Running Head: Federal Policy and the Teacher Labor Market Federal Policy and the Teacher Labor Market: Exploring the Effects of NCLB on Teacher Turnover

Anecdotal evidence from the media suggests that accountability pressure increases teacher stress and drives teachers away from teaching, particularly leading to teachers leaving disadvantaged schools that serve a larger proportion of poor and minority students. However, no prior work has systematically examined the changes in the national trends of teacher turnover in response to NCLB school accountability. Drawing on nationally representative samples of schools and teachers from the Schools and Staffing Surveys and Teacher Follow-Up Surveys from 1993-2009, this study applies difference-in-differences approaches to examine the effects of NCLB school accountability on teacher turnover outcomes. We find that NCLB increased the average rate of teachers transferring involuntarily to other schools following school-initiated separations, particularly in the early stage of policy implementation and in disadvantaged schools. More surprisingly, neither voluntarily transferring between schools nor voluntarily leaving the teaching profession has changed in response to NCLB school accountability, even for teachers in disadvantaged schools. In contrast to non-tested counterparts, teachers in tested subjects and grades became less likely to leave the system following school-initiated separations under NCLB school accountability.