Why do teachers change schools in a district?

How teachers migrate among schools in a district can reveal important information about inequities in leadership and working conditions.

At a Glance

Although conversations about teacher shortages have focused on teachers leaving their districts or the teaching profession, many teachers move within districts.
Many teachers seek positions at other schools because of working conditions at their current school.
Teachers leaving a school causes a chain reaction in which high-needs schools within a district have more positions to fill and fewer experienced teachers.
Tracking teacher migration patterns within a district can help leaders determine which schools need more attention and support.

My worn school ID badge is a reminder of my first day as a Philadelphia teacher. “You look young,” my students said when they saw my badge. I was 22. My outfit — a white silk J. Crew blouse, a tailored wool pencil skirt, and black Cole Haan pumps — was meant to set me apart from the students, some of whom were only two years younger than me. The charter school where I’d begun my career had closed, so I was assigned to this North Philadelphia school in late fall, as holiday greetings echoed through the hallways. Upon my arrival, the principal promptly informed me that “I didn’t order you.”

In the next year, I would learn not to wear white silk — it would be dotted with ballpoint and dry-erase marks. Plus, white showed the pit sweat resulting from a faulty boiler system and a 90-degree classroom. I’d learn to buy skirts that promoted airflow and had deep pockets for my phone, keys, and pens. I loved working in the school’s Hunting Park neighborhood and still miss the school tremendously. But as the principal’s unwelcoming words hinted, the school was in peril. While I worked for the school, it perpetually ranked as the second-lowest-performing school in the city. The next year, I would leave the school after standing up for a falsely accused colleague.

Although teacher retention has been a chief concern among policy makers and practitioners, we ought to equally be concerned about the waves of educators who migrate from school to school. How teachers move reveals inequities that exist within districts that are rarely spoken about. As an educator in the School District of Philadelphia, I taught in five schools in six years. My journey in the City of Brotherly Love highlights the urgency of exploring intra-district transfer and migration patterns.

Teacher migration

I taught at three successive high schools in North Philadelphia and was able to see how certain environmental conditions were replicated throughout the district where I lived. Reflecting on my experience for Chalkbeat (2021), I wrote:

Few classrooms had proper cooling, and students struggled to learn in the warming spring and fall. In the years prior, my classroom’s only source of cooling had been the brown, wood-paneled Kenmore mini-fridge that I kept for my chicken salad. Of course, this was not enough to prevent paramedic visits or student heat exhaustion.

Although teacher retention has been a chief concern among policy makers and practitioners, we ought to equally be concerned about the waves of educators who migrate from school to school.

The schools would become a case study for what organizational researcher Richard Ingersoll (2019) describes as “teacher migration,” which is the movement of teachers internally from school to school within a district. It differs from traditional attrition, or seeking a change at a new district, because the professional is still under the same employer, just at another school.

I, along with many of my colleagues, left our schools because of the environmental and workplace conditions. Although I had a strong rapport with my students, there were few systems in place for student accountability and support. In every move, every school switch, I was trying to get to a more stable place without leaving my city.

But every move brought about a chain reaction in which another educator would be enlisted to take my place. At my first school in North Philadelphia, these replacements often would be new educators, as replacements at high-needs schools tended to be young and new to the profession. For example, the math department head at my first school only had one year of experience. In time, the district would create incentives for professionals to stay at the school. Still, we flowed from school to school, former colleagues becoming colleagues again as they gained experience and moved to more sought-after schools.

Learning from migration patterns

What do we know about teacher migration? According to Ingersoll, teacher migration patterns can indicate a school’s organizational health and the effectiveness of the vision, systems, and processes that leaders put into place to ensure students learn. This can be as simple as the protocol for classroom disruptions and as complex as the protocol for dealing with special education legal issues.

If you work in a school district with multiple schools, you know that there is an internal hierarchy of schools among staff. This was the case in my district, but I wanted to find a data-based correlation between teacher migration and workplace conditions. I reached out to the district office for the transfer numbers, but, unfortunately, the district had not tracked it.

Using the Philadelphia school assignment roster (2024) from the District Performance Office, I was able to determine how many appointed teachers are leaving individual schools each year. The data revealed that 1,610 teachers left schools between October 2022 and 2023 (Kulina-Washburn, 2024).

