Gun Violence in School and Teacher Workforce: Impacts on Mobility, Retention, and Teacher Quality

• In Event: Policy impacts on the K12 Teacher Workforce

Abstract

Teacher shortages remain a critical policy concern in the United States, with an annual attrition rate of approximately 8%, costing districts hundreds of millions of dollars in recruitment and replacement costs. The stability of the teacher workforce is fundamental to student achievement, yet mounting evidence suggests that school safety conditions, not just compensation or workload, may play a decisive role in teachers' decisions to stay or leave. In an era of heightened concern over gun violence in schools, understanding how school shootings shape teacher labor supply has become an urgent priority for both researchers and policymakers. Although existing literature has examined how factors such as low compensation, poor working conditions, and student discipline contribute to teacher turnover, the effect of school insecurity, particularly school shootings, on teacher mobility and retention remains somewhat understudied. This paper fills that gap by estimating the causal impact of school shootings on teacher retention and mobility in North Carolina public schools.

The study combines two primary data sources: school-level shooting incident data from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS), spanning 1966 to 2023, and individual-level longitudinal teacher employment records from the North Carolina Education Research Data Center (NCERDC), covering 1995 to 2023 and including teacher characteristics, mobility, and working conditions. The empirical strategy employs a difference-in-differences and event-study framework, treating school shootings and timing as exogenous shocks to the teacher workforce. Each treated school is matched to its two nearest comparable schools of the same level outside the treated district, mitigating potential spillover effects. Year and district fixed effects are also included to account for systematic differences in district characteristics, such as poverty levels.

The analysis finds that schools exposed to shootings experienced an average reduction of approximately 6.37 full-time equivalent teachers relative to matched non-exposed schools, capturing both teacher attrition and mobility to other schools. Event-study estimates further reveal that teacher mobility begins to rise two years post-shooting and does not recover within seven years, suggesting that the workforce disruptions caused by school violence are persistent rather than transitory. Heterogeneous analysis indicates that these effects are concentrated among the most severe incidents involving deaths or injuries. Future work will examine heterogeneous effects by school type, poverty level, and teacher demographics, as well as potential spillover impacts on neighboring schools, with the goal of informing school security and teacher shortage policy.

Author

• Bogyung Kim, Georgia State University
  Presenting Author