Teacher-colleague race congruence and mobility: Do colleague demographics impact teacher retention?

Teacher turnover is especially pronounced among teachers of color who play critically important roles in the success of students of color. A growing literature points to racial isolation as one factor that is associated with Black teacher job satisfaction in particular, which in turn could play a role in a teacher’s decision to remain in a school. However, little is known about whether having more race-congruent colleagues might be a potential mechanism that leads teachers to stay, and whether that relationship might vary by teacher race. Drawing on statewide administrative data from Pennsylvania, I examine the extent to which colleague racial congruence impacts the likelihood of teacher turnover and what transferring teacher’s destination schools imply about their revealed preferences for colleague race congruence and other factors. Using a series a fixed effects models to account for within- and between-school teacher sorting, I find that a 10 percentage point increase in racially congruent colleagues decreases the likelihood of teacher turnover by 6% of a standard deviation, with larger impacts for Black teachers (0.09 SD) than for White teachers (0.03 SD). However, nonlinear models point to diminishing returns to greater race congruence, as the marginal effect of additional race congruence attenuates to close to zero as a teacher crosses the 50% race congruence threshold. Transferring teachers appear to select into schools with greater proportions of racially congruent colleagues, suggesting a revealed preference for colleague demographics—but again only to a point.