Alvin Christian
College Students and Career Aspirations: Nudging Student Interest in Teaching
We survey undergraduate students at a large public university to understand the pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors driving their college major and career decisions with a focus on K-12 teaching. While the average student reports there is a 6% chance they will pursue teaching, almost 27% report… more →
Teacher Shortages: A Framework for Understanding and Predicting Vacancies
We develop a unifying conceptual framework for understanding and predicting teacher shortages at the state, region, district, and school levels. We then generate and test hypotheses about geographic and subject variation in teacher shortages using data on unfilled teaching positions in Tennessee… more →
Assessing School District Decision-Making: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThe COVID-19 pandemic drew new attention to the role of school boards in the U.S. In this paper, we examine school districts' choices of learning modality -- whether and when to offer in-person, virtual, or hybrid instruction -- over the course of the 2020-21 pandemic school year. The… more →
Can Teacher Evaluation Systems Produce High-Quality Feedback? An Administrator Training Field Experiment
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentTags: Professional developmentA core motivation for the widespread teacher evaluation reforms of the last decade was the belief that these new systems would promote teacher development through high-quality feedback. We examine this theory by studying teachers’ perceptions of evaluation feedback in Boston Public Schools and… more →