Teacher Policy Research

For well over a decade school districts across the United States have struggled to recruit and retain effective mathematics teachers. In response to the need for qualified math teachers and the difficulty of directly recruiting individuals who have already completed the math content required for qualification, some districts, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and New York City, have developed alternative certification programs with a math immersion component to recruit otherwise well-qualified candidates who do not have undergraduate majors in math.

Even as research has begun to document that teachers matter, there is less certainty about what attributes of teachers make the most difference in raising student achievement. Numerous studies have estimated the relationship between teachers' characteristics, such as work experience and academic performance, and their value-added to student achievement; but, few have explored whether instructional practices predict student test score gains.

A central question facing education policymakers is how to structure entry pathways into teaching. One possibility is to set no requirements, allowing public school administrators to choose their preferred candidates from the pool of individuals interested in a teaching position. An alternative is to require some set of qualifications for those teaching in the public schools. These qualifications could include a high school degree, a bachelor’s degree, required courses, specific work experience, and or minimum performance on an exam or series of exams.

According to Chancellor Joel Klein, "No reform is more critical to closing the nation's shameful achievement gap than boosting the quality of teachers in high-poverty schools." Indeed, improving the quality of teachers has been a core strategy for school improvement in the New York City (NYC) reform effort. In the years prior to Children First, data suggest great variability in the quality of New York City's teachers.

A substantial body of research demonstrates that schools with large populations of poor, non-white and low-achieving students, on average have more difficulty attracting and retaining teachers (Boyd et. al., 2005; Boyd et al, 2009; Hanushek et. al., 2004; Ingersoll, 2001; Scafidi et. al., 2007). However, little work assesses the extent to which differences in the neighborhoods in which schools are located either affect teacher recruitment and retention or explain the observed relationship between school characteristics and teachers’ career choices.

Researchers and policymakers often assume that teacher turnover harms student achievement, but recent evidence calls into question this assumption. Using a unique identification strategy that employs grade-level turnover and two classes of fixed-effects models, this study estimates the effects of teacher turnover on over 850,000 New York City 4th and 5th grade student observations over eight years.

As schools and districts seek to recruit teachers, individuals in non-teaching professions are an appealing possible pool. These potential teachers come with work experience and may have expertise that would serve them well in the classroom. While there has been substantial rhetoric assailing the virtues of teachers with prior professional experience, no research that we know of has assessed the effectiveness of these teachers in terms of student learning. This study uses data from New York City to assess the relative effectiveness and retention of career-switchers.

Although there is growing recognition of the contribution of teachers to students’ educational outcomes, there are large gaps in our understanding of how teacher labor markets function. Low-income, low-achieving and non-white students, particularly those in urban areas, often are taught by the least skilled teachers. This sorting of teachers to jobs likely contributes to the substantial gaps in academic achievement among income and racial/ethnic groups of students.