Teacher Sorting Research Articles

A Look at Returning Teachers

Research shows that one-quarter to one-third of teachers who leave the profession return, the majority after only a short absence. Though returning teachers can constitute a substantial share of newly hired teachers in schools each year, little is known about them, the factors associated with their decisions to return, or the schools to which they return. In this study, I use a 20-year longitudinal dataset to examine the characteristics of returning teachers as well as the personal, school, and district factors associated with their return both to the profession and to particular schools. In addition, I consider the extent to which returning teachers contribute to the systematic sorting of teachers across schools. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the loss of teachers to attrition from the profession is more likely to be permanent for smaller schools and districts outside of urban and suburban areas. In addition, both personal and job-related factors impact whether and where former teachers return, albeit differently by gender. Interestingly, personal and pecuniary factors in teaching appear to play a greater role than non-pecuniary factors on male leavers’ decisions regarding whether and where to return, whereas personal, pecuniary, and non-pecuniary factors all influence female leavers’ decisions. Finally, the study demonstrates that returning teachers on average reenter schools that are very similar in terms of student and teacher characteristics to those that they left.

Systematic Sorting

Although prior research has documented differences in the distribution of teacher characteristics across schools serving different student populations, few studies have examined the extent to which teacher sorting occurs within schools. This study uses data from one large urban school district and compares the class assignments of teachers who teach in the same grade and in the same school in a given year. The authors find that less experienced, minority, and female teachers are assigned classes with lower achieving students than are their more experienced, white, and male colleagues. Teachers who have held leadership positions and those who attended more competitive undergraduate institutions are also assigned higher achieving students. These patterns are found at both the elementary and middle/high school levels. The authors explore explanations for these patterns and discuss their implications for achievement gaps, teacher turnover, and the estimation of teacher value-added.

Hometown Disadvantage? It Depends on Where You’re From

This article focuses on an overlooked factor in the unequal sorting of teachers across schools: the geographic preferences of teachers. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, the author examines the patterns of geographic mobility of new teachers and compares them to the patterns of other college graduates. Specifically, the author demonstrates that teachers’ preference for working close to where they grew up is a distinct characteristic of teachers, and the author further explores the implications of those preferences for schools facing chronic shortages of teachers. The author finds that the local nature of the labor force and the differential rates of graduation and production of teachers from traditionally hard-to-staff schools are reinforcing existing deficits of local teacher labor supply.

Competition, Wages and Teacher Sorting: Lessons Learned from a Voucher Reform

This article examines how the entry of private independent high schools in Sweden affects the mobility and wages of teachers in a market with individual wage bargaining. Using matched employer–employee panel data covering all high school teachers over 16 years, I show that the entry of private schools is associated with higher teacher salaries, also for teachers in public schools. The wage returns from competition are highest for teachers entering the profession and for teachers in maths and science. Private school entry also seems to have increased wage dispersion between high‐ and low‐skilled teachers within the same field.

High School Philosophy Teachers’ Use of Textbooks: Critical Thinking or Teaching to the Text?

Ontario is the only North American, English-speaking jurisdiction to include philosophy in secondary schools. In this first study to examine Ontario high school philosophy courses, we investigated what sorts of textbooks teachers used, how they used them, and the reasons for their pedagogical choices when using textbooks. Despite claims that philosophy promotes critical thinking, an online survey of 53 high school philosophy teachers and personal interviews with a subset of 14 revealed their use of textbooks did not match this ideal. Teachers cited insecurities with knowledge, a lack of pedagogical training, their own perception that students were incapable of challenging texts, and pressure to meet provincial curriculum policy demands as factors that contributed to their pedagogical choices.

Salary Schedules, Teacher Sorting, and Teacher Quality

This study investigates how salary rigidities affect teacher quality across teaching subjects and high schools and whether high quality teachers can be compensated sufficiently to attract them into unfavorable schools. For identification, we rely on idiosyncratic variations in compensation across adjacent districts within the same state. The results indicate that, on average, math/science teachers’ scholastic aptitudes are 8.5 percentiles lower and humanities teachers are 4.5 percentiles lower compared to other teachers. Furthermore, we find that schools with higher percentages of student eligible for free lunch hire teachers with, on average, 7 to 17 percentiles lower scholastic aptitudes with the math/science teachers being even lower. Increases in lifetime compensation is found to raise the scholastic aptitude of teachers hired across all schools, with diminishing returns in schools with more favorable working conditions. However, the lower 26% of the teacher aptitude distribution seems to not respond to compensation at all with only marginal gains up to the 60th percentile. Furthermore, bonus/merit pay or additional school activity income do not seem to be significant in recruiting/retaining high aptitude teachers.

