Search

We examine the state of the U.S. K-12 teaching profession over the last half century by compiling nationally representative time-series data on four interrelated constructs: professional prestige, interest among students, preparation for entry, and job satisfaction. We find a consistent and dynamic pattern across every measure: a rapid decline in the 1970s, a swift rise in the 1980s, relative stability for two decades, and a sustained drop beginning around 2010. The current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years. We identify and explore a range of factors that might explain these historical patterns including education funding, teacher pay, outside opportunities, unionism, barriers to entry, working conditions, accountability, autonomy, and school shootings.

We develop a unifying conceptual framework for understanding and predicting teacher shortages at the state, region, district, and school levels. We then generate and test hypotheses about geographic, grade level, and subject variation in teacher shortages using data on teaching vacancies in Tennessee during the fall of 2019. We find that teacher staffing challenges are highly localized, causing shortages and surpluses to coexist. Aggregate descriptions of staffing challenges mask considerable variation between schools and subjects within districts. Schools with fewer local early-career teachers, smaller district salary increases, worse working conditions, and higher historical attrition rates have higher vacancy rates. Our findings illustrate why viewpoints about, and solutions to, shortages depend critically on whether one takes an aggregate or local perspective. [The Tennessee Education Research Alliance provided financial and technical support of this work.]

We examine the labor supply decisions of substitute teachers -- a large, on-demand market with broad shortages and inequitable supply. In 2018, Chicago Public Schools implemented a targeted bonus program designed to reduce unfilled teacher absences in largely segregated Black schools with historically low substitute coverage rates. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that incentive pay substantially improved coverage equity and raised student achievement. Changes in labor supply were concentrated among Black and Hispanic substitutes from nearby neighborhoods with experience in incentive schools. Wage elasticity estimates suggest incentives would need to be 50% of daily wages to close fill-rate gaps.

The COVID-19 pandemic upended the U.S. education system and the economy in ways that dramatically affected the jobs of K-12 educators. However, data limitations have led to considerable uncertainty and conflicting reports about the nature of staffing challenges in schools. We draw on education employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and State Education Agencies (SEA) to describe patterns in K-12 education employment and to highlight the limitations of available data. Data from the BLS suggest overall employment in the K-12 labor market declined by 9.3 percent at the onset of the pandemic and remains well below pre-pandemic levels. SEA data suggest that teachers have not (yet) left the profession in mass as many predicted, but that turnover decreased in the summer of 2020. We explore possible explanations for these patterns including (1) weak hiring through the summer of 2020 and (2) high attrition among K-12 instructional support staff. State vacancy data also suggest that schools are facing substantial challenges filling open positions during the 2021-22 academic year. Our analyses illustrate the imperative to build more timely, detailed, and nationally representative data systems on the K-12 education labor market to better inform policy.

Starting in 2009, the U.S. public education system undertook a massive effort to institute new high-stakes teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting the staggered timing of implementation across states. We find precisely estimated null effects, on average, that rule out impacts as small as 1.5 percent of a standard deviation for achievement and 1 percentage point for high school graduation and college enrollment. We also find little evidence of heterogeneous effects across an index measuring system design rigor, specific design features, and district characteristics.

Economic downturns can cause major funding shortfalls for U.S. public schools, often forcing districts to make difficult budget cuts including teacher layoffs. In this brief, we synthesize the empirical literature on the widespread teacher layoffs caused by the Great Recession. Studies find that teacher layoffs harmed student achievement and were inequitably distributed across schools, teachers, and students. Research suggests that specific elements of the layoff process can exacerbate these negative effects. Seniority-based policies disproportionately concentrate layoffs among teachers of color who are more likely to be early career teachers. These "last-in first-out" policies also disproportionately affect disadvantaged students because these students are more likely to be taught by early career teachers. The common practice of widely distributing pink slips warning about a potential job loss also appears to increase teacher churn and negatively impact teacher performance. Drawing on this evidence, we outline a set of policy recommendations to minimize the need for teacher layoffs during economic downturns and ensure that the burden of any unavoidable job cuts does not continue to be borne by students of color and students from low-income backgrounds.

