Surveying the Landscape of Teacher Education in New York City: Constrained Variation and the Challenge of Innovation. July 2008.  Donald Boyd, Pam Grossman, Karen Hammerness, R. Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, Morva McDonald, Michelle Reininger, Mathew Ronfeldt, and James Wyckoff.

Teacher preparation is receiving increased scrutiny and criticism. However, there is suprising little information about how teachers are prepared for their careers. In this article, we describe the state of teacher education across many preparation programs serving New York City public schools. We explore the characteristics of programs that prepare teachers for New York City schools, inclusing the orientation of programs, who enters these programs, who teaches in the programs, and what characterizes the core curriculum. Perhaps of greatest interest, we examine the variation across preparation programs. Counter to the belief that programs vary widely, we find the overall curriculum of teacher education to be more similar than different. We conclude with recommendations for what it might take to change the landscape of teacher education. Research Paper

Measuring Effect Sizes:  The Effect of Measurement Error.  June 2008.  Donald Boyd, Pam Grossman, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff. 

In this paper we focus on two issues pertaining to how effect sizes are measured.  We argue that model coefficients should be compared to the standard deviation of gain scores, not the standard deviation of scores, in calculating most effect sizes.  Second, we develop a measure that accounts for test measurement error.  Since the standard deviation of observed scores in the denominator of the effect-size measure reflects measurement error as well as the dispersion in the true academic achievement of students, it overstates variability in achievement.  We apply these adjustements to student assessments in New York City and find that effect-size estimates based on the dispersion in gain scores net of test measurement error are four times larger than effect sizes typically measured.  We explore the implications for such an adjustment to the estimated effect sizes of teacher qualifications on student achievement.    Research Paper

Who Leaves? Teacher Attrition and Student Achievement. September 2007. Donald Boyd, Pam Grossman, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff.

No Child Left Behind, state assessment-based accountability policies and new routes into teaching have all had profound effects on the labor market for teachers. In this research we explore how the distribution of teacher qualifications and student achievement in New York City have changed from 2000 through 2005 using data on teachers and students.   The paper examines the role that readily observed measures of teacher qualifications have on student achievement.  Research Paper, Policy Brief

Analyzing the Determinants of the Matching of Public School Teachers to Jobs.  September 2006. Donald Boyd, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff.

This paper develops an empirical approach for disentangling the range of factors that affect the hiring decisions of school officials and the job choices made by teachers.  As discussed in the paper, the framework typically employed to analyze teacher labor market models is inconsistent with relevant institutional features of teacher labor markets.  An alternative approach is developed based on a game-theoretic two-sided matching model of employer-employee job match and a method of simulated moments estimation strategy. This framework allows the authors to estimate how factors affect the choices of teachers and hiring authorities and how these choices interact to determine the equilibrium allocation of teachers across jobs.  Although the paper focuses on teacher labor markets, the issues raised and the empirical framework developed are applicable in other settings as well. Research Paper

How Changes in Entry Requirements Alter the Teacher Workforce and Affect Student Achievement.  Education Finance and Policy, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 2006. Donald Boyd, Hamilton Lankford, Pamela Grossman, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff. 

We are in the midst of what amounts to a national experiment in how best to attract, prepare, and retain teachers, particularly for high poverty urban schools. Using data on New York City students and their teachers in grades three through eight we assess the effects of pathways into teaching on the teacher workforce and student achievement. We consider wheter teachers entering through alternative certification routes alter the attributes of the teacher workdforce, how the achievement gains of the students of alternative route teachers compare to those of other teachers, and the relative retention of teachers across pathways.  Journal Article, Research Paper, Policy Brief.

Complex By Design: Investigating Pathways Into Teaching in New York City Schools.  Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 57, No. 2, March/April 2006.  Donald Boyd, Pam Grossman, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, Nicholas Michelli, and Jim Wyckoff. 

New York City represents a microcosm of the changes that are shaking the very foundations of teacher education in this country.  In their efforts to find teachers for hard-to-staff schools by creating multiple pathways into teaching, districts from New York City to Los Angeles are in the midst of what amounts to a national experiment in how best to recruit, prepare, and retain teachers.  This article provides an overview of a research project that examines features of these different pathways into teaching in New York City schools and the impact of these features on where teachers teach, how long they remain in the classroom, and student achievement in reading and math as measure by value-added analyses.  This article provides both a conceptual framework for the study and a discussion of some of the methodological challenges involved in such research, including problems of selection bias, difficulties in documenting programmatic features, and challenges of estimating teacher effects on student achievement.  Journal Article.

Explaining the Short Careers of High-Achieving Teachers in Schools with Low-Performing Students. American Economic Review, May 2005, Vol. 95, No. 2. Donald Boyd, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff.

This paper examines the decisions of elementary teachers in New York City to stay in the same school, transfer to another public school within NYC, transfer to a school outside NYC, or leave teaching altogether during the first five years of their careers. This study improves on existing research in that it examines how teachers’ transfer and quit behaviors are influenced by (i) interactions between teacher qualifications and school-level student achievement (ii) unobserved variation in teachers’ responses to school-level student attributes, and (iii) the distance from new teachers’ prior homes to their first jobs. Journal Article, Research Paper.

Improving Science Achievement: The Role of Teacher Workforce Policies. May 2005. Donald Boyd, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff.

This paper examines the difficulty hard-to-staff and low-performing schools have in hiring and keeping high quality teachers. Students failing to achieve even minimal levels of educational achievement are most dependent on their teachers and schools for academic learning, yet they typically are taught by individuals with relatively weak and/or inadequate qualifications. This study explores what traditionally hard-to-staff and low-performing schools can do to attract and keep the quality workforce that will provide their students with the requisite schools and learning demanded by future employers and required by state and national standards. Research Paper.

The Impact of Assessment and Accountability on Teacher Retention: Are There Unintended Consequences? March 2005. Donald Boyd, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff.

This paper examines the response of teachers to the implementation of state-mandated testing and uses data on every teacher in NYS public elementary schools from the 1994-95 school year through the 2001-02 school year. Specifically, the paper addresses the effect of testing on fourth grade teaching, including whether there is increased turnover among fourth grade teachers; whether teachers with certain characteristics react differently to the testing; and whether the characteristics of teachers entering the fourth grade have changed with the introduction of testing. The analysis finds that the turnover rate did not increase as expected, and that teachers entering fourth grade are less likely to be inexperienced relative to other teachers. Research Paper.

The Draw of Home: How Teachers’ Preferences for Proximity Disadvantage Urban Schools.  Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Winter 2005, Vol. 24, No.1, 113-132.  Donald Boyd, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff.

This paper presents striking findings regarding the little-understood spatial geography of teacher labor markets and the importance of school proximity and similarity in teachers’ decisions where to seek employment. In turn, the paper discusses the implications of these findings for urban schools as well as teacher recruitment and preparation policies.  Journal Article.