Women’s Work: The Relationship Between Leave Benefits and Turnover Among Early Career Female Teachers in Missouri

• In Event: Strategic Staffing and Incentives

Abstract

Evidence documenting the teacher shortage (Ingersoll, 2001; Hahs-Vaughn & Scherff, 2008; Sutcher et al., 2016; Nguyen et al., 2022) reports alarmingly high attrition among early career educators, with nearly 12% of teachers leaving the profession within their first year and more than 44% within their first five years of teaching (Ingersoll, 2018). Missouri’s newest educators attrit at higher rates than the national average, with 44% leaving within three years and 54% leaving within five years. Since the pandemic, attrition has accelerated among Missouri’s newest educators with an 8.5-percent increase in attrition among teachers with three-years’ experience or less between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 academic years (The Hunt Institute and DESE, 2022).

Forty percent of first year educators (Ingersoll, 2018) and 52% of former teachers cite “personal or family reasons” as their primary reason for leaving (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017). Yet, little empirical evidence exists describing the frequency with which teachers exit due to childrearing (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017; Schaefer et al., 2012) despite women of childbearing age comprising over 36% of Missouri’s educator workforce (DESE, 2023).
Missouri school districts, like most nationwide, offer no paid parental leave, requiring instead that teachers use accumulated sick days for childbirth or adoption (Swisher, 2022; MSTA, 2023). Further, postpartum teachers returning to the classroom may find childcare unaffordable and bell-to-bell instruction policies incompatible with new parenthood responsibilities, like frequent doctor’s visits during infancy or pumping breast milk during the workday (Will, 2019; Loewus, 2017; Philips, 2020).

Leveraging 15 years of longitudinal data on Missouri teachers, schools, and districts, in this study we examine the relationship between leave benefits offered by school districts and the rate of turnover among young, female teachers in Missouri. We model teacher-, school-, and district-level characteristics over time, identifying conditions which are particularly impactful to women and working parents like: (i) teacher age, gender, and experience, (ii) school-level teacher vacancy and substitute fill rate, (iii) district leave benefits, geographic location, and starting salary.

We note several important findings. Leave benefits reflect labor market regionality, with rural districts offering more annual personal days and more generous sick day accumulation policies than metropolitan-area districts. Missouri districts offer 10.99 annual sick days, on average, meaning an early career teacher would need to bank all her sick days over six years to take a 12-week maternity leave as allowed by the Family and Medical Leave Act. Teacher experience and longevity differ by gender, region, teacher on-duty days, and leave day benefits, including: 1) Districts offering more annual leave days attract more experienced teachers, retaining them longer; 2) The most experienced male teachers work in districts with fewer than 150 teacher on-duty days, while districts with 190-199 on-duty days attract the most experienced women; and 3) Teachers in five-day week districts are significantly more experienced than those in four-day week districts. As districts seek to stem teacher turnover and shortages, our findings highlight the importance of family leave policies, especially for early career women who comprise a disproportionate share of the teacher labor force.

Authors

• Jen Sieve Gontram, Saint Louis University

• J. Cameron Anglum, Lehigh University