Essays on Teacher Labor Markets

Abstract

This dissertation studies the "homegrown" teacher pipeline in Massachusetts to inform policies to recruit and retain more racially diverse and highly effective teachers. I construct a new dataset in which I observe students beginning during their K-12 schooling and follow them through postsecondary education and into the teacher pipeline. In Chapter 1, I use this data to document racial disparities in persistence through postsecondary education, entry into teaching, and persistence through the teacher pipeline. I show that alumni of K-12 public schools who become teachers are far more likely to be White than the overall population of K-12 students, and that systemic racial disparities in educational attainment play a significant role in driving this gap in racial diversity between students and teachers. In Chapter 2, I measure the effect of unemployment rates on supply and demand for teachers. I find that students who graduate from college when unemployment rates are higher are more likely to enter the teacher pipeline, and that this effect is stronger among higher achieving students. Higher unemployment also reduces demand for teachers, but I find no evidence that schools take advantage of reduced demand to select higher achieving teaching candidates. These results suggest that college graduates respond to economic incentives when deciding whether to enter teaching, which can inform policy to attract higher quality educators outside of economic downturns. Finally, in Chapter 3, I descriptively compare Massachusetts teachers who attended K-12 schooling in the state to teachers who moved to Massachusetts during college or their early career. I find that K-12 alumni are less racially diverse and perform worse on value-added measures than teachers who entered the state after K-12, but that they have higher rates of early career retention, including at schools serving more disadvantaged students. The results of this analysis provide important context as Massachusetts, alongside many other states, seeks to invest in recruiting future teachers from the population of K-12 students.