Salary Schedules, Teacher Sorting, and Teacher Quality

This study investigates how salary rigidities affect teacher quality across teaching subjects and high schools and whether high quality teachers can be compensated sufficiently to attract them into unfavorable schools. For identification, we rely on idiosyncratic variations in compensation across adjacent districts within the same state. The results indicate that, on average, math/science teachers’ scholastic aptitudes are 8.5 percentiles lower and humanities teachers are 4.5 percentiles lower compared to other teachers. Furthermore, we find that schools with higher percentages of student eligible for free lunch hire teachers with, on average, 7 to 17 percentiles lower scholastic aptitudes with the math/science teachers being even lower. Increases in lifetime compensation is found to raise the scholastic aptitude of teachers hired across all schools, with diminishing returns in schools with more favorable working conditions. However, the lower 26% of the teacher aptitude distribution seems to not respond to compensation at all with only marginal gains up to the 60th percentile. Furthermore, bonus/merit pay or additional school activity income do not seem to be significant in recruiting/retaining high aptitude teachers.

Teacher Quality in Michigan

Most of the low-performing schools and students are in urban districts where poverty is high, where large proportions of students have limited English proficiency, and where students perform poorly on achievement tests. Moreover, urban districts face numerous challenges, including attracting teachers to their schools and optimizing their hiring, transfer, and retention policies so that they bring the best available teachers to the classroom setting. What’s now needed is an understanding of how schools differ on the qualifications of their teachers and the mechanisms driving these differences. In this article, the authors use the Detroit metropolitan region as a case study in order to (a) determine whether there is teacher sorting across schools and districts, and (2) identify which schools and districts have the least qualified teachers.

Teacher Tradeoffs: Disentangling Teachers’ Preferences for Working Conditions and Student Demographics

One of the greatest differences in resources across schools in California comes from an inequitable distribution of teachers. This study identifies reasons for this sorting of teachers by surveying 531 teachers in a California elementary school district. The surveys ask the teachers to make choices between various workplace characteristics. With this information, the study disentangles student demographics from other characteristics of teaching jobs that are amenable to policy influences. It finds that teachers identify working conditions—particularly, school facilities, administrative support, and class sizes—and salaries as significantly more important than student characteristics when selecting a school in which to work.

Student Demographics, Teacher Sorting, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from the End of School Desegregation

The reshuffling of students due to the end of student busing in Charlotte‐Mecklenburg provides a unique opportunity to investigate the relationship between changes in student attributes and changes in teacher quality that are not confounded with changes in school or neighborhood characteristics. Comparisons of ordinary least squares and instrumental variable results suggest that spatial correlation between teachers’ residences, students’ residences, and schools could lead to spurious correlation between student attributes and teacher characteristics. Schools that experienced a repatriation of black students experienced a decrease in various measures of teacher quality. I provide evidence that this was primarily due to changes in labor supply.

The Impact of Peer Effects on Student Outcomes in New York City Public Schools

The impact of peers on student outcomes has important policy implications for how students are organized into classes and the overall impact of education interventions. But it is difficult to accurately measure peer effects because of the nonrandom sorting of students and teachers into classrooms and the endogeneity of peers' achievement. In this study, an education production function (EPF) is specified that includes student and peer characteristics as regressors. This model is estimated using student-level data from New York City public schools for 1995–2000. The richness of these data allows six sources of bias that arise in the EPF model to be addressed, including the above-mentioned nonrandom classroom assignment and the endogeneity of peers' achievement. This results in credible evidence of (small) peer group effects. Instrumenting for the mean of peers' achievement significantly reduces the associated peer effect. Nonlinear peer group effects are evident in the form of a small positive impact associated with the homogeneity of peers' achievement. Generally, peer characteristics do not appear to affect individual performance. Also included in this analysis is an application of a new methodology developed by Graham (2007) that identifies peer group effects through their impact on the variance in classroom mean test scores. The approach is less susceptible to the six biases that plague the EPF approach. The evidence from this exercise indicates that peer group effects are present and corroborates the results from the EPF approach.