Teacher strikes have gained national attention with the "#RedforEd" movement. Such strikes are polarizing events that could serve to elevate education as a political priority or cast education politics in a negative light. We investigate this empirically by collecting original panel data on U.S. teacher strikes, which we link to congressional election campaign advertisements. Election ads provide a useful window into political discourse because they are costly to sponsors, consequential for voter behavior, and predictive of future legislative agendas. Using a differences-in-differences framework, we find that teacher strikes dramatically increase education issue salience, with impacts concentrated among positively-framed ads. Effects are driven by strikes lasting only a few days and occurring in battleground areas with highly-contested elections.

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. Rigorous research provides strong evidence that high-dosage tutoring can produce large learning gains for a wide range of students, including those who have fallen behind academically. This brief provides information on design principles for effective tutoring including: frequency, group size, personnel, focus, measurement, relationships, curriculum, scheduling, delivery mode, and prioritization. [This brief was prepared in collaboration with the University of Virginia, School of Education and Human Development.]

In this paper, we explore how tutoring could become a permanent feature of the U.S. public education system. We outline a blueprint for taking tutoring to scale nationally and estimate its costs, while highlighting a range of design and implementation challenges. Our blueprint is centered on ten core principles and a federal architecture to support adoption, while providing for local ownership over key implementation features. High school students would tutor in elementary schools via an elective class, college students in middle schools via federal work-study, and full time 2- and 4-year college graduates in high schools via AmeriCorps. We envision an incremental, demand-driven expansion process with priority given to high-needs schools. Our estimates suggest that a range of targeted approaches to scaling school-wide tutoring nationally, such as focusing on K-8 Title I schools, would cost between $5 and $15 billion annually. These costs are comparable to existing federal programs such as Title I, the National School Lunch Program, and Head Start and equate to roughly 1% to 2% of total expenditures on U.S. public education. Attempts to scale tutoring to address COVID-19 learning loss might be most successful and sustainable if they are part of an effort to incrementally integrate tutoring services within the public school system.

COVID-19 shuttered schools across the United States, upending traditional approaches to education. We examine teachers' experiences during emergency remote teaching in the spring of 2020 using responses to a working conditions survey from a sample of 7,841 teachers across 206 schools and 9 states. Teachers reported a range of challenges related to engaging students in remote learning and balancing their professional and personal responsibilities. Teachers in high-poverty and majority Black schools perceived these challenges to be the most severe, suggesting the pandemic further increased existing educational inequities. Using data from both pre-post and retrospective surveys, we find that the pandemic and pivot to emergency remote teaching resulted in a sudden, large drop in teachers' sense of success. We also demonstrate how supportive working conditions in schools played a critical role in helping teachers to sustain their sense of success. Teachers who could depend on their district and school-based leadership for strong communication, targeted training, meaningful collaboration, fair expectations, and recognition of their efforts were least likely to experience declines in their sense of success.

Researchers commonly interpret effect sizes by applying benchmarks proposed by Cohen over a half century ago. However, effects that are small by Cohen's standards are large relative to the impacts of most field-based interventions. These benchmarks also fail to consider important differences in study features, program costs, and scalability. In this paper, I present five broad guidelines for interpreting effect sizes that are applicable across the social sciences. I then propose a more structured schema with new empirical benchmarks for interpreting a specific class of studies: causal research on education interventions with standardized achievement outcomes. Together, these tools provide a practical approach for incorporating study features, cost, and scalability into the process of interpreting the policy importance of effect sizes.

Federal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to adopt major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting the staggered timing of implementation across states. We find precisely estimated null effects, on average, that rule out impacts as small as 0.015 standard deviation for achievement and 1 percentage point for high school graduation and college enrollment. We also find little evidence that the effect of teacher evaluation reforms varied by system design rigor, specific design features or student and district characteristics. We highlight five factors that may have undercut the efficacy of teacher evaluation reforms at scale: political opposition, the decentralized structure of U.S. public education, capacity constraints, limited generalizability, and the lack of increased teacher compensation to offset the non-pecuniary costs of lower job satisfaction and security.

