Research Areas

This report provides formative data about the implementation of projects associated with the Pennsylvania Bureau of Special Education’s Attract, Prepare, and Retain (APR) efforts during the 2023–24 school year. We surveyed or interviewed students and educators participating in six such projects: Developing Future Special Educators Grants, APR Mentoring Project, Networking and Learning Communities, Learning Institutes, Accelerated Programs for PK–12 Special Education Teacher Certification Grant, and American Sign Language programs. For the first three APR projects, these findings build on data from the first year of project implementation in the 2022– 23 school year. And for the latter three projects that were introduced in 2023–24, these data provide early evidence about how participants view their experiences with these projects.

Citation: Roddy Theobald, Equia Aniagyei-Cobbold, Marcy Stein (2024). The Special Education Teacher Pipeline in Pennsylvania: Year 2 Report. CALDER Working Paper No. 304-0724

Graduates of special education teacher education programs can teach in a range of special education settings, raising the potential that their training can occur in very different settings than where they find their first jobs. We follow 263 completers of Moderate Disabilities programs in Massachusetts from their field placements to their early-career teaching positions and study the characteristics of their field placements and the degree to which these are aligned with their early-career teaching positions. We also assess the degree to which alignment is associated with early-career teacher turnover. We found that many of these teachers student-taught in an inclusive setting but were hired into a self-contained special education setting and vice versa, and teachers who experienced this misalignment were more likely to leave the workforce early in their careers. Teachers who student taught with a supervising practitioner without a special education license were also more likely to leave early. Findings suggest that teachers training to educate students with learning disabilities should student teach in a setting that is aligned with where they are likely to be hired, and with a supervising practitioner who is trained in special education.

Citation: Benjamin Backes, James Cowan, Dan Goldhaber, Zeyu Jin, Roddy Theobald (2024). Misalignments Between Student Teaching Placements and Initial Teaching Positions: Implications for the Early-Career Attrition of Special Education Teachers. CALDER Working Paper No. 293-0224

Nationally, more than 75% of individuals who are credentialed to teach are prepared in traditional college- or university-based teacher education programs (TEPs). But the college and employment pathways that prospective teachers take to TEP enrollment and completion have not been comprehensively examined. A better understanding of how credentialed individuals find their way into TEPs helps us understand the sources of new teacher supply early in the prospective teacher pipeline. With that in mind, we analyze pathways into and through TEPs using historical postsecondary and unemployment insurance data from Washington state. We find that the pathways are quite varied with around 40% of bachelor’s-level TEP completers spending at least some time in community colleges and less than 40% enrolling and finishing at the same university directly after high school. Pathways to master’s TEP completion are even more varied, with almost half of the completers having prior employment experience. For researchers, this varied landscape raises important questions about the relationship between pathways, candidate persistence, and eventual job performance. For policymakers, the results suggest that efforts to recruit the next generation of teachers need to look beyond the pool of students already enrolled at a 4-year university to include students at 2-year colleges or in the labor force who might be interested in entering a TEP.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, Stephanie Liddle, Roddy Theobald (2023). The Long and Winding Road: Mapping the College and Employment Pathways to Teacher Education Program Completion in Washington State. CALDER Working Paper No. 288-0723

The onset of the pandemic in spring 2020 substantially disrupted routes into teaching and offered a unique opportunity to study this process with different requirements for initial entry into the classroom. We examine the impacts of the Temporary Certificate of Eligibility (Temporary CE), which allowed teacher candidates in New Jersey to enter the workforce before completing assessment and performance requirements. Relative to the novice teacher workforce before the pandemic, Temporary CE teachers were substantially more diverse without any significant effects on teacher performance or student test scores. However, Temporary CE holders were less likely to remain in the same school or in the New Jersey teaching workforce between 2020–21 and 2021–22. Although Temporary CE holders disproportionately entered through alternate routes into teaching, these patterns hold for both traditional- and alternate-route entrants.

Citation: Benjamin Backes, Dan Goldhaber (2023). The Relationship Between Pandemic-Era Teacher Licensure Waivers and Teacher Demographics, Retention, and Effectiveness in New Jersey. CALDER Working Paper No. 286-0623

