick in teacher turnover we document here generally comports with findings from recent state-specific trend studies (e.g., Bacher-Hicks, Chi, and Orellana, 2022;Bastian and Fuller, 2023;Camp, Zamarro, and McGee, 2022).…”

Assessing Licensure Test Performance and Predictive Validity for Different Teacher Subgroups

“…These disparities could still exist if the tests exhibit no prediction biases of the kind we consider in this paper. These possibilities are consistent with empirical evidence from the introduction of licensure testing policies (Angrist & Guryan, 2008) or the relaxation of testing requirements during the pandemic (Bacher-Hicks et al, 2022).…”

“…All of the data for this study come from school years prior to the pandemic. As with many other states, Massachusetts temporarily relaxed licensure testing requirements in the wake of the pandemic and these policies appear to have led to changes in the composition of the teaching workforce (Bacher-Hicks et al, 2022). 8 In the following subsections, we first discuss the construction of the teacher candidate data and then provide an overview of each of the samples of outcomes data.…”

“…Washington state, for instance, eliminated basic skills cut score requirements in 2019 (prospective teachers are still required to take the state's basic skills tests and to pass a test of subject matter knowledge), and California has recently scaled back the testing requirements for new teachers (Lambert, 2020, 2021). The widespread suspension of licensure tests due to the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to heighten debates about the efficacy of licensure tests because there will be many more teachers in the workforce who have not taken or passed these tests (Bacher-Hicks et al, 2022; Skinner et al, 2020). At the same time, teacher turnover has increased in several states as the pandemic has abated, thereby increasing the demand for new teachers at a time when states are considering reimplementing these requirements (Bacher-Hicks et al, 2022; Goldhaber & Theobald, 2023).…”

“…The widespread suspension of licensure tests due to the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to heighten debates about the efficacy of licensure tests because there will be many more teachers in the workforce who have not taken or passed these tests (Bacher-Hicks et al, 2022; Skinner et al, 2020). At the same time, teacher turnover has increased in several states as the pandemic has abated, thereby increasing the demand for new teachers at a time when states are considering reimplementing these requirements (Bacher-Hicks et al, 2022; Goldhaber & Theobald, 2023).…”