Does Teaching in Your Home State Increase Teacher Retention?

This study investigates whether being assigned to teach in one’s home state affects teacher retention. Using unique Teach For America (TFA) data linking applicants’ preferred and actual placements with career outcomes over seven years, the authors track more than 20,000 corps members. Employing fixed effects models to control for background, placement, and preferences, they find that teaching in one’s home state increases retention by an average of 0.15 years. The effect is substantially larger for teachers of color (0.47 years) and those from low-income backgrounds (0.36 years). Results highlight the potential of “grow your own” strategies to improve retention.

Full Citation and Link to Article

Blaushild, Naomi, Claire L. Mackevicius, and Cora Wigger. “Investigating the ‘Draw of Home’ and Teachers’ Career Decisions.” Education Finance and Policy, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp.a.25

Extended Summary

Central Research Question

The central research question of this study is whether teaching in one’s home state affects teacher retention, with a particular focus on whether this effect varies by teachers’ socioeconomic background and race. While past research has documented teachers’ preferences for working near their hometowns, little evidence exists on whether such proximity influences long-term commitment to the profession. The authors leverage Teach For America’s (TFA) assignment process, which incorporates both applicant preferences and organizational needs, to approximate quasi-random placement and examine whether being assigned to one’s home state increases years spent teaching.

Previous Literature

Prior research has shown that teachers strongly prefer to work close to home. Studies in New York and elsewhere found that many new teachers begin their careers within 15 to 40 miles of their hometowns. Boyd et al. (2005) described this as a “draw of home,” showing that teacher labor markets are highly localized. Similarly, Cannata (2010) found prospective elementary teachers preferred familiar contexts where they could work with students and colleagues similar to themselves.

However, research directly linking proximity to home with retention is scarce. Large-scale studies, such as those using the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS), have struggled to track teachers longitudinally across states. District-level studies provide some evidence but are often unable to disentangle home preferences from other contextual factors. In New York City, for example, locally raised teachers had higher retention rates than “outsiders,” suggesting community ties matter, though causality remained unclear.

In recent years, “grow your own” (GYO) programs have sought to expand teacher supply and retention by recruiting locally. These initiatives are premised on the idea that teachers rooted in a community are more likely to persist in teaching and more likely to reflect the demographics of their students. Early findings from such programs suggest benefits for teacher stability and diversity, but little causal evidence exists on the retention effects of teaching near home.

Given high attrition rates, particularly in urban and rural schools, understanding whether home proximity boosts retention is crucial. The study at hand builds on this literature by leveraging TFA’s assignment process to isolate the effect of teaching in one’s home state on career longevity.

Data

The analysis uses administrative datasets from TFA covering four cohorts (2010–2013) and tracking individuals up to seven to ten years after entry. The data include three components:

1. Offer data, which provide demographic characteristics (race, gender, socioeconomic background, home state), placement details (TFA region, subject, grade), and program completion.

2. Preference data, which record applicants’ rankings of TFA regions during the application process.

3. Alumni data, collected through annual surveys and LinkedIn scraping, which indicate whether alumni were teaching each year after their TFA service.

The final dataset includes over 21,000 individuals, though analyses focus on those who completed their initial two-year TFA commitment (about 84 percent of entrants). Retention is operationalized as total years spent teaching, capped at seven to allow comparability across cohorts. A binary measure is also constructed for whether an individual remained in teaching for at least five years.

A key independent variable is “home state match,” which indicates whether a teacher was assigned to a TFA region located in their home state. About 22 percent of the sample received such an assignment.

Methods

The authors use a fixed effects research design to approximate causal inference. They construct groups of comparable teachers who share key characteristics:

1. Same home state of origin.

2. Similar ranking of home state regions in the application process.

3. Placement in regions of similar preference level (e.g., highly preferred, preferred, or would consider).

4. Similar level of “pickiness,” defined by the number of regions listed as highly preferred.

Within these matched groups, some teachers were assigned to their home state while others were not, allowing the researchers to isolate the effect of home state assignment from preference or background differences.

Two estimation strategies are applied:

• Separate fixed effects models, which control for each of the four characteristics individually.

• Combined fixed effects models, the preferred specification, which control for all four simultaneously to ensure comparisons among closely matched individuals.

Both approaches also include controls for demographics (race, income background, age, education major), application scores (leadership, perseverance, communication), placement features (subject, grade, region, cohort), and within-preference rankings.

The main outcomes are total years in teaching and likelihood of staying at least five years. Logit models are used for the binary outcome. Heterogeneity analyses examine effects by race and socioeconomic background. Robustness checks include balance tests, sensitivity analyses, and single-state exclusion tests.

Findings/Size Effects

The results demonstrate a clear, statistically significant home state effect on teacher retention:

• Overall, being assigned to one’s home state increased years in teaching by about 0.15 years.

• Teachers assigned to their home state also had higher odds (odds ratios of 1.136–1.151) of remaining at least five years in the profession.

Importantly, the effects were heterogeneous:

• Teachers from low-income backgrounds taught an additional 0.36 years when assigned to their home state.

• Teachers of color taught an additional 0.47 years under the same conditions.

• No significant effect was found for white teachers or those from higher-income backgrounds.

The effect was most pronounced when teachers both preferred and were assigned to their home state. For example, teachers who ranked their home state as their top choice and were assigned there taught 0.29 years longer on average, with even larger effects for low-income teachers (0.57 years) and teachers of color (0.55 years). By contrast, simply receiving one’s top preference, if it was not the home state, did not affect retention.

Longevity analyses showed that the home state effect increased the odds of staying for three, four, or five years, though effects tapered at six and seven years. This pattern indicates that the effect is not just driven by marginal one-year increases but reflects more substantial career extension among a subset of teachers.

Robustness checks confirmed the stability of results. Excluding individual states, using alternative socioeconomic definitions (e.g., Pell Grant receipt), or altering specifications all yielded consistent positive effects. The results were not sensitive to potential survey response bias or LinkedIn-based data collection.

Conclusion

This study provides some of the strongest evidence to date that teaching in one’s home state positively affects teacher retention, especially for teachers of color and those from low-income backgrounds. While the average effect of 0.15 years is modest, the larger effects for historically underrepresented groups suggest meaningful implications for teacher diversity and stability in high-need schools.

The findings support policies and programs that encourage teachers to begin their careers near home. “Grow your own” initiatives, which recruit local candidates into teaching, may enhance retention and expand diversity in the workforce. Importantly, the results suggest that retention gains come not simply from assigning teachers to their top preference, but from aligning both preference and home state.

The implications extend beyond TFA, since many districts and states increasingly rely on alternative certification and fast-track programs to address shortages. As teacher labor markets become more fluid, policies that foster local connections may help stem attrition. Programs that emphasize community ties—such as recruiting from local schools, supporting teachers in familiar contexts, or providing incentives for home state placements—could have lasting impacts.

Limitations remain, particularly in the generalizability of TFA-based findings to the broader teacher workforce, given TFA’s unique applicant pool and short-term teaching commitment. Nevertheless, given rising teacher shortages, especially in disadvantaged communities, the evidence here provides strong support for expanding policies that connect teachers with their home communities as a means of improving both supply and retention.