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Recent evidence on the large variance in teacher effectiveness has spurred interest in teacher labor markets. Research documents that better qualified teachers typically work in more advantaged schools but cannot determine the relative importance of supply versus demand. To isolate teacher preferences, we document which schools prospective teachers interviewed at during job fairs in Chicago. We find substantial variation in the number of applicants per school, ranging from under five to over 300. Schools serving more advantaged students have more applicants per vacancy, on average, and teacher preferences vary systematically by their own demographic characteristics. School geographic location is highly predictive of applications, even after controlling for distance from applicants' home addresses and a host of school and neighborhood characteristics.

Policymakers aiming to close the well-documented achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students have increasingly turned their attention to issues of teacher quality. A number of studies have demonstrated that teachers are inequitably distributed across student subgroups by input measures, like experience and qualifications, as well as output measures, like value-added estimates of teacher performance, but these tend to focus on either individual measures of teacher quality or particular school districts. In this study, we present a comprehensive, descriptive analysis of the inequitable distribution of both input and output measures of teacher quality across various indicators of student disadvantage across all school districts in Washington State. We demonstrate that in elementary school, middle school, and high school classrooms, virtually every measure of teacher quality we examine—experience, licensure exam scores, and value added—is inequitably distributed across every indicator of student disadvantage—free/reduced-price lunch status, underrepresented minority, and low prior academic performance. Finally, we decompose these inequities to the district, school, and classroom levels and find that patterns in teacher sorting at all three levels contribute to the overall teacher quality gaps.

In an effort to equalize the quality of teacher resources across all state schools in the compulsory education sector of China and eliminate the school choice phenomenon, the Chinese government has launched a nationwide program of rotating principals and teachers. This study has revealed mixed results to date. While the rotation of teachers has helped to narrow the gap in teacher quality between the low-performing and high-performing schools, the study has revealed some important issues that need to be addressed, such as conflict of goals, ineffective incentives, and rotation for rotation’s sake. Whether such a Robin Hood method of “robbing the rich in order to help the poor” can consistently raise the quality of teacher resources and improve the overall quality of education across the whole country remains to be seen.

We use a unique dataset of student teaching placements in the State of Washington and a proxy for teacher shortages, the proportion of new teacher hires in a school or district with emergency teaching credentials, to provide the first empirical evidence of a relationship between student teaching placements and teacher shortages. We find that schools and districts that host fewer student teachers or are nearby to districts that host fewer student teachers tend to hire significantly more new teachers with emergency credentials the following year. These relationships are robust to district fixed-effects specifications that make comparisons across schools within the same district. This descriptive evidence suggests exploring efforts to place student teachers in schools and districts that struggle to staff their classrooms.

Novice teachers’ professional contexts may have important implications for their effectiveness, development, and retention. However, due to data limitations, descriptions of these contexts are often unidimensional or vague. Using 10 years of administrative data from the Los Angeles Unified School District, we describe patterns of new teacher sorting using 24 context measures organized along three dimensions—intensity of instructional responsibilities, homophily, and colleagues’ qualifications—and use school-level survey data to measure a fourth dimension. professional culture. Relative to more experienced teachers, novice teachers have placements that are more challenging along the first three dimensions, and composite measures of the dimensions are differentially predictive of teachers’ outcomes. This suggests that policymakers should carefully consider placements to better support novice teachers.

Although substantial evidence from the United States suggests that more qualified teachers are disproportionately concentrated in the schools and classrooms of academically and socioeconomically advantaged children, it is not clear whether the problem of teacher sorting is global in scope. This study uses data from the 2013 Teaching and Learning International Survey to examine whether and how school- and classroom-level teacher distribution patterns vary across 32 education systems with diverse national contexts and education policies. We find that cross- and within-school teacher sorting is common in most countries but within-school sorting is more pronounced in higher income countries. We also identify several national policy variables that are significantly related to both cross-school and cross-classroom sorting of teachers.

Using unique data from California on teacher job vacancies, we investigate staffing challenges across the urbanicity spectrum, focusing on the extent to which the characteristics of rural school systems explain the differences in staffing challenges as measured by vacancy rates and emergency credentialed teachers, relative to other urbanicities. We find that rural districts have significantly and substantially higher staffing challenges than districts from different urbanicity classifications (urban, suburban, and towns). Some of these differences are explained by district-level attributes, such as the proportion of students in poverty in the district. The geography of rural districts itself also explains the high levels of staffing challenge as rural districts are more likely to be located on a state border and far from teacher education programs, both of which are strongly associated with staffing challenge measures. Even after controlling for a rich set of observable covariates, there is evidence that rural districts are still somewhat more likely to face staffing challenges, suggesting that there are unobserved aspects of being rural associated with the desirability of employment that are not readily captured by quantitative data.

Teacher leadership recently has gained prominence as an important method for school improvement and reform, yet the ranks of teacher leaders do not match the racial and ethnic diversity of the students they serve. Jori S. Beck, KaaVonia Hinton, and Brandon M. Butler conducted a study of teacher leadership that garnered almost 800 survey responses and included 31 interviews with administrators and teachers. They discovered how the lack of diversity in the teacher workforce, the myth of meritocracy, and the isolation of teachers of color present barriers to diversifying the teacher leader workforce. Potential solutions include equity audits, revisions to hiring practices, and the distribution of teachers of color within school buildings.

School performance pressures apply disproportionately to tested grades and subjects. Using longitudinal administrative data—including achievement data from untested grades—and teacher survey data from a large urban district, we examine schools' responses to those pressures in assigning teachers to high-stakes and low-stakes classrooms. We find that teachers with more positive performance measures in both tested and untested classrooms are more likely to be placed in a tested classroom in the following year. Performance measures even more strongly predict a high-stakes teaching assignment in schools with low state accountability grades and where principals exercise more assignment influence. In elementary schools, we show that such \"strategic\" teacher assignment disadvantages early grades, concentrating less effective teachers in K–2 classrooms. Reassignment of ineffective upper-grades teachers to early grades systematically results in lower K–2 math and reading achievement gains. Moreover, evidence suggests that students' lower early-grades achievement persists into subsequent tested grades.

The aim of the present study was to investigate and compare the frequency of the implementation of music improvisation activities in music lessons by classroom teachers and subject teachers teaching music in the fourth and fifth grade in Slovenian primary schools. We also explored the teachers’ sense of competence to implement music improvisation activities, reasons for the infrequent inclusion of such activities and solutions for more frequent inclusion. A descriptive nonexperimental method of research was used, collecting data with a questionnaire. The study found that teachers occasionally carry out music improvisation activities, most often rhythmic improvisation. The results showed no differences between the frequency of improvisation activities between classroom teachers and subject teachers. However, subject teachers do feel more competent to perform music improvisation activities than classroom teachers and there was a weak correlation between the sense of competence and the frequency of improvisation activities in music lessons. Teachers cite a lack of time, knowledge and self-confidence as the key reasons for the infrequent implementation of music improvisation activities. They see solutions for the more frequent inclusion of music improvisation activities in additional music improvisation training and changes in the music curricula, advocating for more flexible and broadly defined learning objectives. Due to the small sample size, the results are not generalisable, but they do provide an insight into the current state of the integration of music improvisation activities in music lessons in the fourth and fifth grade of primary school.