The labor market for public school teachers: A descriptive analysis of New York State's teacher workforce

Abstract

Policymakers across the country are struggling to improve student learning, especially for students in traditionally low-performing schools. Many policies under debate, or being implemented, are intended to raise the level of instruction by attracting and retaining high-quality teachers. In order to design effective policies we must understand the mechanisms that determine the overall quality of the teacher workforce and those that create disparities in teacher quality across schools. In this paper, we examine New York’s public school teaching workforce. We are particularly interested in characterizing the comparative quality of teachers across districts and over time. To examine these issues, we have developed a very rich database that contains a number of measures of teacher quality for each of New York’s teachers over the last fifteen years. Descriptive analyses of these data allow us to characterize teacher quality of New York’s teaching workforce.