The effects of mentor programs on novice teacher attrition rates in Texas public schools

The concept of a mentor has been used in a number of disciplines to integrate novice employees into the routines of the workplace. Education is a field that has also adopted the mentoring programs initiated in other disciplines in an attempt to retain novice teachers in the profession. With an increasing number of teachers exiting the profession and shortages looming in the horizon in Texas, retention of teachers seems an obvious concern.; This dissertation attempted to analyze statistically the relationship of the mentoring program offered to the novice teacher to the percentage of novice teachers who exit the school districts in Texas on a per district basis. Holding demographic variables constant, as well as school climate conditions as measured by Texas Education Agency's Snapshot data, a relationship between the degree of mentoring received by a novice teacher and the attrition rate of that particular district was hypothesized to exist. The degree of mentoring was indexed using surveys mailed to each public school district in the state of Texas, with follow up surveys mailed out after four weeks of the initial survey. The data were then accumulated and coded into a model incorporating other independent variables as determined significant through the literature review. The percent of novice teachers exiting each district was the dependent variable in the model, with this variable being obtained from the Texas Education Agency's Public Education Information Management System database. Using linear regression analysis, the data from the school year 1997–1998 was tested to determine the outcome of the hypothesis. The school year 1997–1998 was used as it was compared to the subsequent school year, 1998–1999, and the data for the most recent school year, 1999–2000, had not been released for publication at the onset of this dissertation.