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
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...