We examine the labor supply decisions of substitute teachers -- a large, on-demand market with broad shortages and inequitable supply. In 2018, Chicago Public Schools implemented a targeted bonus program designed to reduce unfilled teacher absences in largely segregated Black schools with historically low substitute coverage rates. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that incentive pay substantially improved coverage equity and raised student achievement. Changes in labor supply were concentrated among Black and Hispanic substitutes from nearby neighborhoods with experience in incentive schools. Wage elasticity estimates suggest incentives would need to be 50% of daily wages to close fill-rate gaps.

District- and state-level efforts to remake teacher evaluation systems are among the most substantial and widely adopted reforms that U.S. public schools have experienced in decades. Research on these next generation of evaluation systems has focused overwhelmingly on policy goals, program designs, and performance measures. However, still very little is known about how these policies are interpreted and enacted by school leaders. In this study, the authors examine the perspectives and experiences of principals as evaluators in a large urban school district in the northeastern United States that recently implemented sweeping reforms to its teacher evaluation system. The study focuses on principals' perspectives and experiences with classroom observation and feedback because this process is a primary mechanism through which evaluation is intended to promote teacher development. Principals' abilities to rate teachers accurately, to facilitate teachers' own self-reflection, to make specific actionable recommendations, and to communicate this feedback effectively are central to any evaluation process intended to improve instruction. The district studied is an urban district in the northeast that serves a racially and linguistically diverse student population. Interviews were conducted with principals lasting 45 to 60 minutes in July and August of 2013, the summer after the first year the new evaluation system was implemented district-wide. It was found that the quality of feedback teachers receive through the evaluation process depends critically on the time and training evaluators have to provide individualized and actionable feedback. Districts that task principals with primary responsibility for conducting observation and feedback cycles must attend to the many implementation challenges associated with this approach in order for next-generation evaluation systems to successfully promote teacher development. A table is appended. [SREE documents are structured abstracts of SREE conference symposium, panel, and paper or poster submissions.]

In education, there is ample evidence that some schools far outperform others at raising student achievement even when accounting for differences in the students they serve and the resources at their disposal. Differences in the human capital stock of teachers across schools cannot fully account for the differential productivity across schools. In teaching, as in any occupation where professionals perform their work in organizational contexts, productivity is influenced by both individual and organizational factors (Hackman & Oldman, 1980; Kanter, 1983; Johnson, 1990). A growing body of literature attempts to identify, measure, and evaluate the potential contribution of organizational practices and contexts to overall productivity in schools. This study is among the first to address the empirical limitations of prior studies on organizational contexts by leveraging one of the largest survey administration efforts ever conducted in the United States outside of the decennial population census. While it seems intuitively obvious that an individual's performance is affected by the environment in which he or she works, policymakers have largely overlooked the central role that schools play in influencing teachers' in their push to overhaul teacher evaluation systems. To systematically improve student performance, school and district leaders need robust evidence about the strengths and weaknesses of both individual teachers and the school organization as a whole. Equipped with this data, policymakers and practitioners can take steps to address individual as well as organizational strengths and deficiencies. Tables are appended.

A wide body of literature documents the important role that parents play in supporting children's academic success in school (Houtenville & Conway, 2008; Barnard, 2004; Fan & Chen, 2001). Drawing on this literature, national taskforces and federal legislation consistently identify increased parental involvement as a central goal of educational reform initiatives (e.g. No Child Left Behind, Title I, Part A, Section 1118). Schools attempt to promote greater parental engagement though a variety of efforts centered on teacher-parent communication (Epstein, 2008). Cheung and Pomerantz (2012) found that children whose parents were more likely to be involved with their learning were more likely to be motivated to meet their parents' academic expectations, and received higher grades. Recent experimental research has documented how two-way teacher-parent communication can lead to greater parental involvement, improved student engagement and academic achievement (Authors, 2013; Bergman, 2012). This study examines the effect of delivering to parents weekly messages written by teachers about each child's performance in school, and the authors explore how these effects differ across different message types. This is accomplished by conducting a field experiment during a summer credit recovery program in a large urban school district. Researchers randomly assigned participating students and their parents to one of three experimental conditions. Some parents received information throughout the summer program about what their students were doing well and should continue doing; others received information about what their students needed to improve upon, while a third group received no information. The research sought to answer two questions: (1) What is the effect of teacher-to-parent communication on the probability a student earns course credit in a credit recovery program; and 2) Are positive or needs-improvement messages more effective at increasing a student's likelihood of earning course credit? This research contributes to a growing body of evidence on the beneficial impact that teachers providing parents with individualized messages and information about their children's schoolwork can have on student achievement and advancement in school. This study also points to the importance of further examining how teachers and schools can improve the content and quality of their communication with parents. Tables are appended.

