Post-Pandemic CTE Teacher Attrition Across Five States

• In Event: Using Statewide Administrative Data to Examine the Inputs and Outcomes of Career and Technical Education (CTE)

Abstract

         Despite widespread concerns about a mass exodus from the teaching profession shortly after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Dill, 2022; Kamenetz, 2022; Maxouris & Zdanowicz, 2022; Rahman, 2022; Singer, 2022), these fears have generally not been realized in analyses of state administrative data. In fact, teacher attrition rates after the 2019-20 school year (during which nearly all schools closed for in-person instruction in March 2020) decreased relative to prior attrition rates in states like Arkansas (Camp et al., 2022), Massachusetts (Bacher-Hicks et al., 2021), and Washington (Goldhaber & Theobald, 2022). Moreover, while teacher attrition rates rose in these states after the two subsequent school years (Camp et al., 2024; Bacher-Hicks et al., 2022; Goldhaber & Theobald, 2023), these attrition rates were still within historical norms and did not exceed 10% of the teaching workforce in any state.

         That said, emerging evidence still points to areas of concern for the long-term health of the teaching workforce. In particular, rising teacher attrition rates in recent years were concentrated in high-poverty schools (Goldhaber & Theobald, 2024) and hard-to-staff subjects like special education (Gilmour et al., 2025) and STEM (Nguyen et al., 2025) that already had the greatest staffing challenges. To date, however, there is no empirical evidence about how teacher attrition has changed in another common teacher shortage area: career and technical education (CTE). This is important because there are at least two reasons to expect that CTE teachers may been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. First, many CTE teaching roles did not translate easily into a remote setting, meaning that the working conditions of CTE teachers may have been particularly impacted by remote instruction (Kraft et al., 2022). Secondly, CTE teachers likely have greater opportunity costs associated with teaching and may have an easier time finding a non-teaching job, particularly in hard-to-staff CTE areas in which CTE teachers can move into higher-paying positions when they leave the workforce (Kistler et al., 2024).

         In this paper, we use administrative data from five states—Massachusetts, Michigan, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington—to provide a first look at CTE teacher attrition rates over time and how these attrition rates changed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Early analyses from a subset of these states suggest that these attrition rates largely mirror trends for the broader workforce with two important exceptions. First, CTE teacher attrition rates after the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in some states (e.g., Massachusetts and Washington) increased marginally while attrition rates of other teachers decreased, perhaps reflecting the unique challenges of remote instruction in CTE. Second, increases in attrition rates in some states (e.g., Texas and Washington) were more pronounced for CTE teachers than other teachers in the years following the initial onset of the pandemic, perhaps reflecting the unique labor market opportunities of CTE teachers in a rapidly-improving economy. Subsequent analyses will explore these trends across all five states and by CTE cluster to provide the first comprehensive, descriptive post-pandemic portrait of CTE teacher attrition.

Author

• Roddy Theobald, American Institutes for Research
  Presenting Author