Prior research has connected characteristics of cooperating teachers who supervise student teaching to performance measures of the teacher candidates they host, suggesting more effective teachers may also be better mentors. The specific measures of cooperating teacher effectiveness considered in this prior literature (value added and performance evaluations), however, are infrequently observable to individuals responsible for student teaching placements. In this paper, we consider a more easily observed proxy for mentor effectiveness: National Board (NB) Certification. We find that NB teachers are considerably more likely to host candidates than other teachers, candidates supervised by NB teachers are slightly more likely to be hired within three years, and these candidates have slightly lower value added in English language arts than their peers, all else being equal. We find no significant relationship between cooperating teacher NB certification and candidates’ later attrition and value added in math. We conclude that individuals and policies seeking to leverage student teaching placements to improve student and teacher outcomes may need to focus on less easily observable proxies of cooperating teacher quality than NB certification status.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, Roddy Theobald, Grace Falken (2023). National Board Certification as a Signal of Cooperating Teacher Quality. CALDER Working Paper No. 284-0523

A fundamental question for education policy is whether outcomes-based accountability, including comprehensive educator evaluations and a closer relationship between effectiveness and compensation, improves the quality of instruction and raises achievement. We use synthetic control methods to study the comprehensive teacher and principal evaluation and compensation systems introduced in the Dallas Independent School District (Dallas ISD) in 2013 for principals and 2015 for teachers. Under this far-reaching reform, educator evaluations that are used to support teacher growth and determine salary depend on a combination of supervisor evaluations, student achievement, and student or family survey responses. The reform replaced salary scales based on experience and educational attainment with those based on evaluation scores, a radical departure from decades of rigid salary schedules. The synthetic control estimates reveal positive and significant effects of the reforms on math and reading achievement that increase over time.  From 2015 through 2019, the average achievement for the synthetic control district fluctuates narrowly between -0.27 s.d. and -0.3 s.d., while the Dallas ISD average increases steadily from -0.28 s.d. in 2015 to -0.08 s.d. in 2019, the final year of the sample. Though the increase for reading is roughly half as large, it is also highly significant.

Citation: Eric Hanushek, Jin Luo, Andrew Morgan, Minh Nguyen, Ben Ost, Steven Rivkin, Ayman Shakeel (2023). The Effects of Comprehensive Educator Evaluation and Pay Reform on Achievement. CALDER Working Paper No. 281-0323

The decision to close schools in March 2020 was a massive disruption to public education. But pandemic-related closures did more than put in-person instruction on hold. School closures also meant that teacher candidates could not complete their student teaching experiences (Choate et al., 2021). And when licensure test centers closed, prospective teachers could not sit for the exams they needed to get credentialed. As COVID wreaked havoc on the school system—and worries over staffing shortages grew—most states responded to these disruptions by modifying and relaxing their requirements for becoming a teacher during the pandemic.

Three years later, the negative consequences of school closures for students are well known: learning declined and pre-existing inequities grew (Goldhaber et al., 2022). But how (if at all) changes to licensure requirements affected teachers and students is less clear. To provide an initial picture of what happened, this research brief describes the nature of pandemic-era licensure modifications, how many teachers they might have affected, and why we should care. Our rough estimate suggests that around 100,000 graduates of traditional preparation programs might have entered the profession under changed licensure rules in 2020-2021.

Citation: Michael DeArmond, Dan Goldhaber, Sydney Payne (2023). COVID's Under-the-Radar Experiment with Teacher Licensure. CALDER Policy Brief No. 33

Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic era, concerns about teacher turnover and teacher shortages remain at the top of the education agenda. But contrary to media reports about a “wave of resignations and retirements” (e.g., Heller, 2021), early evidence from state databases showed a more nuanced picture: teacher attrition was actually down during the pandemic’s first year (teachers leaving after the 2019–2020 school year) before it increased somewhat in the next year (e.g., Bacher-Hicks et al., 2021, 2022; Bastian & Fuller, 2023; Camp et al., 2022; CERRA, 2022; Goldhaber & Theobald, 2022a,b).

In this policy brief, we follow-up and expand on our earlier analyses of teacher mobility and attrition in Washington state with an additional year of data from the 2022-23 school year. We draw on a longitudinal database of school staffing in Washington, the S-275, which now provides 39 years of annual data on teachers and other school employees in the state.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald (2023). Teacher Turnover Three Years into the Pandemic Era: Evidence from Washington State. CALDER Policy Brief No. 32

This paper examines the impact of Teach For America (TFA) on following-year student test and non-test outcomes in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. This paper measures the extent to which exposure to TFA is followed by improved student outcomes in the future. In particular, this paper measures days missed due to absences or suspensions, course grades in each core subject, and progression in math courses. We find that students taught by TFA math teachers go on to have higher grades in math courses in the following year and are less likely to miss school due to being absent or suspended. However, while students in TFA classrooms score higher on math and ELA assessments in a given year, these test score gains fade out by the following year. 

Citation: Benjamin Backes, Michael Hansen (2023). Persistent Teach for America Effects on Student Test and Non-Test Academic Outcomes. CALDER Working Paper No. 277-0123