Teacher retention at private and charter schools: why teachers leave and what works

The national benchmark comes from NCES's Teacher Follow-up Survey, updated May 2024.

Of teachers teaching in 2020-21, 84% of public school teachers and 82% of private school teachers were still at the same school in 2021-22.

Another 8% of public and 6% of private teachers had moved to a different school, and 8% of public and 12% of private teachers had left teaching altogether.

If you run a charter school, note the fine print: NCES counts charter teachers inside its public school figure, and that page publishes no separate charter rate.

Our research found no other national charter turnover figure to point to, so your own records, counted the same way every spring, are the benchmark that matters.

For the market context around them — school counts, employment and wages — our page of turnover statistics and industry data pulls the sector's figures together.

Read the columns separately, because they respond to different fixes.

Movers are the teachers who went to a different school — the losses your retention work is aimed at.

The 12% of private teachers who left teaching altogether are a different population; what emptied that bucket — retirement, career change, a family move — is exactly what your exit interviews are for, and no workload audit brings a retiree back.

Your controllable number is the move.

The movers' own reasons tell you where the leverage sits.

Among teachers who voluntarily moved schools between 2020-21 and 2021-22, 36% of private school teachers cited salary and other job benefits as the most important reason, against 9% of public school movers.

Pay competition between schools is visible in the federal data, not just in recruiter folklore.

What the survey cannot do is name the teacher who left over one division head, a schedule that put planning time last, or a mission that drifted into paperwork.

Those reasons live in your exit interviews, not a federal table — which is why this guide is about measurement before levers.

Be honest about the math first: our research found no national replacement-cost benchmark for private or charter schools, and a single dollar figure quoted somewhere else was not built for your school, your state or your salary scale.

Build your own number instead.

It takes one morning with your payroll records, your calendar and your last few departures.

Four buckets cover the cost.

Separation runs from the resignation letter through exit processing, final payroll and benefits administration.

Recruitment covers posting fees and any placement or search fees you pay.

Coverage is the vacancy itself: substitutes, colleagues carrying overloaded sections, the course a department had to cancel.

Replacement is everything from interviews to onboarding to the months a new hire needs before they teach at full stride.

Then price the calendar, because timing changes the total.

Carney Sandoe, the placement firm, describes its hiring-conference season as running January through April each year — the window that marks the core of independent-school faculty hiring.

A vacancy that opens inside that window is filled during the core of the hiring season.

One that opens after contracts are signed draws from whatever candidates happen to be looking that month, and the coverage gap gets patched with long-term substitutes and overloaded colleagues.

Total those buckets across your most recent departures and you have the number that pays for everything else in this guide.

When a board member or business manager asks what a retention initiative buys, answer with your own replacement invoice, not a statistic from a study of some other sector.

An exit interview is a structured conversation with a departing teacher, ideally run by someone who is not their direct supervisor so the answers stay candid.

Keep the question set identical every time — the value is the year-over-year pattern, not any single conversation.

Core questions: What is the primary reason you are leaving?

What did the school handle well?

What would have kept you?

Would you consider returning?

Code the answers by theme and keep them in one place, and separate the retirements from the moves.

A retirement is a succession-planning fact; a move to the school across town is a competitiveness fact.

A resignation that cites one relationship or one decision is neither — and if the same pattern shows up spring after spring, you have found a leadership problem with a name attached.

A stay interview is the same conversation held earlier, with the teachers you most want to keep.

Schedule it one-on-one, well before the hiring season opens — for independent schools, that means before January, when Carney Sandoe's conference season begins.

Ask forward-looking questions: What would make you look elsewhere?

What part of your job drains you?

What do you want to be doing here in three years?

What would make next year an easy yes?

Two rules decide whether either practice works.

First, listen without defending: a stay interview where the head argues with the answers is the last honest one you will get.

Second, close the loop publicly — tell the faculty what you heard and what changed.

Feedback that visibly changes nothing teaches people to stop offering it, and the next candid conversation they have will be with a recruiter instead of with you.

Size the practice to the school.

A small school can put the head of school in every stay interview personally.

A charter network should standardize the question set across campuses, so the network office can see patterns an individual principal cannot — and a departing teacher's reasons do not stay locked inside one building.

Pay comes first because the data already spoke: 36% of private school movers named salary and benefits their most important reason for moving.

Winning every bidding war is not the goal.

You need a salary schedule you can explain in one conversation, placement rules teachers recognize as fair, and a review cycle that does not wait for a resignation letter to discover the market moved.

Benchmark against the schools you actually lose teachers to — nearby district scales, charter networks and the independent schools inside your commute shed.

Change pay on purpose, not reactively.

Model the multi-year cost with your business office or CPA, and have counsel review anything that touches an existing contract.

A planned adjustment announced in the spring lands better than a June counteroffer against an offer letter you did not know existed.

Workload is the quieter lever.

NCES's 2020-21 National Teacher and Principal Survey puts numbers on it: regular full-time private school teachers worked an average of 52 hours a week on all school-related activities, including 24 paid hours delivering instruction, against an average contractual requirement of 39 hours.

The gap between the contract and the clock is where burnout compounds.

Audit extra duties annually — advising, coaching, clubs, duty rosters, and dorm responsibilities at boarding schools.

Protect planning time on the master schedule.

Watch where the extras land: a roster that leans on the same few teachers every term is a retention risk you can see on the master schedule.

Leadership is the lever nobody volunteers to pull.

Your exit and stay data will eventually connect a cluster of departures to one division, one supervisor or one decision.

At that point the move is the school's to make: coach the leader, redistribute the portfolio, or accept the turnover as a recurring line in the budget.

Treat retention data as feedback about leadership rather than as weather — the pattern is yours to act on.

And if your data shows early-career teachers leaving first, a structured mentoring program is the direct response: it gives a struggling first year a second conversation before it becomes a resignation.

Faith-based schools keep teachers through the same levers as every other school — pay, workload, leadership — plus one asset the federal surveys cannot price: shared mission.

A teacher who experiences the school's religious identity as the reason they teach, rather than an administrative overlay, has a reason to stay that sits outside the salary comparison entirely.

That asset erodes when the mission becomes a line in the handbook instead of a lived practice.

Make the mission concrete instead of decorative.

Name the faith dimension inside the role itself — the prayer life, the retreats, the service program — rather than bolting it onto a generic teaching job.

Involve faculty in the school's spiritual leadership where your tradition allows it, mark years of service, and treat the religion department's work as central rather than peripheral.

None of this appears in a salary schedule.

All of it surfaces in a stay interview.

Support the credentials your tradition asks for.

Where teachers hold diocesan catechist certification or certification through an association such as ACSI, funding whatever renewal or continuing-education the credential asks of them is a visible investment in their professional standing — and a signal that the school takes their vocation seriously.

Then run the workload audit twice in these schools, because mission roles are a natural place for stacked duties: the person directing retreats may also carry a full teaching load, and the campus minister may also coach.

Look there first.

Charter schools need the boundary note instead.

For federal Charter Schools Program purposes (20 U.S.C. § 7221i(2)), a charter school must be a public school that is nonsectarian in its programs, admissions, employment practices and all other operations, and is not affiliated with a sectarian school or religious institution.

Before borrowing a religious private school's retention practices, check what your charter, your authorizer and your state's law allow.

Build the culture deliberately — a values-based identity can still be a retention asset — inside those limits.

Retention is one chapter of the employer's year.

The contracts, the intent-to-return cycle and the winter hiring calendar that follows it are part of the same system, and our hiring hub maps the rest of it.