Employment data was also limited to control for some externalities. Employment data was collected
as a mid-year snapshot of employed individuals for each year during the five-year period. This eliminates
any vacant positions but may also obscure multiple turnovers within a single job position. Employment data
included demographic characteristics of both teachers and administrators. Employee data included only
individuals listed as full-time teachers or full-time administrators with state certification. Teachers certified
only to teach vocational or career and technical education courses were excluded from analysis due to the
differing credential requirements for career and technical education teachers. For more context on the various
pathways to education, see Appendix Item 2.
The number of teaching positions and the number of students assigned per teacher varied across the
132 schools. The number of teaching positions at a given school varied based on school type, but generally,
elementary schools had the smallest number of teachers, high schools had the largest number of teachers,
and the number of teachers in middle schools was somewhere between elementary and high school teachers.
The state of Florida limits class size at the elementary and secondary levels and in certain curricular areas,
but school districts routinely use varying methods to meet these requirements. Some tools that districts use
include class size waivers and assigning multiple teachers to one classroom. While these factors are also
important, they are subject to change throughout the year, and as such, were eliminated from comparison.
Despite using the same 132 schools for each year of the study period, there were some slight variations
in total numbers of positions each year. These fluctuations can likely be attributed to varying student
enrollment or school budgets. Over the five-year period, there were 11,664 unique employee IDs recorded at
the 132 schools, with each employee ID representing a single teacher. Once a teacher has an assigned ID
number within DCPS, their ID number will be used each time they are employed by DCPS and will not
change year to year. The number of unique IDs for all 132 schools included in the study population for each
year are displayed in the following chart.
Since these data include year-to-year repeats, further analysis was completed to isolate the number of
unique employee IDs that persisted for more than one year within the survey environment. If retention were
truly random and did not have any measurable effects, these data should show a slight and increasingly
positive trend towards year 5 in a fairly smooth line. Since there are other schools in the district that were
excluded from this overall analysis, some slight variations could be expected. However, there was no
discernible or regular trend that suggested that teacher retention within DCPS behaves in a random manner.
As the following graph depicts, more than 30% of the teachers employed throughout the course of this
study were employed at one of the 132 selected schools throughout the full five-year study period. Since these
data do not disaggregate employees by year of initial employment, these data should not be interpreted to
suggest turnover or retention rates for any particular subgroup; these data simply reflect the mobility of the
general teaching population at the 132 schools identified for the five-year period.
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