Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic era, concerns about teacher turnover and teacher shortages remain at the top of the education agenda. But contrary to media reports about a "wave of resignations and retirements" (e.g., Heller, 2021), early evidence from state databases showed a more nuanced picture: teacher attrition was actually…

We use a novel database of student teaching placements in Washington State to investigate teachers' transitions from student teaching classrooms to first job classrooms and the implications for student achievement. We find first-year teachers are more effective when they teach in the same or an adjacent grade, in the same school type, or in a…

This brief is one in a series aimed at providing K-12 education decision makers and advocates with an evidence base to ground discussions about how to best serve students during and following the novel coronavirus pandemic. Student teaching placements influence teacher effectiveness. If student teaching experiences are constrained by the pandemic,…

This policy brief summarizes the responses by early-career science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) teachers in Washington State to the Washington STEM Teacher Survey. These early-career STEM teachers were asked about their perspectives of their teacher education program (TEP) and STEM subject preparation, with a focus on their student…

Purpose: A burgeoning literature investigates the importance of student teaching placements for teacher candidate development, but an important perspective that is largely missing from the existing literature is that of the school districts that host student teachers. In this paper, we describe the student teaching process from the perspective of…

We use a novel database of the preservice apprenticeships ("student teaching placements") of teachers in Washington State to investigate the relationship between mentor effectiveness (as measured by value added) and the future effectiveness of their mentees. We find a strong, positive relationship between the effectiveness of a teacher's…

A growing quantitative literature finds evidence that student teaching placements predict later outcomes of teacher candidates and their students, but there is little large-scale quantitative evidence about the mechanisms for these estimated relationships. We use data from a survey of STEM teachers in Washington State to better understand how…

We used survey and administrative data from Washington State to assess the degree to which special education teacher preparation, district literacy instructional practices, and the alignment between preparation and practice were associated with the reading test score gains of students with high-incidence disabilities taught by early-career special…

This paper examines the savings behavior of public school teachers who are enrolled in a hybrid pension plan that includes a defined contribution (DC) component. Few states have incorporated DC features into teacher pension systems and little is known about how providing teachers with greater control over deferred compensation might affect their…

We report on research examining the revealed preferences of teachers in Denver Public Schools who were given the opportunity to select between remaining on a traditional salary schedule and opting into one of the nation's high-profile pay reform systems, Denver's Professional Compensation System for Teachers. The incentive structure creates…

We use longitudinal data from North Carolina and Washington to study the extent to which four processes--teacher attrition from each state workforce, teacher mobility within districts, teacher mobility across districts, and teacher hiring--contribute to "teacher quality gaps" (TQGs) between advantaged and disadvantaged schools. We first…

Ratings are present in many areas of assessment including peer review of research proposals and journal articles, teacher observations, university admissions and selection of new hires. One feature present in any rating process with multiple raters is that different raters often assign different scores to the same assessee, with the potential for…

We utilize detailed teacher-level longitudinal data from Washington State to investigate patterns of teacher mobility in districts with different collective bargaining agreement (CBA) transfer provisions. Specifically, we estimate the log odds that teachers of varying experience and effectiveness levels transfer out of their schools to other…

We use a novel database of the preservice apprenticeships ("student teaching placements") of teachers in Washington State to investigate the relationship between mentor effectiveness (as measured by value added) and the future effectiveness of their mentees. We find a strong, positive relationship between the effectiveness of a teacher's…

Due to data limitations, very little is known about patterns of cross-state teacher mobility. It is an important issue because barriers to cross-state mobility create labor market frictions that could lead both current and prospective teachers to opt out of the teaching profession. In this article, we match state-level administrative data sets…