Educator Turnover Continues Decline Toward Prepandemic Levels

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A key concern that surfaced during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic was whether educators’ low levels of morale under chaotic teaching conditions would lastingly damage the profession. The pandemic seems to have accelerated the longer-term decline in teachers’ satisfaction (Baker and Koedel, 2025; Kraft and Lyon, 2024; Steiner and Woo, 2021; Steiner, Schwartz, and Diliberti, 2022). And although it was not the mass exodus that many feared, teacher turnover spiked nationally and in several states following the 2021–2022 school year (Barnum, 2023; Diliberti and Schwartz, 2023).

Since that time, teachers’ well-being has plateaued after pandemic-era lows, notably coinciding with the return to more-normal schooling conditions (Doan, Steiner, and Pandey, 2024; Kurtz, 2024). And yet, significant challenges in the profession remain, and notable shares of teachers still report intentions to leave their jobs (Doan, Steiner, and Pandey, 2024; Kraft and Lyon, 2024).

An open question is whether educator turnover rates will ever fully return to pre–COVID-19 pandemic levels. In this report—which is a direct update of our prior work on this topic (Diliberti and Schwartz, 2024)—we add a fourth school year (2023–2024) to our annual tracking of national turnover rates for public school teachers and principals. To our knowledge, this is the first report to estimate educator turnover rates for the 2023–2024 school year. This report is part of a series that provides brief analyses of district leader viewpoints on topics of immediate interest to policymakers, practitioners, and researchers.

The newest data presented in this report come from the fall 2024 American School District Panel (ASDP) survey. The ASDP is a research partnership between RAND and the Center on Reinventing Public Education; the panel also collaborates with several other education organizations, including the Council of the Great City Schools and MGT. We combine these fall 2024 survey data with those from ASDP surveys administered in the fall of each preceding school year. Our annual surveys ask districts to estimate what percentage of their teachers and school principals retired or resigned in the previous school year, which we then average.^[1] We used districts’ answers to construct national estimates of educator turnover, which we define as the estimated average percentage of educators who retired or resigned.^[2] All of the turnover estimates that we discuss in this report, including prepandemic estimates, are constructed from districts’ responses to our ASDP surveys.

Districts Estimate That Teacher Turnover Continues to Trend Downward from a Postpandemic Peak

According to reports from ASDP districts, teacher turnover nationally spiked in the 2021–2022 school year, reaching 4 percentage points above prepandemic levels (see Panel A of Figure 1). This national spike in teacher turnover in 2021–2022 reported by our ASDP districts was later confirmed by administrative data in multiple states (Barnum, 2023; Bastian and Fuller, 2024; Camp, Zamarro, and McGee, 2024; Clark, 2023; Fuller, 2023; Hamidu, 2023; Knight et al., 2023).

ASDP districts then estimated that the high rate of teacher turnover eased somewhat during the 2022–2023 school year. Our most recent data show that teacher turnover continued its downward trend in the 2023–2024 school year. Specifically, districts estimated that 7 percent of teachers, on average, retired or resigned at some point during or at the end of the 2023–2024 school year. Despite improvement since the postpandemic peak, teacher turnover remains slightly above the estimated prepandemic level of 6 percent, at least according to district reports.

Administrative data from two states (North Carolina and Arkansas) further support districts’ estimates that teacher turnover began to recover in the 2022–2023 school year following a spike in 2021–2022 (Bastian and Fuller, 2024; Camp, Zamarro, and McGee, 2024). However, we were not able to identify any data sources that have published more recent teacher turnover rates to confirm or refute districts’ estimates for the 2023–2024 school year.

Districts Estimate That Principal Turnover Remains Higher Than Before the Pandemic

As shown in Figure 1, the national trend in turnover for principals looks slightly different than that for teachers. That is, principal turnover nationally appears to have declined from a postpandemic peak but has since plateaued at a higher level than before the pandemic (see Panel B).

Districts estimated that, on average, 8 percent of their principals retired or resigned at some point during or following the 2023–2024 school year. This turnover rate is roughly on par with that from the previous school year (2022–2023). However, the rate is substantially less than that at the postpandemic peak of 16 percent in the 2021–2022 school year (see Table 1). (Other national and state-specific studies, including Bastian and Fuller [2023] and Knight et al. [2023], have confirmed heightened principal turnover in 2021–2022 relative to prepandemic levels.)

At least according to district reports, principal turnover in 2023–2024 remains higher than prepandemic levels. However, we suspect districts’ reports of 3-percent turnover among principals prior to the pandemic likely underestimates the true principal turnover rate based on data collected in a federal survey of principals before the pandemic began (Goldring, Taie, and O’Rear, 2018).

