Stay or go? Turnover in CMO, EMO and regular charter schools

Abstract

Background

We examine whether working conditions in different types of charter schools lead to different levels of teacher turnover. We consider two types of teacher turnover behaviors. One is teacher migration, which refers to the transfer of teachers from one school to another. The other one is teacher attrition, which describes the phenomenon of teachers leaving the profession entirely. We distinguish among charter schools managed by for-profit education management organizations (EMOs), those managed by non-profit charter management organizations (CMOs), and regular charter schools.

Method/analysis

Our data come from the 2011–12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). We estimate multi-level models with hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) software.

Findings and implications

We find that teachers in charter schools managed by EMOs and CMOs have higher levels of migration and attrition intention than do teachers in regular charter schools. Teachers, particularly in EMO-managed charter schools, are more likely to consider moving to another school or to leave the teaching profession. Our analyses suggest that the increased migration and attrition among teachers in MO-managed charter schools can be partially explained by the differences in working conditions, such as the degree of administrative support in the school, the degrees of classroom control and school-wide influence of teachers, salary, opportunities of professional development, the quality of the student body, and the degree of student misbehavior.

Keywords:

• Charter schools
• Job turnover
• Education reform

Notes

1 EMOs and CMOs each managed 36% of charter schools during the 2011–12 school year (Miron and Gulosino, 2013).

2 The percentage of EMO charter schools is about 7.5%, which is about half of what we would expect, while CMO charter schools, which make up more than twenty percent of charter schools in our data, are more closely in line with other national data for the 2011–12 school year (NAPCS, 2017).

3 School closures may have occurred between the year that the sampling frame was constructed (2009–10) and the year that the survey was administered (2011–12). According to the NAPCS, 167 charter schools closed at the end of the 2009–10 school year and 174 charter schools closed at the end of the 2010–11 school year (NAPCS, 2017). We were unable to find any information that provided the number of EMO charters, CMO charters, and regular charter school closures during this time frame.

4 Previous research provides no indication of whether teachers’ attitudes towards income or their personal wealth varies according to whether they are employed in regular charter schools or in charter schools managed by EMOs or CMOs.