Posted August 18, 2005
Teachers leaving jobs at record rate
By Ben Feller
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - More teachers, it seems, are ready to leave their schools behind.

Forty percent of public school teachers plan to leave the profession within five years, the highest rate since at least 1990, according to a study being released today.

The rate is expected to be even greater among high school teachers, half of whom plan to be out of teaching by 2010, according to the National Center for Education Information.

Retirement is the dominant factor, as the public teaching corps is aging fast, say surveys of teachers in kindergarten through grade 12.

In 1996, 24 percent of teachers were age 50 or older. By 2005, 42 percent of teachers are.

"I´m ready to do what I want to do," said Pat Jeppe, 59, a middle school teacher in Southaven, Miss., who plans to retire in a couple of years after teaching for the past 35. "I finally have grandchildren and I want to be with them and go to their school functions," Jeppe said.

The projected turnover rate will deprive school districts of an enormous amount of teaching experience just as the United States pushes to get a top instructor in every class.

The proportion of teachers with at least 25 years in the classroom has more than doubled in the past 15 years, from 12 percent to 27 percent.

The teaching corps has grown older across the board because more people are moving into the field in their 30s and 40s, said Emily Feistritzer, president of the center, a private organization that specializes in survey research of school trends.

"We´re going to have tremendous turnover, but I happen to think it´s a tremendous opportunity rather than a hand-wringing time," she said.

"We´ll have 40 percent of the teaching force replaced by mid-career switchers and people with life experience, people with altruistic motives for coming into teaching," Feistritzer said.

In 1990, 74 percent of teachers predicted they would still be in the classroom five years later.

In the surveys, that total dropped to 66 percent in 1996 and 60 percent this year.

School districts are expanding their recruitment beyond colleges of education to other career fields, where experts in math, science and other subjects are being trained to teach.

Broadening this pool of prospective teachers will help fill the void of retiring teachers, said Michelle Rhee, president of The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group that helps some of the largest school districts recruit teachers.