Recruiting, Training, and Retaining Effective Educators
Schools are only as effective as the teachers, administrators, and staff working within them. WEPC researchers seek to better understand the educator pipeline and to measure the impact of policies designed to improve the education workforce, from teacher preparation to professional development to increasing the diversity of the education profession.
Latest Projects
Using Classroom Observations in the Evaluation of Special Education Teachers
Authors: Nathan D. Jones, Courtney A. Bell, Mary Brownell, Yi Qi, David Peyton, Daisy Pua, Melissa Fowler, Steven Holtzman Project Summary While teacher evaluation systems and policies have evolved nationwide during the past decade, the use of structured classroom observation tools remains nearly universal. This paper examines one of the most popular observation systems in the country—Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching (FFT)—and asks the question: “How well do common observation...
COVID-19 and the Composition of the Massachusetts Teacher Workforce
Authors: Andrew Bacher-Hicks, Olivia Chi, and Alexis Orellana Project Summary The COVID-19 crisis has created unprecedented disruption for school systems, educators, and the students they serve. The pandemic-related challenges and connected policy responses have the potential to alter the supply of and demand for teachers, both in the short and long-term. The following analyses examine the extent to which the composition of the teacher workforce changed in Massachusetts during various stages...
Teacher Time Use and Affect During COVID-19
Authors: Nathan Jones, Eric Camburn, Ben Kelcey, & Esther Quintero This research was supported in part by a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences. Project Summary In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a shutdown of school buildings across the United States and a subsequent unplanned nationwide transition to remote learning. For teachers, these school building closures resulted in a transformation of many facets of their work, requiring them to take on new and often...
The Impact of Principal Attrition and Replacement on Indicators of School Quality
Authors: Marcus A. Winters, Brian Kisida, & Ikhee Cho Project Summary This study explores whether principal transitions are inherently disruptive or if the impact of changing principals depends on the context surrounding the outgoing or incoming principal—namely, whether the new principal was hired externally or promoted from within a school. Key Findings We find that transitions to both internal and external hires negatively impact student performance. Externally hired principals also...
A Classroom Observer Like Me: The Effects of Race-congruence and Gender-congruence Between Teachers and Raters on Observation Scores
Author: Olivia Chi Project Summary To further understand the challenges of diversifying the teacher pipeline, Olivia Chi examines how race and gender dynamics influence administrators’ subjective assessments of teachers in the context of classroom observations. Specifically, Chi asks whether teachers receive higher classroom observation scores as a result of sharing race or gender with their observers, who are typically school-based administrators. On a broad scale, if teachers benefit from...
Professional Development at Scale: The Causal Effect of Obtaining an SEI Endorsement Under Massachusetts’s RETELL Initiative
Authors: Jesse Bruhn, Nathan Jones, Yasuko Kanno, & Marcus A. Winters This project was funded by a generous grant from the William T. Grant Foundation. Project Summary English learners (ELs) are among the most rapidly-growing and lowest-performing student groups in American public schools. Lack of access to teachers who have been trained to serve their specific needs is one potential explanation for ELs’ unequal educational outcomes relative to non-EL students. Jesse Bruhn, Nathan Jones,...
Regulatory Arbitrage in Teacher Hiring and Retention
Authors: Jesse M. Bruhn, Scott A. Imberman, & Marcus A. Winters Project Summary Charter schools typically have greater flexibility in their employment practices than do traditional public schools. However, it is not clear the extent to which charter schools capitalize on this comparative labor market flexibility to remove low value-added teachers or better retain high value-added teachers. Jesse Bruhn, Scott Imberman, and Marcus Winters use longitudinal administrative data from...