As educational policy makers seek strategies to improve the teacher workforce, the early career period represents a unique opportunity to identify struggling teachers, examine the likelihood of future improvement, and make strategic pretenure investments in development or dismissals. It is also a useful time to identify particularly promising…

The relatively low status of teaching as a profession is often given as a factor contributing to the difficulty of recruiting teachers, the middling performance of American students on international assessments, and the well-documented decline in the relative academic ability of teachers through the 1990s. Since the turn of the 21st century,…

There is increasing agreement among researchers and policymakers that teachers vary widely in their ability to improve student achievement, and the difference between effective and ineffective teachers has substantial effects on standardized test outcomes as well as later life outcomes. However, there is not similar agreement about how to improve…

Districts nationwide are implementing teacher induction programs as a strategy to increase both beginning teacher retention and student achievement. The induction of beginning teachers has been widely acknowledged as important for teachers' feelings of success and their retention (Darling-Hammond, 1994; Huling-Austin, 1989; Smylie, 1994).…

Educators raise concerns about what happens to students when they are exposed to new teachers or teachers who are new to a school. These teachers face the challenge of preparing a year's worth of new material, perhaps in an unfamiliar work environment. However, even when teachers remain in the same school they can switch jobs--teaching either a…

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…

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…

Almost a quarter of entering public-school teachers leave teaching within their first three years. High attrition would be particularly problematic if those leaving were the more able teachers. The goal of this paper is estimate the extent to which there is differential attrition based on teachers' value-added to student achievement. Using data…

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…