Beginning Teachers Are More Common in Rural, High-Poverty, and Racially Diverse Schools. Issue Brief No. 53

This brief considers whether the concentration of beginning teachers in a district is associated with the district's poverty rate, racial composition, or urbanicity. Authors Douglas Gagnon and Marybeth Mattingly report that poor communities have moderately higher percentages of beginning teachers than communities with lower poverty rates and that a higher concentration of minority students in a district is associated with a higher percentage of beginning teachers. Large cities, remote towns, and rural districts have higher percentages of beginning teachers than midsized-small cities, suburbs, and fringe-distant town districts. The combined impact of poverty, race, and urbanicity has a substantial effect on the probability that a district has a critically high percentage of beginning teachers. A high percentage of beginning teachers likely reflects higher teacher turnover in the district, and could suggest issues of teacher quality. The brief uses combined data from the 2009-2010 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), the 2009 Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE), and the 2010 U.S. Census to form a nationally representative data source of 6,569 districts. (Contains 2 figures, 1 table, and 15 endnotes.)