Student Teaching and the Geography of Teacher Shortages

Abstract

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.

Teacher Staffing Challenges in California: Examining the Uniqueness of Rural School Districts

“…The results also suggest that as distance to TEPs increases, so does the vacancy rate. Again, this is not surprising given that student teachers are likely to be placed near TEPs (Krieg et al, 2016), and districts’ hosting student teachers is associated with reductions in the need to rely on emergency credentialed teachers (Goldhaber et al, 2019). That said, none of these models explains much of the variation in vacancy rate (with R 2 statistics at most .039).…”

“…If rural districts produce fewer eventual teachers, then there will be fewer local teachers to return and teach in their schools. And Goldhaber et al (2019) found that there are important geographic connections between districts and TEPs related to the hosting of student teachers (i.e., teacher candidates in training). In particular, TEPs tend to work with geographically proximate districts in student teacher placements, and many districts end up hiring teacher candidates who did their student teaching in the same district.…”

“…As such, our results suggest some broad implications for local and state policymakers who are trying to staff their schools with high-quality teachers. For instance, the research discussed above has shown that the teacher labor force is extremely local (e.g., Boyd et al, 2005a; Reininger, 2012) and, moreover, where student teaching occurs is predictive of district and school employment (Krieg et al, 2016) and of the employment of teachers with emergency credentials (Goldhaber et al, 2019).…”

“… 11. Prior research has shown that teachers are sensitive to factors such as student demographics (Hanushek et al, 2004) as well as district and regional characteristics, and we have selected controls based on existing empirical work in this area (see Cowan et al, 2016; Goldhaber et al, 2019; McVey & Trinidad, 2019). …”

“… 28. We use lagged measures to account for the possibility that parents might opt in or out of particular districts based on the district’s ability to staff classrooms. Selection of student, district, and teacher controls is informed by prior work such as Hanushek et al (2004), Cowan et al (2016), Goldhaber et al (2019), and Rivkin et al (2005). …”