Lansingburgh High School math teacher Regina Felio helps a student prepare for their upcoming Algebra I Regents exam on Friday at Lansingburgh High School in Troy. Lansingburgh is among the local school districts whose students are overperforming in Algebra I exams, compared to other high need school districts. Its low teacher turnover is having an impact, data shows.
Will Waldron/Times Union
Algebra I Regents exam practice material is used in math class on Friday, at Lansingburgh High School in Troy. Passing the exam is a graduation requirement. In high-need districts, upward of 40% of students never pass it.
Will Waldron/Times Union
Lansingburgh High School math teacher Eric Loudis helps a student prepare for their upcoming Algebra I Regents exam on Friday at Lansingburgh High School in Troy.
Will Waldron/Times Union
Algebra I Regents exam practice material is used in math class on Friday at Lansingburgh High School in Troy.
Will Waldron/Times Union
Lansingburgh High School math teacher Regina Felio, right, helps a student prepare for their upcoming Algebra I Regents exam on Friday at Lansingburgh High School in Troy.
Will Waldron/Times Union
Lansingburgh High School math teacher Regina Felio, right, helps a student prepare for their upcoming Algebra I Regents exam on Friday at Lansingburgh High School in Troy.
Will Waldron/Times Union
Algebra practice material is displayed in a classroom on Friday at Lansingburgh High School in Troy.
Will Waldron/Times Union
Algebra I Regents exam practice material is used in math class on Friday, May 15, 2026, at Lansingburgh High School in Troy, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union)
Will Waldron/Times Union
Lansingburgh High School math teacher Eric Loudis works in his classroom ahead of the upcoming Algebra I Regents exam on Friday at Lansingburgh High School in Troy.
Will Waldron/Times Union
Mastering high school math can be a nightmare. Then add in the chaotic effects of poverty. But one factor can multiply students’ chances of success.
A Times Union analysis of high-need school districts found that teacher turnover can play a pivotal role in student success.
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Wealth is the biggest predictor of how well students do in school, according to state data. But among districts with similarly disadvantaged students — from those who live in poverty to those with disabilities or limited English proficiency — those with very low teacher turnover have strikingly higher results.
Take the Algebra I Regents exam. It’s required for graduation. Students start taking it freshman year. Many students have to take it multiple times. In high-need districts, upward of 40% of students never pass it, according to data from the state Education Department.
But some high-need districts buck that trend, getting about 80% of their students through the test.
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It’s not because of a unique math curriculum. It’s not that their students all memorized the multiplication tables in elementary school, although that would help.
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It’s because their teacher turnover is less than 5%, state data shows.
The state Education Department defines which schools are high need, based on many factors, including poverty, chronic absenteeism and a high number of students who are learning English.
Among high-need schools, the pass rate on the Algebra I exam increased by 7 percentage points when their teacher turnover fell to 5% or less, according to an analysis of 11 years of state Education Department records.
Only 17 high-need districts in the state managed to achieve such low turnover, but the increase in pass rates there meant that 675 more students passed the exam by graduation between 2009 and 2019.
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At the same time, high-need districts with turnover above 15% had worse pass rates than similar schools that had average teacher turnover.
Their pass rate fell 3 percentage points, which translated to about 1,400 more students not passing the exam by graduation during the same time period.
State Ed is now making plans to allow students other ways to show their mastery of algebra, rather than requiring them to pass the exam. But the Board of Regents has not set a date for the Regents exams to become optional. For now, they are still required for graduation, meaning students must pass the algebra exam.
In 2020 and 2021, students did not have to take Regents exams. That means the cohorts that graduated recently could get their diploma without passing the algebra exam. The cohort that graduates this spring is the first since the COVID-19 pandemic to be required to take the exam. Officials are anxiously awaiting their final results; scores have so far been down statewide, but students can keep taking the exams.
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Last year, the passing rate for the algebra exam was 56% statewide, down from 71% in the last year before the pandemic.
What matters in the end is passing it, not how many tries it takes. The Times Union analysis looked at the final results of each cohort when they graduated, from 2009 to 2019. The analysis compared districts to others that serve similar demographics.