Gaps in Educator Turnover Rates Across Locales Have Narrowed Considerably Since the Pandemic Peak, According to Districts' Reports

Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, urban districts reported higher turnover rates than their nonurban peers (see Table 1). During the pandemic, teacher turnover rates rose across all types of districts, as shown in Figure 2. However, the teacher turnover rate rose most sharply in urban districts, which expanded the preexisting gaps in teacher turnover rates by district locale. By 2021–2022, urban districts reported a turnover rate of 14 percent, compared with 8 percent in suburban districts. Since that time, teacher turnover in urban districts has declined sharply, down to 9 percent in 2023–2024. This is much closer to the 7-percent teacher turnover rate observed in suburban and rural districts.

Throughout the pandemic, principal turnover rates remained relatively stable for urban and suburban districts, at least according to district reports. Turnover rates fluctuated between 3 to 7 percent for suburban districts and 5 to 6 percent for urban districts. In contrast, districts reported that principal turnover spiked in rural districts in the 2021–2022 school year. We believe this spike is an artifact of the small number of schools in many rural districts, such that even one principal leaving a rural district in a given year can easily drive up that district’s principal turnover rate by 20 percentage points or more.

Turnover gaps between urban, suburban, and rural districts were smaller in 2023–2024 than they were during the pandemic. Both teacher and principal turnover rates in 2023–2024 were not statistically different across district locale.

Limitations of Our Analysis

We caution readers that these educator turnover estimates have the following limitations:

• Our numbers are estimates provided by districts rather than taken directly from employment records. It is possible that districts’ reports could over- or underestimate the actual turnover rate.
• We asked districts in summer 2021 to estimate their typical prepandemic turnover rates, which were rates from more than a year before. Thus, districts’ reports likely have some recall bias—either because respondents could not accurately remember their prepandemic turnover rates or because respondents might have been overly optimistic in recalling the past.
• Our data about turnover for 2020–2021 were collected in summer 2021. In contrast, our data for 2021–2022, 2022–2023, and 2023–2024 were collected in the fall of the subsequent school year. Therefore, districts’ estimates of educator turnover in 2020–2021 represent a shorter time frame (i.e., these estimates do not include the entire summer), which perhaps contributes to the lower turnover rates observed in that particular school year.
• Comparisons across time points should be made with caution because some differences that appear to be changes over time might be due to uncertainty associated with survey estimates in each period. For this reason, we include confidence intervals for all survey estimates shown in Table 1.

Despite these limitations, we present these survey data for two reasons. First, they are some of the only national data on educator turnover rates. Second, these national data cover the most recent school year (2023–2024), whereas other national data sources are several school years behind.^[3]

Summary

The continued decline in teacher turnover rates and the apparent plateauing of principal turnover rates in 2023–2024 show reason to be cautiously optimistic. Turnover rates are continuing to trend back down toward prepandemic levels, and the gaps in turnover rates across urban, suburban, and rural districts that emerged during the pandemic have shrunk. Taken together, these patterns suggest that educator turnover is trending downward toward prepandemic levels—an encouraging sign.

Of course, there is room for improvement. Turnover rates still remain somewhat above prepandemic levels. And even prepandemic turnover levels created challenges for districts. Furthermore, significant challenges in the teaching profession remain (Kraft and Lyon, 2024). For one, notable shares of teachers still report intentions to leave their jobs, even though schooling conditions have become more stable (Doan, Steiner, and Pandey, 2024). And while teachers’ self-reported well-being has recovered somewhat, it has not returned to prepandemic levels (Doan, Steiner, and Pandey, 2024; Kurtz, 2024).

Amid the plethora of concerning trends in education since the pandemic, there is reason to be optimistic that these turnover rates are a sign of postpandemic normalcy returning to schools. We will continue to track national trends to see if the pattern holds.

Acknowledgments

We are extremely grateful to the educators who agreed to participate in the panels. Their time and willingness to share their experiences were invaluable for this effort and for helping us understand how to better support their hard work in schools. We thank Daniel Ibarrola for helping manage the survey; Gerald Hunter for serving as the data manager for this survey; and Tim Colvin, Roberto Guevara, and Julie Newell for programming the survey. Thanks to Claude Messan Setodji for managing the sampling and weighting for these analyses. Thank you also to AK Keskin who assisted with some of the survey analyses. We greatly appreciate the administrative support provided by Tina Petrossian and Erin Levendorf and ASDP management provided by Samantha DiNicola. We also thank Morgan Polikoff and Elizabeth Steiner for helpful feedback that greatly improved this report. We also thank Chris Anthony for her editorial expertise and Monette Velasco for overseeing the publication process.

