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Educator labor markets
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Purpose: Urban school districts often face challenges in filling principal vacancies with effective leaders, especially in high-needs schools. Prospective principals’ engagement with the job application process may contribute to these challenges. The goal of this study is to better understand the job search strategies and behaviors of prospective principals and how their approaches might contribute to leadership staffing challenges in high-needs schools.
Research Design and Methods: We employ a convergent mixed-methods design that draws on data from two urban school systems. We pair analysis of interviews of 36 principals who have recently navigated the districts’ hiring systems with multiple years of applications and other administrative data provided by the two districts. We explored how patterns and themes that emerged from each data source were confirmed or disconfirmed with the other source.
Findings: Guided by a job-search model, our analysis uncovers three main findings. First, the typical principal applicant conducted a targeted rather than a wide search, reflecting multiple strategies, preferences, and relational factors. Second, elementary educators showed a strong propensity to apply to the same grade level. Third, leaders applied to schools serving larger proportions of historically marginalized students at similar rates as other schools, reflecting their motivations to work with underserved students.
Implications for Research and Practice: Considerations informing prospective principals’ job searches are multifaceted. High-needs schools are desirable to many principal candidates. Identifying and strategically recruiting candidates with preferences for working in such schools can be a strategy for districts seeking to overcome challenges in filling principal vacancies.
The 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 this is rarely the case. To gain a better understanding of where sorting mechanisms may occur along the principal pipeline, this paper longitudinally analyzes the full, start-to-finish career trajectories of over 1.6 million educators in Texas for 30 years. Using social sequence analysis and discrete-time hazard modeling, we find that (1) emergent principals tend to stay in their first teaching position longer than other educators and most often take a direct pathway towards the principalship; (2) proportionally, more principals emerge from elementary, ELA, Social Studies, or STEM fields, while fewer come from Special Education; (3) holding other features constant, male and Black educators are more likely to become a principal while female and Hispanic educators are less likely; and (4) educators are more likely to first become principals when transitioning to a smaller school with more Black and/or Hispanic students. While the pipeline does result in a balanced principal market in some areas, increasing efforts to encourage a more diverse content area representation as well as representation for Hispanic educators in Texas will be particularly important.
The use of four-day school weeks (4dsw) in the United States has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. Previous work examines the impact of 4dsw on student outcomes, but little research to date examines the effect on school employees even though schools in some locales have adopted 4dsw to recruit and retain staff. This paper examines the effect of 4dsw adoption in Oregon, a state with widespread 4dsw use, on teacher and other school staff retention by leveraging a staggered roll-out of the schedule using a difference-in-differences design. We find that adopting a four-day week increased turnover among teachers, but that turnover among non-teaching staff was largely unaffected. The findings suggest that policymakers interested in implementing 4dsw for improved school employee retention should exercise caution and be attentive to the full set of incentives offered to staff.
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/ethnically diverse than the teacher workforce, Black and Hispanic paraeducators are less likely than White paraeducators to transition into teaching. We additionally show that teachers with paraeducator experience are similarly effective to teachers without paraeducator experience. Lastly, we use simulations to show that the potential for the paraeducator-to-teacher pipeline to diversify the teaching profession may be limited unless they are highly targeted. Our results have policy design implications for efforts to expand the paraeducator-to-teacher pipeline or to diversify the teacher workforce.
The 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 event study framework, we find that, on average, strikes increase compensation by 8% and lower pupil-teacher ratios by 0.5 students, driven by new state revenues. We find little evidence of sizable impacts on student achievement up to five years post-strike, though strikes lasting 10 or more days decrease math achievement in the short-term.
JEL: I22, J30, J45, J52.
The teacher workforce in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) has been a perpetual weak spot in public schools’ teaching rosters. Prior reports show the pipeline of new STEM teachers into the profession is weak while demand for instruction in STEM fields continues to grow. This paper seeks to document whether and how the STEM teacher workforce in high-need settings has been impacted by these pressures. It analyzes successive waves of nationally representative teacher survey data to explore demographics and qualifications among the secondary STEM teacher workforce in high-need settings has fared over time. Results show the STEM teacher workforce in high-need schools is consistently less likely to be experienced, less likely to hold any degree in a STEM field, less likely to hold a master’s degree, and less likely to be fully certified than STEM teachers in more advantaged settings. Yet, surprisingly, the observed qualifications gaps across high- versus low-need settings are either stable or slightly narrowing over time. Certain STEM fields—namely, physical sciences and computer science—rely on a less qualified workforce than those in math or biology, with low levels of teacher qualifications observed across both high- and low-need settings. Though even when considering field-specific alignment between teachers’ background qualifications and their teaching assignments, the qualifications gap between high- and low-need settings has been slowly shrinking in three of four STEM fields analyzed here. In addition to high-need schools, small schools (based on enrollment size) rely more heavily on underqualified STEM teachers.
This paper reports findings from a nationally representative survey of K-12 teachers in May 2023 that examines the potential long-term impacts of COVID-19 on public schooling. The findings suggest fundamental ways in which school operations, instructional practice and parent-teacher interaction have changed since the pandemic. Some changes seem promising; others suggest caution. While policymakers may not be able to directly influence some of the reported changes in the short run, monitoring the evolution of school practices (and their consequences for children) will position educational leaders to help teachers and students address the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic going forward.
We study the effect of educational attainment on family formation using regression discontinuity designs generated by centralized admissions processes to both secondary and tertiary education in Finland. Admission to further education at either margin does not increase the likelihood that men form families. In contrast, women admitted to further education are more likely to both live with a partner and have children. We then pre-register and test two hypotheses which could explain each set of results using survey data. These suggest that the positive association between men's education and family formation observed in the data is driven by selection. For women, our estimates are consistent with the idea that, as increased returns to social skills shift the burden of child development from schools to parents and particularly mothers, education can make women more attractive as potential partners.
The United States is facing growing teacher shortages that may disproportionately affecting schools serving high proportions of students of color, low-income students, and those in rural or urban areas. Special education teachers (SETs) are particularly in demand. Each year, nearly half of all vacancies are filled with teachers switching from one school to another, yet little research has addressed the nuances of within-career sorting, especially by subject. Utilizing longitudinal data covering 27 years and over 1.2 million teachers in Texas, this study examines SET switching patterns relative to core subject teachers, utilizing discrete time hazard modeling, fixed-effect regressions, and geographic information system mapping. Results show SETs switch schools at much higher rates, associated with experience, salary, and student demographics, yet generally transfer shorter distances than their peers. These findings highlight differential subject-specific labor market dynamics, suggesting targeted recruitment and retention strategies to address widespread shortages.
In the context of an ongoing national conversation about teacher shortages, we build on prior literature on the efficacy of teacher certification pathways by comparing entry and exit patterns based on age at the time of certification. All trainees who complete a state certification process have invested substantial time and resources into entering teaching. Competing employment opportunities and expectations might vary with age. We use both linear regression and discrete-time hazard models to examine employment and subsequent exit of newly certified teacher trainees in Michigan from 2011 to 2023. We find that while mid-career entrants in their 30s and 40s compose a small share of new certificates, they are more likely to enter a teaching position and no more likely to subsequently exit than counterparts who were certified in their early 20s. Mid-career pathways also contribute to teacher diversity by attracting more Black and male teachers who enter and persist.