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Reviews Worth Sharing: The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis in America's Urban Schools (TNTP, July 2012)

The New Teacher Project’s report on teacher retention argues that not all teacher turnover is created equal and that attention should be paid to the quality of teachers who are leaving the profession.  Di Carlo considers all of the report’s recommendations to merit discussion, but here he focuses explicitly on TNTP’s use of the word “irreplaceable,” suggesting that “the analysis would have been better had TNTP avoided the overblown, media-friendly characterizations of their performance categories.”  Independent of the report’s recommendations about retention, when it comes to the characteristics, attitudes and behavior among teachers who are “nearly impossible to replace,” he encourages readers to interpret the results of this particular report with a healthy dose of caution.

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