Notes

• [1] Our estimates of educator turnover are an average of districts’ reports (e.g., one district reported an 8-percent turnover rate and another reported a 10-percent turnover rate for an average of 9-percent turnover). This method does not account for the fact that educators are not evenly distributed across districts and, thus, are susceptible to an upward or downward bias if, say, large districts that employ many educators report substantially higher or lower educator turnover rates than smaller districts that employ fewer educators.
• [2] Many national and state-specific studies conducted before and after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic have documented churn in the educator labor market. Although terminology and definitions are inconsistent across studies, researchers generally categorize educators into three buckets: (1) stayers (i.e., educators who remain in the same position or in the same school), (2) movers (i.e., educators who remain in the profession but who move to new schools or new positions, whether internal or external to their current school district), and (3) leavers (i.e., those who depart the profession entirely). Because they can track individuals over time, state administrative records can categorize educators into these three bins precisely. The term turnover is sometimes used to refer to only leavers and at other times to leavers plus movers. In this short report, we use the term turnover to mean educators who retired or resigned. We presume that, unlike state administrative records, districts’ reports cannot distinguish between an educator who leaves the profession entirely and one who moves to a new but similar position external to the school district. We also presume that districts’ self-reports exclude internal movers because, from districts’ perspectives, these people have not retired or resigned. Given this context, we interpret districts’ reports of retirements and resignations as including leavers and external movers but excluding internal movers. Thus, when we compare our results with those from other studies, we generally expect our numbers to fall somewhere between other studies’ estimates of leavers and leavers plus movers. (Federal data show that about half of movers are internal and half are external [Taie, Lewis, and Merlin, 2023b]).
• [3] The National Center for Education Statistics’ National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) also provides national data on educator attrition and mobility that bridge the prepandemic and pandemic eras. As of the writing of this report, the most recent NTPS data cover educator attrition and mobility that occurred between the 2020–2021 and 2021–2022 school years, which are roughly analogous to our 2020–2021 estimates (Taie, Lewis, and Merlin, 2023a; Taie, Lewis, and Merlin, 2023b). The last prepandemic NTPS data collection for teachers occurred between the 2011–2012 and 2012–2013 school years. At that time, 8 percent of teachers were categorized as movers and 8 percent were categorized as leavers (Goldring et al., 2014). The most recent NTPS data collection categorized 8 percent of teachers as movers and another 8 percent as leavers—the same rates that the NTPS documented before the pandemic (Taie, Lewis, and Merlin, 2023b). Although our prepandemic and 2020–2021 teacher turnover estimates are slightly lower than those observed in the NTPS, we nevertheless reach the same conclusion: Teacher turnover did not increase nationally in 2020–2021 over prepandemic levels. The last prepandemic NTPS data collection for principals occurred between the 2015–2016 and 2016–2017 school years. At that time, 6 percent of school principals were categorized as movers and 10 percent were categorized as leavers (Goldring, Taie, and O’Rear, 2018). The most recent NTPS data collection categorized 6 percent of school principals as movers and another 11 percent as leavers—at most, a marginal increase over prepandemic levels (Taie, Lewis, and Merlin, 2023a). Our prepandemic and 2020–2021 school principal turnover estimates are substantially lower than those observed in the NTPS reports perhaps because of the method we use to calculate our turnover rates. Nevertheless, we reached the same conclusion as the NTPS: Principal turnover increased marginally in 2020–2021 over prepandemic levels. In sum, our main conclusion that there was no mass attrition among educators nationally following the 2020–2021 school year broadly aligns with data from the NTPS.

References

• Baker, Sofia, and Cory Koedel, “The Decline in Teacher Working Conditions During and After the COVID Pandemic,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University, EdWorkingPaper No. 24-1000, January 2025.
• Barnum, Matt, “Teacher Turnover Hits New Highs Across the U.S.,” Chalkbeat, March 6, 2023.
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• Bastian, Kevin C., and Sarah Crittenden Fuller, Educator Attrition in North Carolina Public Schools: Updates Through September 2023, Education Policy Initiative at Carolina, January 2024.
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• Clark, Jess, “Kentucky Teacher Turnover Reaches New Heights,” Louisville Public Media, December 29, 2023.
• Diliberti, Melissa Kay, and Heather L. Schwartz, Educator Turnover Has Markedly Increased, but Districts Have Taken Actions to Boost Teacher Ranks: Selected Findings from the Sixth American School District Panel Survey, RAND Corporation, RR-A956-14, 2023. As of January 16, 2024: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA956-14.html
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• Hamidu, Maria, Revolving Classroom Doors: Recent Trends in Wisconsin’s Teacher Turnover, Wisconsin Policy Forum, August 2023.
• Knight, David S., Christopher A. Candelaria, Min Sun, Pooya Almasi, Jinseok Shin, and David DeMatthews, Principal Retention and Turnover During the COVID-19 Era: Do Students Have Equitable Access to Stable School Leadership? College of Education, University of Washington, December 2023.
• Kraft, Matthew A., and Melissa Arnold Lyon, “The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession: Prestige, Interest, Preparation, and Satisfaction over the Last Half Century,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University, EdWorkingPaper No. 22-679, April 2024.
• Kurtz, Holly, “The Teachers Are Not All Right: Improving the Mental Well-being of Teachers and Their Students,” Education Week, August 7, 2024.
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Topics

• Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
• Principals
• Teachers and Teaching