Teacher Turnover Three Years into the Pandemic Era: Evidence from Washington State

Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic era, concerns about teacher turnover and teacher shortages remain at the top of the education agenda. But contrary to media reports about a “wave of resignations and retirements” (e.g., Heller, 2021), early evidence from state databases showed a more nuanced picture: teacher attrition was actually down during the pandemic’s first year (teachers leaving after the 2019–2020 school year) before it increased somewhat in the next year (e.g., Bacher-Hicks et al., 2021, 2022; Bastian & Fuller, 2023; Camp et al., 2022; CERRA, 2022; Goldhaber & Theobald, 2022a,b).

In this policy brief, we follow-up and expand on our earlier analyses of teacher mobility and attrition in Washington state with an additional year of data from the 2022-23 school year. We draw on a longitudinal database of school staffing in Washington, the S-275, which now provides 39 years of annual data on teachers and other school employees in the state.