When teachers leave schools, overall morale appears to suffer enough that student achievement declines鈥攂oth for those taught by the departed teachers and by students whose teachers stayed put, concludes a study recently presented at a conference held by the Center for Longitudinal Data in Education Research.
The researchers鈥攖he University of Michigan鈥檚 Matthew Ronfeldt, Stanford University鈥檚 Susanna Loeb, and the University of Virginia鈥檚 Jim Wyckoff鈥攍ooked at eight years of test-score data for New York City 4th and 5th graders. For each analysis, students taught by teachers in the same grade-level team in the same school did worse in years when turnover rates were higher, compared with years in which there was less teacher turnover.
The effects were seen in both large and small schools, new and old ones, and the negative effects were larger in schools with more low-achieving and black students.
