Educators raise concerns about what happens to students when they are exposed to new or new-to-school teachers. However, even when teachers remain in the same school they can switch roles by moving grades and/or subjects. We use panel data from New York City to compare four ways in which teachers are new to assignment: new to teaching, new to…

Tenure is intended to protect teachers with demonstrated teaching skills against arbitrary or capricious dismissal. Critics of typical tenure processes argue that tenure assessments are superficial and rarely discern whether teachers in fact have the requisite teaching skills. A recent reform of the tenure process in New York City provides an…

This paper describes teacher tenure reforms first enacted by the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) during the 2009-10 academic year (AY) and the changes in the district's teacher workforce following the reforms. We show that the reforms dramatically changed the proportion of eligible teachers receiving tenure, as well as the career…

Evidence that teachers' short-term instructional effects persist over time and predict substantial long-run impacts on students' lives provides much of the impetus for a wide range of educational reforms focused on identifying and responding to differences in teachers' value-added to student learning. However, relatively little research has…

Measures of teachers' "value added" to student achievement play an increasingly central role in k-12 teacher policy and practice, in part because they have been shown to predict teachers' long-term impacts on students' life outcomes. However, little research has examined variation in the long-term effects of teachers with similar…

School districts are confronting difficult choices in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Today, the financial imbalance in many school districts is so large that there may be few alternatives to teacher layoffs. In nearly all school districts, layoffs are currently determined by some version of teacher seniority. Yet, alternative approaches to…

Researchers and policymakers often assume that teacher turnover harms student achievement, though recent studies suggest this may not be the case. Using a unique identification strategy that employs school-by-grade level turnover and two classes of fixed-effects models, this study estimates the effects of teacher turnover on over 850,000 New York…

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…

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…

This paper analyzes attrition patterns among teachers in New York City public elementary and middle schools and explores whether teachers who transfer among schools, or leave teaching entirely, are more or less effective than those who remain. We find that the first-year teachers who are less effective in improving student math scores have higher…

There are fierce debates over the best way to prepare teachers. Some argue that easing entry into teaching is necessary to attract strong candidates, while 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…

Understanding what makes an effective teacher, as well as how teachers sort by their effectiveness across schools, is central to understanding and addressing student achievement gaps. Prior studies have found substantial sorting of teachers across schools, with the schools with the highest proportions of poor, non-white, and low-scoring students…

This paper explores a little-understood aspect of labor markets, their spatial geography. Using data from New York State, it finds teacher labor markets to be geographically very small. Teachers express preferences to teach close to where they grew up, and, controlling for proximity, they prefer areas with characteristics similar to their…

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 students and teachers in grades three through eight, this study assesses the effects of pathways into teaching in New York City on the teacher workforce and on student…

This paper explores a little-understood aspect of labor markets, their spatial geography. Using data from New York State, we find teacher labor markets to be geographically very small. Teachers express preferences to teach close to where they grew up and, controlling for proximity, they prefer areas with characteristics similar to their hometown.…