Unsurprisingly, those schools that made headlines for dysfunction and even violence saw the highest transfer of teachers. Murrell Dobbins Technical High School, the second school that I taught at and the subject of many headlines related to violence (Mcilwain, 2024) and disorganization (Juhasz & Caiola, 2022), lost the most teachers: 24. A middle school that garnered significant media attention after a professional was stabbed had one the highest rates of transfer among elementary and middle schools, losing 20 staff members. (Due to the limited qualifiers on publicly available data sets, retirements and forced transfers are still reflected in the data.)

It’s important to understand which schools and neighborhoods are losing teachers to internal transfers.

Why is this important? I believe that “if the district is not tracking that movement, then it is also not tracking why it happens, what it means for students, and what needs to change” (Kulina-Washburn, 2024). It’s important to understand which schools and neighborhoods are losing teachers to internal transfers. It’s also important to understand which teachers are more likely to transfer. Research from Ingersoll and Henry May (2011) suggests that minority teachers may be more likely to be more intrinsically motivated to work at high-needs schools. What does that mean for their working conditions? Ultimately, I am interested in how these numbers intersect with funding, student and teacher demographics, and supplemental support from parent groups.

Policy, data, and teacher moves

Alarmingly, while I was running these numbers, researchers (Chingos, Meltzer, & Carter, 2024) at the Urban Institute were predicting an increase in teacher transfers after New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a law requiring New York City’s public schools to reduce class sizes. While this sounds good in theory, scholars are concerned that it will only reproduce some of the staffing inequities already present between schools in terms of staffing. Matthew Chingos, Ariella Metzler, and James Carter (2024) observe:

If past data are any indication of where some schools may get the teachers they need to reduce class sizes, other schools in the district are an important potential source. And when schools hire teachers from within NYCPS, they tend to hire them from the highest-poverty schools.

Efforts to pinpoint teacher satisfaction at the school and district level could be a predictor of attrition or migration. For years, districts have relied on end-of-the-year surveys. However, it’s been difficult to make these numbers actionable. Many teachers have reservations about taking the survey. For example, in Philadelphia, only a few teachers at Castor Middle School, which had the largest turnover, took the survey — skewing the data.

A new collaboration called Educators Thriving has teamed up with districts and teacher unions to measure teacher well-being and leadership. Recently, the group helped lead negotiations between district personnel and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in Cleveland, highlighting data linked to migration and attrition (Fox et al., 2025). In an email, Educators Thriving co-founder Laura Andersen reflects, “When we survey, we typically ask about intent to return to the school site versus intent to stay in the district.” She said they hope their data can help “flag sites that need extra support/training/attention and in which areas long before teachers transfer.”

The importance of tracking transfers

We don’t talk about internal teacher retention because it highlights uncomfortable disparities that exist in districts already. Attention to teacher migrations can highlight the disparities between equity, organizational leadership, and workplace conditions that can exist within districts. However, tracking transference highlights the work to be done to promote equity within a district and ways school leadership can disrupt structural inequalities.

I always remind my students of the observation attributed to Maya Angelou: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” We know about teacher migration. Let’s use the data to do better for our students.

References

Chingos, M., Meltzer, A., & Carter, J. (2024, July 24). Will implementing class size caps exacerbate hiring challenges in New York City’s highest-poverty schools? An essay for the learning curve. Urban Institute.

Fox, H.B., Andersen, L., Fandel, A., & LaPointe, K. (2025). A historic contract for Cleveland. American Educator. 49 (1), 57.

Ingersoll, R. & May, H. (2011). Recruitment, retention, and the minority teacher shortage. Consortium for Policy Research in Education.

Ingersoll, R., May, H., & Collins, G. (2019). Recruitment, employment, retention and the minority teacher shortage. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 27 (37).

Juhasz, A. & Caiola, S. (2022, December 15). “We need help”: Students at Dobbins High School walk out over safety concerns. WHYY.

Kulina-Washburn, L. (2021, December 17). In Pennsylvania, it’s past time to focus on school funding gaps. Chalkbeat.

Kulina-Washburn, L. (2024, December 10). Teacher migration: Canary in the coal mine for school dysfunction. The Philadelphia Citizen.

Mcilwain, K. (2024, October 2). Student, 15, critically injured after incident at Philly high school. NBC 10 Philadelphia.

This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Kappan, Vol. 107, No. 3-4.