Early Career Outcomes for the “Best and the Brightest”

Educational efforts aimed at attracting the “best and brightest” into the teaching profession are widespread and include national programs, such as Teach for America and the New Teacher Project Teaching Fellows, as well as regional and state-based programs, city-based programs, and university-based programs. Yet, studies of attrition in programs aimed at recruiting highly selective teachers provide some evidence that highly selective entrants are less likely to persist in a teaching career. Using data from the first three years of the Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Survey (BTLS), we investigate the greater incidence of attrition among selective college graduates and whether higher rates of attrition can be explained by measures of early career adjustment.