Eyeing the Exit: Teacher Turnover and What We Can Do About It
“Eyeing the Exit: Teacher Turnover and What We Can Do About It” provides a nuanced look at which Mississippi teachers are leaving the classroom and why. Central to the report is our examination of attrition risk and teachers’ standard of living to make the case that financial insecurity drives teachers’ desire to exit the classroom early.
Eyeing the Exit
Authors
Grace Breazeale, Director of Research and K-12 Policy
Editor
SEE MORE REPORTS & PUBLICATIONS
Mississippi First has released a new report, The Weight They Carry: Life as a Teacher in Mississippi, which examines the conditions shaping teachers’ day-to-day experiences and their decisions about whether to remain in the classroom. Based on survey responses from nearly 1,000 Mississippi teachers across more than 120 school districts and charter schools, the report […]
A year after the historic raise, Mississippi continues to see high levels of teacher turnover. We turned back to our reliable tool, surveying teachers, to confirm our hypothesis that record inflation, which reached a peak in 2022, was cutting into the gains promised by the teacher salary increase. With the 2022-2023 Mississippi Teacher Survey, we […]
In our previous report, Nothing in the Pipes: Educator Crisis in Mississippi, we explained how the rising cost of college attendance and the declining value of teaching salaries may be squeezing aspiring new teachers out of the pipeline. To build on that analysis, we surveyed 6,496 Mississippi teachers to establish the state’s most comprehensive resource for understanding […]
In recent years, a new problem in a decades-old challenge has emerged: the number of new Mississippi teachers has sharply declined, exacerbating the teacher shortage and threatening the success of public education in Mississippi. In this investigation, Mississippi First examines the state of Mississippi’s educator pipeline, specifically how the number and diversity of candidates completing […]