A Policy Brief From EPIC

Viral Change: Trends in Michigan Teacher Attrition and Mobility Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

October 2023

In this study, we use administrative data from Michigan to understand how teachers’ propensities to leave the public school system, switch districts, or switch schools shifted after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis sample includes more than 140,000 traditional public and charter school teachers who worked in Michigan for at least one year between 2012-13 and 2022-23.

Key Findings:

1. Michigan teachers were more likely to leave the public school system or switch schools during the pandemic, but less likely to switch to a new district. Following the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years, teachers were 17 and 28 percent more likely to leave the Michigan public school system compared to the last full pre-pandemic school year, respectively. District switches decreased significantly less in all three pandemic-impacted school years. School switches increased by 14 percent in both 2020-21 and 2021-22.
2. Teachers may have been more concerned with instructional modality offerings during the 2020-21 school year than COVID-19 incidence rates. Teachers in districts with the highest COVID-19 rates were less likely to leave teaching altogether than their peers in low COVID-19 rate districts following initial school building closures, which seems counterintuitive given the discourse surrounding school reopening prior to fall 2020. Teachers in fully remote districts, however, were significantly less likely to leave the teaching profession or switch districts following the 2019-20 school year compared to teachers in fully in-person districts.
3. Attrition and mobility rates after each school year were generally consistent across racial/ethnic subgroups. Specifically, we find few significant differences in attrition and mobility by race/ethnicity, even when controlling for districts’ instructional modalities.
4. Novice teachers were more likely to exit the workforce during the pandemic compared to teachers with at least four years of teaching experience. Novice teachers were 3.4 percentage points more likely to leave the Michigan teacher workforce than teachers in the 2018-19 school year, and between 1.0 and 1.5 percentage points more likely to leave than teachers with four or more years of experience.