Should I Stay or Should I Go? Turnover among Public School Teachers and Principals

This dissertation uses data on public school teachers and principals to address three related research questions: 1. How do the predictors of turnover intention and actual turnover differ? 2. How do managerial constraints--in particular, constraints on public managers' ability to dismiss poorly performing employees--affect managers' turnover intentions and actual turnover decisions? 3. How do policymakers' efforts to induce bureaucrats' compliance with formal policy goals affect bureaucrats' turnover intentions? The dissertation comprises five chapters--an introduction, three empirical analyses (each of which will address one of the research questions listed above), and a conclusion. The first two empirical chapters use nationally representative, large-N data and non-experimental research designs to address their respective empirical questions. The third empirical chapter uses information collected from 12 semi-structured interviews with current and former public school teachers in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.Below, I begin with a discussion of why public employee turnover deserves analytical attention. The simplest justification for the dissertation is that turnover is costly to organizations, making the identification of its antecedents a worthwhile exercise. In my first empirical chapter, I illustrate how the use of turnover intention as a proxy for actual turnover in large-N research can produce misleading public management prescriptions. I do this using nationally representative data on public school teachers. In the dissertation's second empirical chapter, I transition to a focus on public school principals. Given that public school principals constitute a large class of public managers, it is useful to make them the focus of an analysis that tests whether managerial constraints are associated with managerial turnover decisions. Finally, in the dissertation's third empirical chapter, I narrow my analytical focus to teachers in the Washington, DC, public school system in order to more deeply explore the reasons underlying public sector employees' turnover behavior. I conclude with a discussion of the dissertation's implications for public management theory and public management prescription.