Policy makers and school leaders are perennially concerned with the capacity of the nation's public schools to recruit and retain highly skilled teachers. Over the past two decades, policy strategies including the federal No Child Left Behind Act and alternative pathways to teaching, as well as changes in the broader labor market, have altered the…

Alternative routes into teaching, particularly in urban school districts, are becoming increasingly prevalent. Four features capture the range of variation in these programs: the nature of the provider, specific labor market needs, the timing and focus of coursework and fieldwork, and the focus of recruitment and selection. The issue of student…

Purpose: In light of the difficulty many districts face finding quality principal candidates, this article explores an informal recruitment mechanism of teachers to become principals, which the authors call tapping. The authors assess the extent to which current teachers are being approached by school leaders to consider leadership and whether…

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,…

The literature on effective schools emphasizes the importance of a quality teaching force in improving educational outcomes for students. In this article we use value-added methods to examine the relationship between a school's effectiveness and the recruitment, assignment, development, and retention of its teachers. Our results reveal four key…

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…

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…

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.…