Teacher Policy Research (TPR) is a research partnership between the University of Virginia, Stanford University and the University at Albany that examines the behavior of teachers and administrators with the goal of developing policies that will attract and retain high-quality teachers and leaders, especially in low-performing schools. The research covers a broad range of issues in teacher policy, including teacher preparation, teacher labor market institutions, how teachers are distributed across schools, and teacher retention, particularly in urban, low performing schools. We have received financial support from the Carnegie Corporation, the City University of New York, The National Science Foundation, the New York State Department of Education, The Smith Richardson Foundation, The Spencer Foundation, the Noyce Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education.
We are in the midst of what amounts to a national experiment in how best to attract, prepare, and retain teachers, particularly for high poverty urban schools. Using data on New York City students and their teachers in grades three through eight, we assess the effects of pathways into teaching on the teacher workforce and student achievement.
New York City represents a microcosm of the changes that are shaking the very foundations of teacher education in this country. In their efforts to find teachers for hard-to-staff schools by creating multiple pathways into teaching, districts from New York City to Los Angeles are in the midst of what amounts to a national experiment in how best to recruit, prepare, and retain teachers.
This article uses data on every teacher in New York State public elementary schools from 1994-1995 through 2001-2002 to examine the response of teachers to the implementation of state-mandated testing. The authors ask whether the introduction of testing in the fourth grade has increased the turnover of fourth-grade teachers, whether testing differentially affected the decisions of teachers with particular attributes, and whether the characteristics of teachers entering the fourth grade changed with the introduction of testing.
Studies have found substantial sorting of teachers across schools, with the schools with the highest proportions of poor, non-white, and low-scoring students having the least qualified teachers as measured by certification, exam performance, and inexperience (Lankford, Loeb and Wyckoff, 2002). Yet, there have been substantial changes in the educational policy landscape over the past five years. New laws, including the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), have changed requirements for teachers.
In this article, the authors describe the state of teacher education in and around the large and diverse school district of New York City. Using multiple data sources, including program documents, interviews, and surveys of teachers, this study attempts to explore the characteristics of programs that prepare elementary teachers of New York City public schools, including the kinds of programs that exist, who enters these different programs, who teaches in the programs, and what characterizes the core curriculum.
There are fierce debates over the best way to prepare teachers. Some argue that easing entry into teaching is necessary to attract strong candidates, whereas others argue that investing in high quality teacher preparation is the most promising approach. Most agree, however, that we lack a strong research basis for understanding how to prepare teachers. This article is one of the first to estimate the effects of features of teachers’ preparation on teachers’ value added to student test score performance.
One of the most significant changes in the teaching profession over the past two decades has been the rapid growth of alternative routes into teaching. Such routes typically enable individuals with a bachelor's degree to begin teaching as the teacher of record before completing all the coursework required for full certification. Although alternative pathways to a teaching career were rare in the 1980s, 49 U.S. states now allow some form of alternative certification (Feistritzer, 2008).
Many large urban school districts are rethinking their personnel management strategies, often giving increased control to schools in the hiring of teachers, reducing, for example, the importance of seniority. If school hiring authorities are able to make good decisions about whom to hire, these reforms have the potential to benefit schools and students. Prior research on teacher transfers uses career history data, identifying the school in which a teacher teaches in each year.
School districts are confronting difficult choices in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In prior recessions, districts often muddled through by imposing a combination of tax increases and expenditure cuts that avoided involuntary personnel reductions. Today, the financial imbalance in many school districts is so large that there is no alternative to teacher layoffs. In nearly all school districts, layoffs are currently determined by some version of teacher seniority.
This article explores the relationship between school contextual factors and teacher retention decisions in New York City. The methodological approach separates the effects of teacher characteristics from school characteristics by modeling the relationship between the assessments of school contextual factors by one set of teachers and the turnover decisions by other teachers in the same school. We find that teachers’ perceptions of the school administration have by far the greatest influence on teacher retention decisions.