Then What? Quantifying SBAE Teacher Career-Decisions Post-Migration

Abstract

Complex career decisions, such as teacher mobility, are often reduced to stigmatizing labels that do little to account for the state of teaching as a profession or credit those engaging in migratory decisions as making healthy career choices. Through our study, we focused on understanding workforce mobility, teaching as an unstaged profession, and the current quantifications existing around SBAE teacher migration. We drew on over 100 years of data from California as we quantitatively explored and synthesized the career decisions of migrating SBAE teachers. This snapshot offers a means of understanding the Teacher Career Cycle (Fessler & Christensen, 1992) in light of the implications for the teaching career as a series of choices rather than a stretch of time at an individual school. Implications of this conceptualization of migration stretch beyond SBAE to administration.