Who Comes Back? A Longitudinal Analysis of the Reentry Behavior of Exiting Teachers

Abstract

While a large literature examines the factors that lead teachers to leave teaching, few studies have systematically examined what factors impact teachers' decisions to re-enter the profession after exiting. Drawing on research on the role of family characteristics in predicting teacher work behavior, we examine predictors of re-entry after a spell out. We employ survival analysis of time to re-entry for teachers who exit using longitudinal work data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. We find that teachers who are younger, better paid and more experienced are more likely to re-enter. We also find that women are more likely to return to teaching than men. Child-rearing plays an important role in this difference. In particular, women are less likely to re-enter with young children in the home. We conclude that re-entrants may be an important source of teacher labor supply and that policies focused on the needs of teachers with young children may be effective means for districts to attract returning teachers. It is surprising, then, that the literature has largely ignored a potentially significant source of teacher labor that presumably comes with lower search costs and results in smaller losses in teacher human capital: former teachers. In particular, little research has examined teachers' decisions to come back to teaching after a spell outside the profession. This oversight is especially noteworthy given an influential study by Flyer and Rosen (1997) that argued that, among college-educated professionals, teachers are peculiarly predisposed to re-entry because the structure of teacher pay via the uniform salary schedule ensures that they do not face large wage losses if they take time off. The flexibility this structure provides in turn attracts to the profession workers who are prone to take temporary leaves to, for example, raise small children, which, the authors suggest, helps explain why teaching is dominated by women.This study helps fill a gap in the teacher work literature by analyzing teachers'propensities to return to the teaching profession after a spell outside of teaching using data that is longitudinal, national, and recent. The small body of previous work on this topic has been 3 limited to single-state studies, with the exception of Stinebrickner (2002), which reports on data from the 1970s. We conduct a more comprehensive analysis using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 cohort (NLSY79), which contains information on workers throughout the 1980s, 1990s and into the 2000s. We ask: what personal, work and family factors predict a teacher's decision to return to teaching after an exit? In particular, we ask whether there is support in the data for the hypotheses suggested by Flyer and Rosen (1997) that women are more likely to return than men and that child-rearing plays a role in re-entry decisions. We address these questions using survival models that allow examination of the timing of teacher re-entry with respect to changes in factors such as...

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