From Candidate to Classroom: Research-Based Practices for Recruiting and Hiring Highly-Effective Teachers
Category: Staffing, Finance, and Operations
Districts nationwide seek to diversify the educator workforce, yet pathways for paraprofessionals—typically more ethnoracially and linguistically diverse than the general teacher pipeline—remain understudied. Using administrative data from New York City Public Schools (NYCPS), this study examines paraprofessionals’ demographic, transition, and exit patterns. Between 2016–17 and 2023–24, the paraprofessional workforce grew substantially, and more new teachers had prior paraprofessional experience. Those advancing to teaching were more ethnoracially diverse and less likely to leave teaching in NYCPS compared to other teachers, especially when teaching in the same school that they served as a paraprofessional. Findings underscore the need for targeted support to strengthen both the retention of paraprofessionals and their success as classroom teachers when transitioning to new school environments.
Keywords
Staff Development, Career Development, Teacher Characteristics, Retention, Race, Ethnicity, Descriptive Analysis, Regression Analysis
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/511n-s861
