Why is teacher turnover so high?

In my daily perusal of a bunch of online stuff, I came across a few interesting stories (for some reason, these stories always seem to pop up right before school starts). Anyway, they were lamenting the fact that many school districts have major retention problems. They quote numbers that suggest that 1/4 of new teachers stop teaching within 3 years, and 1/2 within 5 years. One school (I think it was in Chicago) claimed to have 100% teacher turnover from year to year.

 Why? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, most of the places that seem to have real retention problems are places that no sane person would want to be to start with. High crime, inner city schools. Places where education is so far down the list of “things to do” that the staff would be better equipped with experience managing a hostile prison population than a BS or MS in education. If you remove these schools from the studies, teachers still have a high turnover rate, but not as bad. Even “normal” schools have high turnover rates compared to other fields that require BS or MS degrees for employment. Once again, why? I believe there are a bunch of reasons:

1. Teachers get paid crap. Nothing more to be said there.
2. The demographic of people entering a teaching career happens to be a very good match to the “starting a family” demographic. By combining items 1 and 2, anyone with kids will realize that the crappy teacher salary doesn’t begin to cover the cost of day care, so why work when it results in a net income loss?
3. #2 leads right in to this one: career change. To a college kid, the idea of summers off, spring break, and short work days is a pretty strong incentive. Of course, once they hit the real world, and realize that their kids day-care worker gets paid a lot more than they do, that other job starts to look pretty good. Not to mention those office salaries….
4. Respect: something that is non-existent in the teaching profession. On the scale of Job Status, public school teacher is barely a step above flipping burgers. If you’re lucky. And the kid flipping burgers probably makes more than a starting teacher…
5. The realization that a job in a public school is 50% paperwork, 40% babysitting, and (in a good school) only 10% teaching. For this you need a college degree?
6. The fact that no matter how poorly a child behaves, performs, or treats others, there is absolutely nothing the teacher can do about it without risking getting fired. One bratty kid can easily eliminate that 10% teaching time, and there is nothing the teacher can do about it, and worse, the kid knows it. If you’re lucky and you’re teaching in elementary school, you may be able to get the kid tagged as “special needs”, then at least the little runt will be out of your class for a couple hours  for special ed.

So, given all of that, is it any surprise that half of the teachers that start out punt in 5 years? Especially considering the fact that moving out of the public schools – moving into private schools, tutoring, or other educational venues – counts as “leaving teaching”. The simple fact is that the teachers that remain in teaching are either completely dedicated, or so incompetent that they have no hope of finding any other job. And the truly dedicated ones burn out, leaving behind empty husks that simply don’t have the energy to change.