From Candidate to Classroom: Research-Based Practices for Recruiting and Hiring Highly-Effective Teachers
Category: Staffing, Finance, and Operations
Early childhood care and education (ECCE) settings rely on teachers to support children’s development and families’ workforce participation. Yet ECCE teachers turn over at high rates, often twice as often as teachers in K-12 settings. Because large-scale ECCE workforce data are rare, little is known about how job and teacher characteristics relate to turnover. Using data on a large sample (N = 14,373) of teachers employed at publicly funded child care centers in Virginia in fall 2023, this study investigates associations between job and teacher characteristics and teacher turnover. Overall, 38% of teachers left their fall 2023 site by fall 2024. Wage, being a lead teacher, experience, education, and race/ethnicity were all related to turnover after accounting for region. Results from within-site models were similar. The findings from this study inform policies to increase ECCE teacher retention and point to key areas for future research.
Keywords
Child care, teacher turnover, teacher workforce
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/8q8d-4293
