Disconnected Development? The Importance of Specific Human Capital in the Transition From Student Teaching to the Classroom

Abstract

We use a novel database of student teaching placements in Washington State to investigate teachers’ transitions from student teaching classrooms to first job classrooms and the implications for student achievement. We find first-year teachers are more effective when they teach in the same or an adjacent grade, in the same school type, or in a classroom with student demographics similar to their student teaching classroom. We document that only 27% of first-year teachers are teaching the same grade they student taught, and that first-year teachers tend to begin their careers in higher poverty classrooms than their student teaching placements. This suggests that better aligning student teacher placements with first-year teacher hiring could be a policy lever for improving early-career teacher effectiveness.

Front End to Back End: Teacher Preparation, Workforce Entry, and Attrition

“…Also consistent with Krieg et al (2020a), there is substantial variation in alignment across teachers who begin their careers in different school levels (columns 2–5 of Table 5). For example, while over 90% of elementary teachers in the sample also student taught in an elementary school and about 80% of high school teachers student taught in a high school, only 45% of middle school teachers student taught in a middle school.…”

“…Finally, in Table 5, we examine measures of the alignment between candidates’ student teaching placements and first jobs. Column 1 summarizes all hired teachers and shows that, consistent with prior research (Krieg et al, 2020a), about 25% of candidates are hired into the same grade, about 80% are hired into the same school type (elementary, middle, or high school), 16% are hired into the same school, and 40% are hired into the same district as their student teaching placement. The average teacher also begins their career in a classroom with 6 percentage points more FRL students in their classroom and in a school with 3 percentage points more FRL students in their school than experienced during their student teaching.…”

“…Second, we consider the alignment between the student demographics of a teacher’s current school/classroom and their student teaching school/classroom. Following Goldhaber et al (2017) and Krieg et al (2020a), we focus on the percentage of students receiving FRL in a teacher’s classroom or schools and include flexible polynomials for the differences between the first classroom and their student teaching experience in the attrition model in Equation 2. Specifically, let FRL jt be the percentage FRL of teacher j ’s current classroom/school, and let FRL jtʹ be the percentage FRL of that teacher’s student teaching classroom/school.…”

“…Characteristics of the schools in which teacher candidates student taught, such as teacher turnover and collaboration, are predictive of the value added of teacher candidates who become teachers (Ronfeldt, 2012(Ronfeldt, , 2015. Measures of the alignment between student teacher and early-career teaching experiences have also been shown to be predictive of teacher effectiveness in the workforce, though not uniformly (Boyd et al, 2009;Goldhaber et al, 2017;Henry et al, 2013;Krieg et al, 2020a;Ronfeldt, 2015). For example, teachers are more effective (as measured by value added) when they are teaching in a classroom with similar student demographics as their student teaching classroom or in the same grade in which they student taught (Krieg et al, 2020a), but several studies have found that teaching in the same school as student teaching is not significantly predictive of value added (Goldhaber et al, 2017;Henry et al, 2013;Krieg et al, 2020a;Ronfeldt, 2015).…”

Special Education Teacher Preparation, Literacy Instructional Alignment, and Reading Achievement for Students With High-incidence Disabilities

“…Finally, a considerable body of theoretical and qualitative work has argued that the alignment or “coherence” between a teacher candidate’s education experiences and inservice practice is important (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 2000; Grossman et al, 2008; Powell, 2015). These studies are bolstered by a small body of research specific to special education (e.g., Brownell et al, 2014; Leko & Brownell, 2011) and an emerging quantitative literature (e.g., Boyd et al, 2009; Krieg et al, 2021) that suggests that alignment between preparation and practice may have important implications for teacher and student outcomes. For example, Leko and Brownell (2011) provide qualitative evidence about how well-aligned student teaching experiences allow for the appropriation of knowledge about effective reading instruction from preparation programs.…”