There are a variety of possibilities as to why a teacher may have exited the selected schools; it is
impossible to speculate as to the most likely cause of these teachers exiting since these data do not
capture every single personnel movement within DCPS during the five-year period.
In order to determine if teacher retention across the survey period was truly random, the
average teacher experience across the selected schools was calculated. If teacher retention were
random and there was not a definite pattern of teacher attrition, the average years of teacher
experience should show a sustained positive trend. As the following chart demonstrates, average
teacher experience decreased over the 5 years of the study. This finding suggests that not only are
inexperienced teachers leaving, but mid-career and later-career teachers are leaving at a faster pace
than new teachers.
As the previous charts and graph demonstrate, rates of teacher retention are not distributed ran-
domly and normally across the 132 schools. Therefore, the researcher concludes that there are persistent
school-level factors that influence teacher turnover in a statistically significant manner.
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