Retaining High Performers: Insights from a Teacher Exit Survey

As school districts across the country report various kinds of teacher shortages, how to retain teachers has emerged as a key area of interest for district leaders and policymakers. There are a variety of incentives and strategies to keep teachers in the profession, but which ones are most effective? Asking teachers themselves yields answers, some of which cut against the grain of conventional wisdom in the education community.

In order to better understand why teachers leave the profession, this study analyzed teacher exit survey data from the District of Columbia Public Schools to determine what could have retained them or what would have had no effect. Because the researchers believe that retention efforts should be focused on effective teachers, they broke down teachers’ responses by their latest teacher evaluation performance rating and focused their analysis on high-performing teachers.