Who Stays and Who Exits in Charter Schools and Traditional Public Schools? The Influence of Teacher and School Attributes

• In Event: Parental Choices

Abstract

In this paper, we compare the effects of teacher characteristics and school context on the timing of teachers’ decisions to stay or leave a charter school or traditional public school (TPS). We employ the Cox proportional hazards model using longitudinal student records and administrative data for teachers in Utah K-12 public schools, observed from 2003-2011. Our findings show that average teacher turnover rates are higher for charter schools than for TPSs. Our calculation of the Kaplan-Meier survival estimate indicates that charter school teachers have shorter survival times than their TPS counterparts. In addition, differences in teacher turnover are observed between elementary and secondary teachers as well as for teachers in STEM fields that also show disfavoring results for charter schools.

Authors

• Charisse Atibagos Gulosino, University of Memphis

• Yongmei Ni, University of Utah