As school districts face ongoing and, in some cases, worsening staffing challenges, policymakers often lack the timely information to make key decisions to address these challenges, as administrative data is usually available too late to inform policy debates or decision making. We summarize research that uses teacher job postings data from public…

Several decades of research using school administrative data show that teacher quality is inequitably distributed across schools. But these estimates may understate teacher-related inequities if they do not account for how teacher vacancies or late hires are distributed across schools. We investigate these hiring issues using data on a direct…

We use comprehensive administrative data from three states to document the relationships between geographic mobility and student outcomes during K-12 schooling. We focus specifically on "nonstructural" mobility events--which we define as school or district changes that do not occur naturally as the result of planned transitions between…

In this research brief, the authors present evidence on how the diversity of the teacher workforce changes as "prospective" teachers advance through the teacher pipeline: tracking from 12th grade students as some obtain the education and certifications required to be eligible to teach in public schools, and some apply to and are hired…

To make up for pandemic-related learning losses, many U.S. public school districts have increased enrollment in their summer school programs. We assess summer school as a strategy for COVID-19 learning recovery by tracking the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight districts serving 400,000 students. Based on…

There is much discussion of late about the significant challenges that schools face with hiring staff for the 2021-22 school year and implementing COVID recovery initiatives. Numerous stories report increasing difficulties recruiting and retaining all manner of school personnel, from bus drivers to teachers. Unfortunately, it is challenging to get…

In many school districts, the policies that regulate teaching personnel are governed by collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). While there is significant policy attention that has affected the scope of these agreements, there is relatively little research on how CBAs vary over time, or whether they change in response to states' legislative…

Emerging research finds connections between teacher candidates' student teaching placements and their future career paths and effectiveness. Yet relatively little is known about the factors that influence these placements and how teacher education programs (TEPs) and K-12 school systems match teacher candidates to mentor teachers. In our study of…

There is much discussion of late about the significant challenges that schools face with hiring staff for the 2021-22 school year and implementing COVID recovery initiatives. Despite some media reports of teachers and principals leaving the workforce because of COVID, there is evidence that retention rates remain consistent with pre-pandemic…

California is experiencing one of its most severe teacher shortages in two decades. Budget cuts and layoffs resulting from the recession contributed to a steep decline in the number of teachers in California, falling from a high of 310,362 teachers in the 2007-08 school year to 283,836 four years later. Recent efforts, including Proposition 30 and…

One of the unfortunate consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the sharp downturn in tax revenues, in the absence of a federal bailout, likely foretells unprecedented cuts in state and local budgets. This will in turn mean large cuts in teaching positions across the country; indeed, some projections suggest that the number of teacher layoffs…

The overwhelming majority of public school teachers enter the teaching profession only after completing an apprenticeship as a student teacher. A growing body of research demonstrates how important the student teaching experience, also known as clinical practice, is for developing teaching capacities and shaping teacher career paths. But recent…

Anecdotal evidence points to the importance of school principals, but the limited existing research has neither provided consistent results nor indicated any set of essential characteristics of effective principals. This paper exploits extensive student-level panel data across six states to investigate both variations in principal performance and…

We use a database of over 15,000 teacher candidates from 15 teacher education programs in Washington state to investigate the connections between specific teacher preparation experiences and the likelihood that these candidates enter and stay in the state's public teaching workforce. As has been found in prior research, candidates with…

Empirical evidence shows that disadvantaged students tend to have less-qualified and less-effective teachers than their more-advantaged peers. These teacher quality gaps (TQGs), which have existed for decades and across many measures of student disadvantage and teacher quality, are an important factor explaining student achievement gaps between…