Clinical Experiences and (Unexpected Findings on) Job Placements: Experimental Evidence from Student Teaching Interventions

We implemented two reforms to student teaching in randomized controlled trials designed to test improvements to pre-service preparation. Although neither reform affected overall teacher employment, we find significant effects on other labor market outcomes. The first intervention placed student teachers with more effective mentors and in more effective schools for their clinical experiences. We find that treated candidates tended to find employment in higher income and less diverse schools, an effect that appears to operate primarily among teachers not hired into their placement sites. The second intervention provided detailed reports to teacher candidates, their field instructors, and their school-based mentor teachers about performance on clinical evaluations during the clinical experience. Treated candidates in this experiment were more likely to obtain teaching positions in the schools in which they completed their student teaching. Overall, the results suggest that student teaching reforms may have important and unexpected effects on the teacher labor market.