Understanding Teacher Labor Markets: Implications for Equity

Executive Summary Education policymakers at both the state and federal level are struggling to identify ways to improve the academic achievement of public school students. Faced with the substandard academic performance of some student groups and the persistence of achievement discrepancies between certain racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups of students, policymakers' need for information to bridge the gap is at an all-time high. Concern over low student performance has a long history but has taken on new urgency in a time of dramatic increases in the availability of achievement data, frequent court cases on adequacy and equity and widespread calls for accountability. Recent research on student achievement suggests a strong link between teachers and student outcomes, though efforts to eliminate funding disparities within states still leave many schools comparatively short-changed in the qualifications of their teachers. Public policy already recognizes the connection between the distribution of teacher qualifications and educational equity. Education systems in some states currently face legal challenges because of charges they are not meeting adequacy standards for student outcomes. Plaintiff's evidence increasingly includes examples of how teacher qualifications differ across schools and districts and how teachers with low qualifications are unevenly distributed to students from nonwhite and low socioeconomic households. Federal, state and district policies have begun to focus on strategies designed to attract better qualified teachers to traditionally low-performing schools where an overwhelming majority of students are poor, nonwhite and from urban areas. Moreover, as states and districts work to implement the standards and accountability systems required by the No Child Left Behind Act, issues relating to the equitable distribution of teacher qualifications will continue to grow in importance. Though ample literature exists on the mobility decisions of teachers and teaching equity, little is known about the specific distribution of teacher qualifications and their contribution to and effect on educational equity. This report bridges the gap by examining 1) the distribution of teacher qualifications, 2) their relationship to educational equity and 3) the attributes of teacher labor markets that contribute to the poorest-qualified teachers being unevenly distributed to nonwhite students. ii The results of our study show striking differences in the qualifications of teachers across schools. Teachers are sorted across New York State public schools such that the least qualified teachers are much more likely to teach in schools with higher concentrations of nonwhite, poor, and low-achieving students than their more qualified peers. Too often these …