TEACHERS LONG-RANGE TEACHING PLANS - A DISCRIMINANT-ANALYSIS

The purpose of this study was to compare teachers who were contemplating quitting the teaching profession with teachers whose long-range plans were to continue in teaching. Two groups of teachers from a large urban school district were compared in terms of their work-related attitudes and perceptions and their reactions to conditions in their work environment. Eleven variables, implicated in earlier investigations of teacher persistence, were used in a stepwise discriminant function to maximize discrimination between the two groups of teachers. The results suggest that teachers who plan to quit teaching and those who plan to stay can be reliably distinguished by the pattern of their work-related attitudes, perceptions, and reactions. The results support Chapman and Hutcheson (1982) and Super and Hall (1978) in highlighting the role that perceptual variables play in teacher retention.