Eight percent of teachers in public schools exited the profession between the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years, a pivotal time when K-12 education was heavily impacted by the pandemic. This departure rate was unchanged from nearly a decade earlier, according to the Teacher Follow-Up Survey, a longitudinal component of the National Teacher and Principal Survey, released recently by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the statistical center within the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.