Peeling Back the Layers of Teacher Turnover: An Exploration of the Role of Working Conditions and Teacher Effectiveness

Teacher turnover impacts schools and students by changing the composition of teachers in a school, and by causing disruptions to the organizational functioning within schools. Research has begun to examine how the organizational conditions within schools may be implicated in this process. Efforts have also been made to determine whether more effective teachers are systematically more likely to leave than less effective teachers. To date, however, no research has simultaneously investigated the role of working and teacher effectiveness in the turnover processes within a single study. Using a sample of teachers drawn from the Measures of Effective Teaching project, and employing multi-level logistic regression analysis, this study explored several research questions relating to teacher turnover and investigated the way in which working conditions and teacher effectiveness may be interrelated in producing turnover outcomes. Findings indicated that when teachers perceived the working conditions in their schools as being more positive they were less likely to turnover. Teacher effectiveness, measured using teachers’ Valued-added model scores, was not found to be statistically significantly related to turnover. Findings further indicated that in a combined model that included both working conditions and teacher effectiveness variables, inferences made about the variables were unchanged from models in which they were evaluated individually. Analysis also indicated the absence of a statistically significant interaction between working conditions and teacher effectiveness. Implications and conclusions drawn from the findings were discussed