Excavating the Teacher Pipeline: Teacher Preparation Programs and Teacher Attrition

We analyze the placement and attrition patterns of teachers by preparation programs and document large differences in the rate at which teachers exit both their schools and the profession. These differences are robust to within-school comparisons. Moreover, assumptions about turnover and the persistence of program effects prove important for predicting the likely changes in student achievement that would result from varying the proportion of graduates from the most and least effective programs within a state.