How Teacher Turnover Harms Student Achievement

Matthew Ronfeldt, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, James Wyckoff

NBER Working Paper No. 17176
Issued in June 2011
NBER Program(s):   ED

Researchers and policymakers often assume that teacher turnover harms student achievement, but recent evidence calls into question this assumption. Using a unique identification strategy that employs grade-level turnover and two classes of fixed-effects models, this study estimates the effects of teacher turnover on over 600,000 New York City 4th and 5th grade student observations over 5 years. The results indicate that students in grade-levels with higher turnover score lower in both ELA and math and that this effect is particularly strong in schools with more low-performing and black students. Moreover, the results suggest that there is a disruptive effect of turnover beyond changing the composition in teacher quality.

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Acknowledgments

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