Why they quit: a focused look at teachers who leave for other occupations

To better understand the factors related to teachers' decisions to leave for jobs outside of education, the study employs a structural equation modeling approach to analyze data from two large national datasets from the National Center for Education Statistics. The focus on occupation switchers is unique, with most studies of teacher attrition failing to differentiate between teachers who leave by their reasons for doing so. Overall, our findings suggest that district- and school-level leaders concerned about keeping good teachers in the classroom can take steps to improve teachers' job satisfaction by enhancing salaries and the conditions in which teachers work. Forced to choose between these levers, administrators may be more successful in boosting satisfaction and reducing the rate by which teachers quit to take a job outside of education by focusing their efforts on improving working conditions.