Does teacher turnover relate to lower safety and quality in child care settings?

Abstract

Child care teachers play a key role in providing the safe environments and warm interactions that parents prioritize when choosing care. High turnover among teachers at child care centers is hypothesized to negatively impact safety and quality, but we have limited empirical evidence on whether the centers that experience high teacher turnover also have low safety and interaction quality. We fill this gap by combining administrative data on teacher turnover and classroom observations with web-scraped data from state licensing inspections reports. We provide descriptive evidence on how teacher turnover relates to licensing violations and teacher-child interaction quality in the universe of licensed, publicly-funded centers in Louisiana. Centers with low annual turnover (less than 20%) were 10 percentage points less likely than centers with high turnover to have critical violations—the most troubling safety issues as defined by the state. Centers that experienced high annual turnover and those with persistently high turnover exhibited significantly lower process quality, with high turnover centers having an average overall CLASS score about 0.3 standard deviations lower than the average for low turnover centers. The findings of this study demonstrate a clear association between higher levels of teacher turnover and lower safety and lower quality teacher-child interactions in center-based ECE settings.