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Texas lost more than one in five classroom educators last year. The conventional response has been to recruit more,

pay more, and hope for the best. The research says something different.

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What The Classroom Sees

 

In 2022–23, Texas teacher attrition hit a record 13.4 percent. By 2023–24, total turnover across districts had reached 21.4 percent, nearly double the rate from a decade earlier. Nearly 78 percent of Texas educators reported considering leaving the classroom in the past year. Those are the official numbers. They do not capture the full picture. State attrition data measures teachers who leave at the end of a school year. It does not systematically track mid-year departures (the teachers who walk out in October, in January and in March) leaving a classroom of students with a substitute, a long-term fill-in, or nothing at all. The disruption those departures cause to students is real and largely invisible in the data that policymakers use to make decisions.

 

For an educator standing in that classroom, the question is not abstract. It is: Is this worth it? Not just the pay — research from RAND Corporation found that stress was the most common reason teachers left the profession, almost twice as common as insufficient pay. The majority of early leavers went on to take jobs with equal or less compensation. Three in ten accepted positions with no health insurance or retirement benefits. They were not leaving for better money. They were leaving to breathe.

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What an individual teacher cannot know, and what no individual teacher should have to figure out alone, is whether the conditions they are experiencing are specific to their campus, their district, or the profession as a whole. Whether what they are feeling is a signal worth acting on, or noise they should push through. Whether there is somewhere else in Greater Houston where the same skills and the same commitment would be met with something different.

That is the question ASEP was built to answer.

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What The Administrator's Office Sees

 

The view from a principal’s office or a district leadership team is not easier, it is just different. Texas is now operating under a hard deadline. Legislation passed in 2025 requires all core subject teachers (math, reading, science, social studies) to be fully certified by the 2027–28 school year. This matters because the pipeline has been quietly

collapsing for years. In 2024–25, roughly 30 percent of newly hired Texas teachers were uncertified; triple the pre-pandemic rate, up from approximately 5 percent in the early 2010s.

 

In some districts serving primarily economically disadvantaged students, certified educators accounted for only 40 to 60 percent of new hires. The certification gap is not just a compliance problem. TEA data shows that 60 percent of uncertified teachers leave the public education workforce within five years, compared to 40 percent of certified teachers. Hiring uncertified teachers to fill gaps accelerates the very turnover it is meant to solve.

 

And turnover is expensive in ways that rarely appear in a budget line. The Learning Policy Institute estimates that replacing a single teacher costs a large district an average of 3.7 million just to stand still.  That is before accounting for the effect on student achievement: students in grade levels with higher teacher turnover consistently show lower performance in both English language arts and math, with the effect strongest in schools serving students of color and economically disadvantaged students. The conventional response to all of this has been to raise starting salaries, offer retention bonuses, and invest in recruitment pipelines. These are not wrong. But a six-year longitudinal study across 13 districts and four states, published by Harvard Education Press in 2026, found that the single most powerful predictor of teacher retention was not compensation; it was the quality of collegial relationships and the presence of a supportive school culture.

 

“Without fail, no matter what school we went to, what state we were in, that was always the number one response,” said researcher Suzanne Poole Patzelt. “That was far and beyond the number one reason why teachers stayed.”

 

The districts that retained teachers best were not necessarily the ones that paid the most. Those districts were the ones where teachers were not isolated, where administrators fostered trust, where resources were shared, where new teachers were not left to sink or swim.

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That finding has a direct implication for district leaders: the most important retention investment may not be a line item. It may be a set of conditions that are difficult to measure without asking the people who experience them.

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The Gap Between Both Views

 

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Here is what makes this problem genuinely hard: educators and administrators are not operating with the same information. A teacher knows what their campus feels like. They do not know how it compares to the campus three miles away, or to the district on the other side of the county line. They cannot easily tell whether the stress they are carrying is a sign of a broken system or a temporary rough patch. They make career decisions — to stay, to transfer, to leave the profession entirely — with incomplete information about where their skills would actually be valued.

 

An administrator knows their budget, their vacancy rates, and their end-of-year attrition numbers. What they typically do not have is a clear, honest picture of what is driving those numbers from the inside — what teachers in their own buildings are actually experiencing, what would make them stay, and how those conditions compare to what neighboring districts are offering.

 

Research consistently shows that administrators underestimate the role of working conditions and overestimate the role of

compensation in driving attrition. They are investing in solutions to a problem they have not fully diagnosed. The data that would close this gap — granular, campus-level, educator-reported retention data — does not exist in any systematic

form in Texas. What exists are end-of-year departure counts and statewide averages. What is missing is the signal underneath those numbers: the working conditions, the leadership quality, the culture, the sense of being valued or not.

That is the gap A Stellar Education Project is designed to fill.

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What ASEP Is Doing

 

A Stellar Education Project collects retention data directly from educators — through a voluntary survey designed to surface what official statistics cannot capture. That data is analyzed through the STELLAR framework, which examines the conditions that research consistently links to educator retention: leadership quality, collegial relationships, professional growth, workload, compensation, and school culture.

 

The findings are made available to both audiences — but for different purposes.

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For educators, the data provides a basis for comparison. It answers the question every teacher deserves to be able to ask: Is what I’m experiencing here typical, or is it specific to this place? That is not a small thing. It is the difference between a career decision made in the dark and one made with real information.

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For administrators and district leaders, the data provides something harder to come by: honest, campus-level insight into what is actually driving retention in their buildings, benchmarked against comparable schools and districts in the region.

 

Not what teachers said in an exit interview on their way out the door — but what they are experiencing right now, while there is still time to act.

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The goal is not to assign blame. It is to make the problem visible to the people who have the ability to address it — and to give educators the information they need to make decisions about their own careers with clarity and confidence.

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Call To Action

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For educators: Your experience is data. The survey takes less than ten minutes and contributes to a regional picture that no individual campus or district can build alone. 

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For school and district leaders: If you are making decisions about teacher retention without campus-level, educator-reported data, you are working with an incomplete map.

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