For over a century, school systems in the U.S. have attempted to improve instructional quality by investing in the education and training of their teachers. Today, over 90% of teachers report participating in some form of professional development (PD). Practitioners have responded to critiques of PD by re-envisioning it in the form of individualized and sustained teacher coaching programs that provide tailored feedback to teachers about their classroom practices. In this paper, the authors evaluate the effect of a time-intensive, individualized coaching program MATCH Teacher Coaching (MTC) that focuses on improving teachers' classroom management and instructional practices, both of which are cited as important mechanisms behind improvements in student outcomes. In May of 2011, the authors recruited 59 teachers, working in Recovery School District charter schools across New Orleans, to participate in a randomized trial of the year-long coaching program. Study findings reported that that MTC was implemented with a high degree of fidelity and had a profound effect on teachers' instructional practices compared to control teachers who had access to standard professional development opportunities. Teachers' emails and coaches' logs were analyzed to assess the content and methods used during coaching sessions. Results indicate that teachers who received coaching are more effective than those who participated in the standard PD activities provided by their schools. Building the necessary evidentiary base and shifting longstanding norms about PD practices will take time, but the evidence-to-date suggests doing so will be a valuable investment. Tables and figures are appended.

While there are many reasons why late hiring may affect student achievement, no empirical studies have documented this effect in practice. This paper presents the first estimates of the direct impact of late hiring on students' academic achievement, sheds light on two competing explanations for the struggles of late-hire teachers advanced in the literature (labor market effects and disruption effects), and examines broader consequences of late hiring on student achievement, including spillover effects that occur from increased teacher turnover. Researchers address the following questions: (1) Do the observable characteristics of teachers who are hired late and the schools that hire them differ from on-time hires?; (2) Does late hiring reduce student achievement? If so, are labor market effects or disruption effects to blame?; and (3) Are teachers who are hired late more likely to switch schools or leave the school district? The study reveals the following findings: (1) Late-hired teachers differ from their peers in the district in several ways--gender, ethnicity, age, professional route to teaching, and a tendency to work in different types of schools; (2) A classroom with a teacher hired after school starts in the fall reduces student achievement; and (3) Late-hired teachers are much less likely to stay in the district than standard-hired teachers, and those who remain are more likely to transfer schools. Tables and figures are appended.

Research has shown that "last hired, first fired" policies maximize the number of teachers subject to reductions in force by eliminating those teachers that are lowest on the pay scale first. Until now, advocates of effectiveness-based reduction-in-force (RIF) policies could only point to simulated policy exercises as evidence of the potential benefits of a discretionary reduction-in-force policy. This study suggests that, while reductions in force negatively affect student achievement, districts have the potential to reduce these negative effects by concentrating layoffs among the lowest-performing teachers. The analyses of this study focuses on three main objectives: (1) comparing the relative weight that North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools' (CMS) administrators and principals placed on a variety of RIF criteria when implementing layoffs; (2) estimating the causal effect of discretionary layoffs in CMS on student achievement in the following academic year; and (3) documenting how these negative effects are exacerbated when highly effective teachers are laid-off teachers. Results from descriptive regression analyses suggest that CMS used multiple RIF criteria when selecting teachers for layoffs including tenure status, licensure status and type, and job performance. Although replacing seniority with performance measures can minimize effects on student achievement, exchanging one inflexible criterion for another will not provide districts with any discretion in navigating a complex process aimed at preventing a variety of negative consequences. Tables are appended.