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Educator perceptions
Untapped Potential? Understanding the Paraeducator-to-Teacher Pipeline and its Potential for Diversifying the Teacher Workforce
Paraeducators are among the largest categories of public education employees and are increasingly seen as a pool of potential teachers. However, little is known about paraeducator-to-teacher transitions. Using statewide administrative data, we show that while paraeducators may be more racially/… more →
How Teachers Learn Racial Competency: The Role of Peers and Contexts
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentThis paper investigates how teachers learn about race in the school context, with a particular focus on teachers’ development of racial competency. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews we find that teachers learn through three sources: from their peers, from years of experience, and from… more →
The Reform Logics of Teaching: How Institutionalized Conceptions of Teaching Shape Teacher Professional Identity
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentTags: Educator perceptionsTeachers’ professional identities are the foundation of their practice. Previous scholarship has largely overlooked the extent to which the broader institutional environment shapes teachers’ professional identities. In this study, I bridge institutional logics with theory on teacher professional… more →
The extent and consequences of teacher biases against immigrants
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentWe study the extent and consequences of biases against immigrants exhibited by high school teachers in Finland. Compared to native students, immigrant students receive 0.06 standard deviation units lower scores from teachers than from blind graders. This effect is almost entirely driven by… more →
What matters and for whom? Exploring characteristics of teacher residency programs and their relationship to participant perceptions
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentThis concurrent mixed methods study descriptively explores teacher residency programs (TRPs) across the nation. We examine program and participant survey data from the National Center for Teacher Residencies (NCTR) to identify important TRP structures for resident support.
Latent Classes of Teacher Working Conditions in Virginia: Description, Teacher Preferences, and Contextual Factors
Many dimensions of teacher working conditions influence both teacher and student outcomes; yet, analyses of schools’ overall working conditions are challenged by high correlations among the dimensions. Our study overcame this challenge by applying latent profile analysis of Virginia teachers’… more →
Should I Stay or Should I Go (Later)? Teacher Intentions and Turnover in Low-Performing Schools and Districts Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentTeacher turnover is a perennial concern that became more salient during the COVID-19 pandemic as teacher-reported intentions to leave teaching escalated. The extent to which these teacher reports may translate into actual turnover remains an open question—especially given the pandemic context.… more →
Why Do You Want to Be a Teacher? A Natural Language Processing Approach
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentHeightened concerns about the health of the teaching profession highlight the importance of studying the early teacher pipeline. This exploratory, descriptive paper examines preservice teachers' (PST) expressed motivation for pursuing a teaching career and its relationship with PST… more →
The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession: Prestige, Interest, Preparation, and Satisfaction over the Last Half Century
We examine the state of the U.S. K-12 teaching profession over the last half century by compiling nationally representative time-series data on four interrelated constructs: occupational prestige, interest among students, the number of individuals preparing for entry, and on-the-job satisfaction… more →
The Valence of Teacher Performance Feedback and Its Consequences: Examining a Critical Mechanism of Reformed Teacher Evaluation Systems
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentTags: Educator perceptionsDistricts nationwide have increased the frequency of teacher evaluations. Yet, we know little about the role of evaluator feedback for teacher improvement. Using unique classroom observation-level data, we use evaluator ratings and teacher self-assessments of teacher performance to rigorously… more →
Troublemakers? The Role of Frequent Teacher Referrers in Expanding Racial Disciplinary Disproportionalities
Topics: Student Well-BeingTeachers’ sense-making of student behavior determines whether students get in trouble and are formally disciplined.
Bias in kindergarten ability group placement: Does parental lobbying make it worse? Do formal assessments make it better?
Von Hippel & Cañedo (2021) reported that US kindergarten teachers placed girls, Asian-Americans, and children from families of high socioeconomic status (SES) into higher ability groups than their test scores alone would warrant. The results fit the view that teachers were biased.
Investing in the Teacher Workforce: Experimental Evidence on Teachers’ Preferences
While investing in the teacher workforce is central to improving schools, school resources are notoriously limited, forcing school leaders to make difficult decisions on how to prioritize funds. This paper examines a critical input to resource allocation decisions: teacher preferences. Using an… more →
Does Monitoring Change Teacher Pedagogy and Student Outcomes?
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentIn theory, monitoring can improve employee motivation and effort, particularly in settings lacking measurable outputs, but research assessing monitoring as a motivator is limited to laboratory settings. To address this gap, I leverage exogenous variation in the presence and intensity of teacher… more →
Do students improve their academic achievement when assigned to a growth mindset teacher? Evidence from Census Data in Chile using a Student Fixed Effect Design
Topics: Student LearningGrowing evidence shows that a student's growth mindset (the belief that intelligence is malleable) can benefit their academic achievement. However, due to limited information, little is known about how a teachers’ growth mindset affects their students’ academic achievement. In this paper, we… more →
Understanding Teacher Perceptions of Efficacy in Social and Emotional Learning: Toward Equity-Based Approaches to SEL in Urban Schools
Topics: Student Well-BeingResearchers have noted the importance of equity-based approaches to social and emotional learning (SEL), which emphasize the role of school environment, including adult beliefs, in student well-being. This article builds on this work by examining 129 teachers’ perceptions of efficacy in SEL.… more →
Teachers’ Willingness To Pay For Retirement Benefits: A National Stated Preferences Experiment
Many states have recently made or are considering changes to their teacher retirement systems. However, little is known about how teachers value various elements of their retirement benefits versus other aspects of their jobs and compensation. To help alleviate this gap, we use a discrete choice… more →
Education Leaders’ Knowledge of Causal Research Design: A Measurement Challenge
Federal policy has both incentivized and supported better use of research evidence by educational leaders. However, the extent to which these leaders are well-positioned to understand foundational principles from research design and statistics, including those that underlie the What Works… more →
First Impressions: The Case of Teacher Racial Bias
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentWe study racial bias and the persistence of first impressions in the context of education. Teachers who begin their careers in classrooms with large black-white score gaps carry negative views into evaluations of future cohorts of black students. Our evidence is based on novel data on blind… more →
The Big Problem with Little Interruptions to Classroom Learning
Narrative accounts of classroom instruction suggest that external interruptions, such as intercom announcements and visits from staff, are a regular occurrence in U.S. public schools. We study the frequency, nature, and duration of external interruptions in the Providence Public School District… more →