Who Teaches and Where They Choose to Teach: College Graduates of the 1990s

This article investigates the key determinants of entry into the teaching profession and the subsequent sorting of new teachers across urban, suburban, and rural schools. Of particular interest is the relative importance of teacher salaries, alternative labor market opportunities, and nonpecuniary job attributes or working conditions to this decision process. Results from a nested logit model applied to the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study show that working conditions play a relatively more important role in determining where new teachers end up choosing to teach, rather than differences in teacher salaries. This is especially true for women. Meanwhile, wages play a relatively more important role in the occupational entry decision. In addition, there is significant variation in teacher quality indicators across these school locations.

Pay, Working Conditions, and Teacher Quality

Eric Hanushek and Steven Rivkin examine how salary and working conditions affect the quality of instruction in the classroom. The wages of teachers relative to those of other college graduates have fallen steadily since 1940. Today, average wages differ little, however, between urban and suburban districts. In some metropolitan areas urban districts pay more, while in others, suburban districts pay more. But working conditions in urban and suburban districts differ substantially, with urban teachers reporting far less administrator and parental support, worse materials, and greater student problems. Difficult working conditions may drive much of the difference in turnover of teachers and the transfer of teachers across schools. Using rich data from Texas public schools, the authors describe in detail what happens when teachers move from school to school. They examine how salaries and student characteristics change when teachers move and also whether turnover affects teacher quality and student achievement. They note that both wages and student characteristics affect teachers' choices and result in a sorting of teachers across schools, but they find little evidence that teacher transitions are detrimental to student learning. The extent to which variations in salaries and working conditions translate into differences in the quality of instruction depends importantly on the effectiveness of school personnel policies in hiring and retaining the most effective teachers and on constraints on both entry into the profession and the firing of low performers. The authors conclude that overall salary increases for teachers would be both expensive and ineffective. The best way to improve the quality of instruction would be to lower barriers to becoming a teacher, such as certification, and to link compensation and career advancement more closely with teachers' ability to raise student performance.

Introducing the Issue

Introducing the Issue Susanna Loeb (bio), Cecilia Rouse (bio), and Anthony Shorris (bio) Susanna Loeb Susanna Loeb is associate professor of education and director of the Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice at Stanford University. Cecilia Rouse Cecilia Rouse is the Theodore A. Wells ’29 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, director of the Education Research Section at Princeton University, and a senior editor of The Future of Children. Anthony Shorris Anthony Shorris is Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and former director of the Policy Research Institute for the Region at Princeton University. Notes 1. Cecilia Elena Rouse, "Inadequate Education: Consequences for the Labor Market," mimeo (Princeton University, September 2005). 2. Lisa Barrow and Cecilia Elena Rouse, "U.S. Elementary and Secondary Schools: Equalizing Opportunity or Replicating the Status Quo?" The Future of Children 16 (2006): 99-117. 3. Eric A. Hanushek, Steven G. Rivkin, and John J. Kain, "Teachers, Schools and Academic Achievement," Econometrica 73, no. 2 (2005): 417-58. Here, a "good teacher" is defined as one with an average value added that is one standard deviation greater than the average. This does not include knowledge depreciation. 4. Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff, "Teacher Sorting and the Plight of Urban Schools: A Descriptive Analysis," Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis 24, no. 1 (2002): 37-62. 5. This estimate comes from multiplying the average teacher salary from 2003-04 ($46,752 at http://www.nea.org/edstats/images/05rankings.pdf) by the number of teachers given above. 6. Thomas D. Snyder, Alexandra G. Tan, and Charlene M. Hoffman, Digest of Education Statistics 2005 (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, July 2006), table 28, downloaded from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d05/tables/dt05_028.asp?referer=list (October 26, 2006). 7. Susanna Loeb and Luke Miller, "State Teacher Policies: What Are They, What Are Their Effects, and What Are Their Implications for School Finance," Getting Down to Facts Report, unpublished (Stanford University, December 2006). 8. G. A. Strizek and others, Characteristics of Schools, Districts, Teachers, Principals, and School Libraries in the United States: 2003-04 Schools and Staffing Survey (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2006) http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/2006313.pdf 9. Bringing in effective administrators is likely to be even more helpful, but unfortunately this is a substantially more difficult undertaking, since administrator labor markets are no less complicated than teacher labor markets. [End Page 14] Copyright © 2007 The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and The Brookings Institution

