Viral Change: Trends in Michigan Teacher Attrition and Mobility before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

We use administrative data on Michigan school teachers in an interrupted time series framework to understand how teacher attrition may have shifted after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and into the years following the pandemic. While teachers stayed in place following the 2019–20 school year, they subsequently were more likely to leave the profession, less likely to leave their districts, and no more or less likely to switch schools within their district in the years following relative to pre-pandemic trends. This resulted in an average annual additional 1.1 percentage point loss of the teacher workforce due to the pandemic. Teachers in districts that offered fully in-person instruction during the 2020–21 school year were more likely to leave the teaching profession or switch districts following the 2019–20 and 2020–21 school years compared with teachers in fully remote districts. We also present results by teacher characteristic and school setting, finding school setting to be more predictive of attrition than teacher characteristics. We do not find evidence that the pandemic exacerbated inequality; in fact, teachers in charter schools, schools with higher shares of non-White students, and higher shares of economically disadvantaged students were generally less likely to attrit.