Some Factors Affecting Teacher Survival in School Districts

Influenced by the work of British labor statisticians, J. Whitener (1965) a few years ago developed an actuarial procedure for investigating staff turnover in school systems, an approach that circumvented the interpretation difficulties of the commonly used crude turnover rate (Lane and Andrew, 1955; Silcock, 1954). In an exploratory study, he obtained lists of all teachers entering employment in ten Missouri school districts during the calendar years of 1951, 1952, and 1953-a total of 937 teachers-and recorded their lengths of service at the time they terminated employment in the district, if they did, through a ten-year period. These data were converted into a survival curve, showing the proportions of the cohort still in employment at yearly intervals. Districts involved in the study were located, with one exception, in the St. Louis suburban area and were mostly in the student enrollment range of 1,000-6,000. Most of Whitener's statistical analyses of the factors affecting teacher survival were carried out in a sub-group of 431 teachers between the ages of 22 and 26 at the time of entering employment.