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Teacher hiring and retention
Do Test Scores Misrepresent Test Results? An Item-by-Item Analysis
Much of the data collected in education is effectively thrown away. Students answer individual test questions, but administrators and researchers only see aggregate performance. All the item-level data are lost. Ex ante it is not clear this destroys much useful information, since the aggregate… more →
The reliability of classroom observations and student surveys in non-research settings: Evidence from Argentina
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentThere is a growing consensus on the need to measure teaching effectiveness using multiple instruments. Yet, guidance on how to achieve reliable ratings derives largely from formal research in high-income countries. We study the reliability of classroom observations and student surveys conducted… more →
Shock Absorption: Did School Turnaround Shelter Schools from the Pandemic’s Effects on Teacher Turnover?
Successful turnaround interventions should build school capacity to promote not just school improvement but also resilience to exogenous shocks that undermine schooling. While a large literature demonstrates that turnaround can improve school outcomes, little is known about whether it can help… more →
Estimating Compensating Wage Differentials for Public School Teachers in High-Poverty and High-Minority Schools: Evidence from U.S. National Data, 1988–2018
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentUsing a hedonic wage framework, this paper estimates compensating wage differentials (CWDs) for teachers in high-poverty and/or high-minority schools, drawing on thirty years of nationally representative data from the School and Staffing Surveys (SASS), National Teacher and Principal Survey (… more →
Financial Aid For Future Educators: Assessing A Federal Grant's Impact On Students' Postsecondary Decisions
Created in 2007, the federal TEACH grant program is a large federal financial aid program that seeks to attract postsecondary students to the teaching profession by providing financial assistance to help pay for a teaching degree. This paper describes the uptake and usage of the federal TEACH… more →
Who Wants to Be a Teacher in America?
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentLong-standing compositional disparities and more recent concerns about the health of the teaching profession highlight the need to increase our understanding of the pipeline into K–12 teaching. Leveraging data from 11.5 million college applicants from 2014–2025, we provide the most detailed… more →
Revisiting The Rural Teacher Workforce: Insights from a Novel Rurality Measure
How we define rurality fundamentally shapes our place-based understanding of the teacher workforce. This study uses the Community Assets and Relative Rurality (CARR) Index—a novel, multidimensional measure of rurality—alongside longitudinal administrative data to examine K–12 teachers in Kansas… more →
Behind the Push for Licensure Reform: How Beliefs About the Teaching Profession Unite and Divide Coalitions
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceA long history of scholarship on teacher professionalism documents how different narratives about teaching animate education policy and practice. We bridge the Advocacy Coalition Framework with institutional logics to examine how beliefs about teaching unite and divide a state-level coalition… more →
The Four Day Gamble: The Quasi-Experimental Effects of Four-Day School Week Adoption on Teacher, Principal, and Paraprofessional Staff Turnover and District Financial Outcomes
Four-day school week (4DSW) adoption is an increasingly popular policy, particularly for rural districts that are seeking to reduce educator turnover and district expenditures. Using a staggered treatment event study design, I am among the first to estimate the quasi-experimental effects of 4DSW… more →
Using Large Language Models to Analyze Preservice Teacher Feedback and Reflections During Clinical Teaching
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentClinical teaching is vital for preservice teacher (PST) development, yet field supervisors’ roles are understudied. This study analyzes over 11,000 supervisor evaluations and PST reflections from a Texas teacher preparation program using large language models to extract measures of feedback… more →
Bring in the Subs: A Mixed-Method Investigation of the Substitute Teacher Labor Market in Michigan
Substitute teachers play a crucial role in how schools can function, yet little research has focused on understanding the contours of the substitute labor market. This paper uses a mixed method approach, including a survey of a random sample of the population of substitute teachers, state… more →
Expanding Access to Highly Effective Educators for All Students: A Review of Recent Evidence
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentWe have long known that some teachers are much more effective than others. Highly effective teachers and their students thrive in ways that have been hard to replicate on a large and consistent scale. In this paper, we read across studies to identify actionable lessons about what it will take to… more →
Leveraging Quarterly Workforce Indicators to Analyze Teacher Labor Market Dynamics: Inequitable Trends in Educator Turnover
Educator labor markets vary considerably across the country and can change quickly during recessions. We use data from the Quality Workforce Indicators (QWI) on educators in Elementary and Secondary Schools from 2000-01 to 2022-23. We demonstrate how to transform the quarter-level data in the… more →
The Prevalence of LGBTQ+ Teachers in the U.S.
Due to limited data, we know little about the prevalence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) educators. Using the American Community Survey and Census Pulse, we examine the representation of LGBTQ+ individuals in PK-12 teaching. We find that 3.3-3.5 percent of LGBTQ+… more →
What Happens When We Pay Our Teachers More? Evidence from New Jersey Public Schools
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentThis paper examines the impact of increasing teacher salaries on student outcomes by exploiting variation from the “50K The First Day” campaign that established a $50K salary floor for new teachers across New Jersey school districts. Using school-level data from 2003 to 2019, we employ a… more →
Pathways to the Teaching Profession: Teaching Assistants’ and Substitute Teachers’ Transitions into the Teacher Workforce
Teacher shortages and lack of teacher diversity have led to growing efforts nationally to recruit teaching assistants (TAs) to be classroom teachers. Substitute teachers are not typically considered in these efforts. We pair longitudinal administrative data from a mid-sized urban district with… more →
Teacher-colleague race congruence and mobility: Do colleague demographics impact teacher retention?
Topics: MethodsTeacher turnover is especially pronounced among teachers of color who play critically important roles in the success of students of color. A growing literature points to racial isolation as one factor that is associated with Black teacher job satisfaction in particular, which in turn could play… more →
Differential Responses to Teacher Evaluation Incentives: Expectancy, Race, Experience, and Task
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentTeacher evaluation systems and their associated incentives have produced fairly mixed results. Our analyses are motivated by theory and descriptive evidence that accountability systems are highly racialized, and that individuals are less likely to respond to incentives when they have low… more →
Career Sequences and Unequal Sorting of Subject Area Teachers along the Path to the Principalship
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentThe path to becoming a school principal is characterized by a variety of trajectories that reflect the diverse experiences and backgrounds of aspiring leaders. While ideally the road to the principalship would result in a proportional and representative body of principals, research has shown… more →
The Causes and Consequences of U.S. Teacher Strikes
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThe U.S. has witnessed a resurgence of labor activism, with teachers at the forefront. We examine how teacher strikes affect compensation, working conditions, and productivity with an original dataset of 772 teacher strikes generating 48 million student days idle between 2007 and 2023. Using an… more →