Does school tracking affect equality of opportunity? New international evidence

This paper investigates whether the interaction between family background and secondary school tracking affects human capital accumulation. A widely shared view is that more tracking reinforces the role of parental privilege, and thereby reduces equality of opportunities. This may occur for several reasons, including peer effects (more talented students are gathered together), teacher sorting (better teachers prefer teaching better students), differences in curricula (academic oriented schools – like the German gymnasium, the French lycee, the British grammar school or the Italian liceo – teach abilities that increase the probability of entering college) and/or differences in resource endowment. Compared to the current literature, which focuses on early outcomes, such as test scores at 13 and 15 years old, we look at later outcomes, including literacy, dropout rates, college enrolment, employability and earnings. While we do confirm the common view that school tracking reinforces the impact of family background when looking at educational attainment and labour market outcomes, we do not confirm the same results when studying its impact on literacy and on-the-job training. Overall school tracking has an ambiguous effect in our sample of countries. On the one hand, and consistently with the previous literature, tracking has a detrimental impact on educational attainment, because it prevents some individuals from further progressing to the tertiary level of education (the diversion effect). On the other hand, the curricula offered in vocational schools seem more effective in promoting further training and adult competences (the specialization effect), thereby reducing the impact of parental background on these two outcomes. Thus, reducing the extent of student tracking, either by raising the age of first selection or by reducing the number of tracks available, may be appropriate for increasing intergenerational mobility in educational attainment, but may increase social exclusion for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. — Giorgio Brunello and Daniele Checchi

Photo Interviews: Eliciting Data through Conversations with Children

Photo interviewing is a useful method for qualitative inquiry in classrooms and with children. The idea of photo elicitation is especially relevant when interviewing children who have preset ideas about interacting with adults. Interviewing children is complicated by the school setting, in which children perceive the researcher to be some sort of teacher. This study explores the potential of photo interviewing to get around these problems, with data from one study of children’s perceptions about classroom writing.

A philosophy of teaching practicum: construction of a personal theory of teaching and learning

Teaching practicum requires a philosophy to give directions to values and actions. The philosophy proposed here aims for the development of a reflective and reflexive learner who learns through situational analyzing, theorizing, hypothesis testing, inquiring, experimenting, and justifying. Such development has to be built around the searching and identification of oneself as a teacher based on one's personal theory of teaching and learning. While cooperating teachers can help by engaging in dialogues and interrogation with student teachers, student teachers need also to carry out a personal reflection on their own self as a person of feelings, emotions, values and beliefs so as to embark on a transformation of their vision of what sort of teacher they would like to be.

Teacher sorting, teacher quality, and student composition

Using panel data for Norwegian schools, we establish a two-equation supply and demand model for teachers with approved education. Taking into account nationally determined teacher pay and a strict teacher appointment rule, the data enable us to separately estimate supply and demand functions for certified teachers. The results clearly indicate that the student body composition, and in particular students belonging to ethnic minorities, influences both teacher supply and teacher demand. The implied negative relationship between excess demand for certified teachers and the share of minority students is likely to be important for teacher quality.

Teacher Sorting and the Plight of Urban Schools: A Descriptive Analysis

This paper uses rich new data on New York State teachers to: determine how much variation in the average attributes of teachers exists across schools, identify schools that have the least-qualified teachers, assess whether the distribution has changed over time, and determine how the distribution of teachers is impacted by attrition and transfer, as well as by the job matches between teachers and schools at the start of careers. Our results show striking differences in the qualifications of teachers across schools. Urban schools, in particular, have lesser-qualified teachers; and New York City stands out among urban areas. Low-income, low-achieving and non-white students, particularly those in urban areas, find themselves in classes with many of the least skilled teachers. Salary variation rarely compensates for the apparent difficulties of teaching in urban settings and, in some cases, contributes to the disparities.

The cultural formation of teachers' class consciousness: teachers in the inner city

Currently the job of teaching is being reconstructed through a technicist and managerial account which bleaches out the ‘authentic’ voice of the teacher. This paper is an attempt to recover the commitments which a particular group of teachers (urban teachers) bring to their work and explore the way their perspectives are infused with their class histories, class consciousness and their teaching experiences. The paper is divided into two main sections. The first part briefly examines the contested classed position of teachers and argues that there is a need to distinguish between economic and subjective class identities. The second part draws on a small data set of interviews conducted with seven experienced and long-stay inner-city teachers and argues that (these) teachers do what they do because of their classed identities and subjectivities. While these sorts of teachers may always have been in a minority (Grace 1978), nevertheless they are still out there teaching in the city. Through their perceptions, values and sometimes their actions, they are contesting normalizing discourses of what it is to be a teacher.