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Teachers are crucial to students' learning outcomes in school. Therefore, it is of particular importance to recruit and retain skilled teachers for schools with a socially or economically disadvantaged student body. However, previous international research has stated that the highest rates of teacher turnover can be found in disadvantaged schools with large concentrations of low-income families, low-achieving students and/or students with minority backgrounds. Therefore, it is key to gain an understanding of whether teachers systematically leave disadvantaged lower secondary schools in Norway or the teaching profession entirely, as well as investigating the mechanisms behind these patterns. I investigate Norway at large, and focus separately on Oslo, due to the large differences in student composition between schools in this city. I present the first sociological contribution to the understanding of the association between the share of minority students and teacher mobility and/or teacher attrition in Norway and Oslo, respectively. In the study, I pose three research questions: 1) Is there a positive association between the proportion of students with a minority background and teacher mobility from lower secondary schools in Norway and/or Oslo? 2) Is there a positive association between the proportion of students with a minority background and teachers' propensity to leave their profession in Norway and/or Oslo? 3) Whether and how does the association between the proportion of minority students and teacher mobility and/or teacher attrition vary with teacher characteristics in Norway and/or Oslo? I specifically focus on teacher characteristics like teachers' sex, immigrant group and age group. I apply theoretical assumptions from mechanism-based explanations, push- and pull-factors (Gambetta, 1987), the DBO model (“Desires, Beliefs and Opportunities”) (Elster, 2015; Hedström, 2005), as well as previous research. Using linear probability models, with and without school-fixed effects, I investigate the association between the proportion of minority students at school-level and teacher mobility from lower secondary schools and teacher attrition from the teaching profession. I report the average marginal effects of the proportion of minority students on teacher mobility and/or teacher attrition.
By partaking in the project Ethnic Segregation in Schools and Neighbourhoods: Consequences and Dynamics, I have access to administrative register data managed by Statistics Norway, as well as data from the Directorate of Education. I completed the merging and appending of variables in Stata 16.1 software in order to have a comprehensive longitudinal data set. The panel data set for the time period between 2003—2013 comprises individual-level data of teachers, students and students' parents, as well as organisational school-level data from the primary- and lower secondary school information system.
In line with my research questions, I conduct two separate analyses in Norway. A subset of both analyses specifically address the situation in Oslo, which is an especially important venue for studying this topic. Overall, I find that once I include school-fixed effects and school-level and individual-level control variables, the proportion of minority students does not affect the probability that teachers will exit lower secondary schools and/or the teaching profession in Norway and Oslo, respectively. Despite this lack of evidence, the findings indicate dissimilarities in the association between the minority student share and teacher mobility and attrition according to teacher characteristics, like immigrant group and age group. First, teachers who are themselves non-western immigrants are more likely to stay in schools with high or increasing shares of minority students in Norway, compared to native majority teachers. Second, teachers with a non-western descendant background are more likely to leave the teaching profession if working in schools with high or increasing shares of minority students in Norway, relative to native majority teachers. This gives support for the anticipation that minority teachers possibly have different desires, beliefs and/or opportunities in the labour market, relative to native majority teachers. Third, in Oslo, the teachers who are themselves in the oldest age group 65—70, are more likely to leave the profession if working in schools with high or increasing shares of minority students, compared to teachers in age group 18—24. This is in accordance with previous research and theoretical expectations about other desires, beliefs and/or opportunities among teachers coming close to retirement age. Teachers' sex is of no importance for any of the associations in the study.
In general, the thesis has contributed with more information about whether and how the student composition, measured by the share of minority students at school-level is associated with teacher mobility and/or teacher attrition, both in Norway and Oslo. Higher minority concentrations in schools do not make teachers more likely to quit their jobs.
