| dc.description.abstract | The literature documents the importance of teachers for student outcomes as well as the challenges of supporting teacher development, recruitment, and retention. This dissertation examines policies and conditions that promote teacher development and supply in hard-to-staff content areas. I use a longitudinal state dataset that includes information on teachers, schools, and students across time. In the first chapter, I use a regression discontinuity approach to examine the extent to which licensure exams are a barrier to entering the teaching profession. I find that those who initially fail are less likely to become licensed in the field aligned with the given test or to become employed as a teacher in the state but receive similar evaluation scores. The second chapter uses a fixed-effects approach to describe the extent to which teachers’ returns to experience vary as a function of their principals’ attributes. I find that teachers whose principals have higher survey ratings and longer tenures in their schools improve more rapidly than their counterparts. In the third chapter, I describe Career and Technical Education teachers’ turnover patterns, the salaries of exiters, and the implications of exit. I find that teachers in high-growth CTE areas are most likely to leave, earn higher salaries upon exiting, and that their turnover has implications for course offerings and staffing. Taken together, these chapters provide insight into policy solutions to support teacher development and supply. | |
