Essays on the Economics of Education

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays. In each essay, I use an applied econometric method to study the impact of a policy or an intervention on the teacher workforce. The first essay estimates the impact of personnel policy choices on teachers’ employment decisions using a discrete choice experiment design with a national sample of 1,030 US teachers. The findings suggest that support staff—special education specialists, counselors, and nurses—play an essential role in shaping teachers’ employment decisions. Teachers value access to these support staff more than they value a 10% increase to their own salary. The essay concludes by identifying a set of policy reforms that are both more cost-effective and more important to teachers than increasing salary. The second essay describes and evaluates a bias education program designed to increase teachers’ awareness of their own racial biases. The group-based, online intervention was piloted using a small sample RCT. While descriptive results suggest that bias awareness is negatively correlated with deficit-based patterns of thinking that perpetuate and reproduce racial inequality, the results of the randomized trial provide little proof of concept that bias education programs, as typically conceived, increase teachers’ awareness of personally-held biases. The essay concludes by discussing alternative approaches to group-based bias education that may be more effective. The third essay considers the effects of a long-run strategy of hiring Teach For America (TFA) teachers relative to a counterfactual hiring strategy of no TFA hiring. I use a teacher fixed effects model to estimate TFA teacher performance over time and find that TFA teachers improve at double the rate of non-TFA teachers over the first five years of their careers. Accounting for teacher attrition, I find that a long-run strategy of TFA hiring increases steady-state student achievement by 0.05 standard deviations. I also document variation in teacher performance within the sample of TFA teachers and find that TFA teachers who leave after two years are the highest performers among all TFA recruits.