Essays on the Teacher Workforce

This dissertation consists of three papers. In each, I use applied econometric methods and economic theory to study the American teacher workforce. The first paper evaluates a novel policy to address teacher shortages by promoting experienced school staff to be teachers of record. Controlling for demographics and baseline scores, I find that students assigned to these teachers perform just as well as those assigned to traditionally licensed teachers on average and outperform their peers in math. My results point to an untapped resource of potential teachers and underscore the value of principals' local knowledge to identify capable candidates for teaching positions. The second paper, co-authored with Shirin Hashim, documents historical trends in the teaching labor market in context by incorporating the nursing workforce as a relevant comparison group. We document historical trends in skill level, average and relative wages, wage dispersion, unionization rates, and quantity, and find important divergences in the teaching and nursing professions that cannot be explained by previous theories. We posit two new theories that align with our documented trends: technological innovation and occupational differentiation in nursing. We argue that trends in the nursing profession indicate that declines in teaching quality were (and are) not inevitable. The third paper analyzes school principals' human capital strategies and how they relate to school-level changes in teacher effectiveness and principals' own conceptualization of their strengths. I identify three distinct human capital strategies: hiring, developing, and selectively retaining teachers. I find that about 2% of the variation in changes in overall teacher quality can be tied to principal-specific effects and that hiring has the largest amount of principal-level variation among the strategies. I also find suggestive evidence that principals specialize in different strategies, but they generally conceptualize themselves as strong in all strategies and often cannot accurately identify their own human capital strengths or weaknesses. This work contributes new evidence on the role of principals in ensuring teacher quality, providing a framework for understanding different principal strategies and principals' conceptualization of their own personnel practices. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]