Education Week has a nice round-up of several different studies that come to wildly disparate conclusions on the topic of teacher attrition. The principal antagonists are the University of Pennsylvania s Richard Ingersoll and research firm SRI International s Andrew Wayne.

Predicatably, Ingersoll's research concludes that teacher attrition is a major problem indeed, at the top of the list of issues to be addressed with regard to teacher quality. We think Wayne's study is much more interesting and insightful. Wayne shows that teacher attrition can be explained as normal behavior exhibited by those holding their first jobs. Using data from the 1993 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, Wayne found that the attrition in the teaching profession is actually better than the attrition rate from other white-collar initial occupations.