Constructing Teacher Survival Functions From Public Salary Data

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Retention Lessons and Questions From Large Data Sets

Abstract

This paper uses public salary records to analyze teacher retention patterns across 14 states and thousands of school districts. Unlike previous approaches that used surveys to estimate a national attrition rate for new teachers, this paper uses a census of teachers to estimate retention and finds enormous variability in attrition across school districts and across years. This paper details a comprehensive data collection and cleaning method, and presents name-linkage based analyses of Kaplan-meier survival functions and teacher retention rates.

Author

• William Lief Evison Esbenshade, Stanford University