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Public Engagement Initiative
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Did You Know?
Individual schools and public school districts around the country face numerous challenges attracting and keeping teachers. More than 15% of the nation’s teaching force change schools or leave the profession entirely in a typical year. These national trends are reflected in San Francisco where the public schools faced a 16% turnover rate for the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 school year. For demographic data about the San Francisco public schools teacher workforce, click here.
School districts must address both the impending retirement of large numbers of experienced teachers and an alarming rate of new teacher departures.
- Large numbers of experienced teachers are retiring. In the coming years, more than 1 million experienced teachers across the country will retire. In California, nearly one-third (32%) of the teaching workforce – approximately 100,000 teachers – are scheduled to retire in the next decade. A slightly higher percentage (35%) of teachers in SFUSD are scheduled to retire in the next decade. This situation demonstrates not only the need to recruit more teachers, but highlights the urgency of retaining the teachers we already have.
- New teachers are leaving at an alarming rate. Nationally, researchers have found that approximately one-third of new teachers leave the profession after three years and almost half do so after five years. This pattern plays out in San Francisco. 18% of teachers with three years or less experience left the District during the 2005-2006 to 2006-2007 school year, compared to only 6% of more experienced teachers.
- Teacher turnover is costly and detrimental. Education advocates estimate the annual cost for California’s teachers who leave the profession at more than $200 million. The costs associated with teachers leaving the San Francisco Unified School District are estimated at more than $3 million annually. This conservative estimate factors in the current starting salary for a teacher in the SFUSD, along with the costs for recruitment, orientation and other start up costs for a new employee.
- A teaching experience gap exists between the lowest and highest performing schools. A review of state and local statistics shows that the lowest performing schools tend to have higher percentages of new teachers. In California, during the 2005-2006 school year, 16% of teachers in the lowest performing schools on the state’s Academic Performance Index (API) were considered novice (in their first or second year of teaching). By contrast, only 10% of teachers in the highest performing schools were novice. The numbers for San Francisco are even more dramatic: