Press Release Archives

For Immediate Release: 3 november 2008

REL-NEI Database Showcases Teacher Retention Strategies in Four New England States

Boston, Mass. — The Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast and Islands (REL-NEI) has prepared a searchable database of teacher retention policies and programs implemented by Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont, providing education decision-makers with a powerful new resource organized by state, district size, per-participant cost, target audience, and target grade level, among other variables. On November 3, the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education published a companion report, “Developing the ‘Compendium of Strategies to Reduce Teacher Turnover in the Northeast and Islands Region.’”

Teacher turnover is costly, both economically and academically. The National Center for Education Statistics estimates about one-third of U.S. teachers leave teaching during their first three years and almost half leave during the first five years. The Alliance for Excellent Education estimates the annual cost of replacing public school teachers who leave the profession or transfer from school to school to be $4.9 billion.

“Teacher turnover is a problem and there aren’t a lot of resources devoted to reducing it,” said Abigail Jurist Levy, project team leader at REL-NEI, which is administered by Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC), in Newton, Massachusetts. “We wanted to provide decision-makers and educators with useable information about what others have done and to offer them contact information so they can talk to and learn from the people who have been implementing these programs.”

The 33 policies and programs profiled in the database range from offering teachers financial compensation, such as signing bonuses or loan forgiveness, to providing mentoring for new teachers. The database is not a complete inventory of teacher retention strategies in the four states but provides a sample of the interventions that have been implemented at the state, regional, and district levels. All included interventions met the following three criteria:

1. They had the explicit purpose of reducing teacher turnover.
2. They had publicly available descriptive information.
3. They had been in operation or under development between 2002 and 2007.

Levy and her research team collected information about the teacher retention policies and programs from websites, public documents, and interviews with individual contacts. The researchers constructed four policy categories to classify and organize the interventions: financial incentives, pre-service programs, in-service programs, and central systems and supports. Of the 33 strategies included in the database, 8 are financial incentives, 4 are pre-service programs, 19 are in-service programs, and 2 are considered to be central systems and supports.

The database may be searched with keywords and variables at www2.edc.org/relnei/teacherdb/. The program and policy descriptions offer details about the various strategies and the states and districts implementing them, as well as contact information for learning more. Measures of program quality, implementation, or impact were not among the criteria required for inclusion, and database users should not draw conclusions about any retention program’s merit or standing in the field. In addition, the database does not include school-level policies or practices for reducing teacher turnover.

The database and companion report were developed by Levy, Pamela Ellis, Marian Grogan, and Kevon Tucker-Seeley, all at EDC. The report is available online at ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/projects and includes a Users Guide for reading and navigating the database.

For more information about this report, contact agaddis@edc.org.

The Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast and Islands (REL-NEI) is run by Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC), the American Institutes for Research (AIR), and WestEd’s Learning Innovations program. REL-NEI is one of 10 Regional Educational Laboratories funded by the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education. REL-NEI provides rigorous research that is relevant to national education priorities, responsive to local needs, and usable for policy and practice. Visit www.relnei.org.

This project has been funded at least in part with federal funds from the U.S. Department of Education under Contract Number ED-06-CO-0025. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Department of Education nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.

Education Development Center, Inc.(EDC) is a global nonprofit organization that develops, delivers, and evaluates innovative programs to address some of the world’s most urgent challenges in education, health, and economic development. Celebrating its 50th year, EDC manages more than 300 projects in 35 countries. Visit www.edc.org.