Are Public Schools Losing Their 'Best'? Assessing the Career Transitions of Teachers and Their Implications for the Quality of the Teacher Workforce

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September 2007
Dan Goldhaber, Betheny Gross, Dan Player

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CRPE Working Paper #2007-2

This paper examines attrition and mobility of early-career teachers in North Carolina public schools using teacher value-added measures.

Most studies that have fueled alarm over the attrition and mobility rates of high-quality teachers have relied on proxy indicators of teacher quality, which recent research finds to be only weakly correlated with value-added measures of teachers’ performance. We examine attrition and mobility of teachers using teacher value-added measures for early-career teachers in North Carolina public schools from 1996 to 2002. Our findings suggest that the most-effective teachers tend to stay in teaching and in specific schools. Contrary to common expectations, we do not find that more-effective teachers are more likely to leave more-challenging schools.