It found that many more students were passing the algebra exam in four local districts than in comparable districts. Statewide, 17 high-need districts consistently beat the average passing rate for high-need schools.
Officials at some of the districts were surprised that their students were actually overperforming, because they had not been comparing their district to other disadvantaged districts. They were instead looking at the wealthiest districts, like Bethlehem, where almost every student passes.
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Lansingburgh
But it was no surprise to Lansingburgh Superintendent Antonio Abitabile.
“I’ve also identified Lansingburgh has overperformed,” he said.
He was a math teacher at the Hudson City School District. He interviewed at Lansingburgh because he wanted answers.
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“What is it you’re doing here that I can’t replicate?” he said he wanted to know.
What he found was not a different way of teaching students, but there was a different attitude among the teaching staff.
They were planning to stay.
Part of that is because of the district’s mentoring program, which he called “very robust.”
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Veteran teachers work with each new teacher. In addition, there are teachers assigned to teach other teachers, leaving their classroom to take on that role.
“Their entire job is to take our teachers, work with them and make them better,” he said.
That can ruffle feathers in some districts. But Lansingburgh chooses teachers that other teachers look up to and admire, he said.
“We hand select them. They are highly respected people. They have to be successful teachers. They have to have walked the walk. And been successful here,” he said.
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The philosophy includes paying teachers more, as well.
“As great as culture may be, people still need to pay their bills,” he said.
When the district received funds to help at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, every teacher received a “retention bonus.” When the district received more money from the state through the Campaign for Fiscal Equity court settlement in 2021, every teacher’s salary was bumped up by $4,000.
“We have seen dramatic increases in our retention because of it,” he said.
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He was not surprised that the pass rate improved when teacher turnover decreased. His dissertation was on the importance of teacher retention in high-need school districts.
Studies
Researchers have looked at teacher turnover from many perspectives. Many have considered the possibility that high turnover gets rid of poor teachers, while good ones stay. Some teachers have suggested that they are all generally equal in skill and it’s up to individual students to make their own future by studying hard.
But in the last decade, repeated studies have found a correlation between low turnover and better student performance, especially in schools with many low-income students.
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One study in 2013 looked at the fourth and fifth grade teachers in all of the New York City public schools over the course of eight years. High turnover led to lower scores in English Language Arts and math. But it was “especially deleterious” in schools with many low-income students, the study found.
The study found that even the students of teachers who stayed performed “significantly worse” when turnover was high, although their own teacher was not new to the school. The study authors said the issue could be that the team of fourth or fifth grade teachers did not function as well when many members of the team were new.
“One possibility is that turnover negatively affects collegiality or relational trust among faculty; or perhaps turnover results in loss of institutional knowledge among faculty that is critical for supporting student learning,” the study said.
Other over-performers
In the Capital Region, three other high-need school districts regularly outperformed their peers on the Algebra I exam from 2009 to 2019. They were Rensselaer, Cohoes and Watervliet.
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Rensselaer Junior Senior High Principal Dominick Pitaniello said his teachers became adept at “honing in” on what each student needed to work on to pass the test.
“We had a good amount of experience on the staff,” he said of the high school math department. “The more they’re teaching that subject area, the more tips and tricks they pick up.”
This year, the district added a full-year class for students who failed Algebra I.
“A course for students who have been struggling with that test to really focus on it,” he said, adding that previously, students were “usually just test prepping” before a retake.
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Teachers are seeing improvements in the scores on practice tests, he said, but the proof is in the pudding. The exam is only offered in January, June and August.
How we did it
The Times Union analysis used ChatGPT to write a Python code to extract all of the relevant data fields from extremely large datasets published by the state Education Department. The most recent dataset had approximately 1.2 billion items. They are released every year in a Microsoft Access database. ChatGPT was directed to pull specific columns from those databases and place them in an Excel sheet, from which the Times Union could create pivot tables to look at what factors might influence passing rates. A check from the Times Union confirmed the data was identical to the state Ed database. The Times Union has done this type of analysis before, but it takes hours to manually gather the data for just one district. Using the Python code written by ChatGPT, the Times Union was able to gather the relevant data for every school district in the state in a matter of days.
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