2007 American Education Finance Association Conference Abstracts

"Are Public Schools Really Losing Their “Best”? Assessing the Career Transitions of Teachers and Their Implications for the Quality of the Teacher Workforce" Dan Goldhaber (University of Washington), Betheny Gross (University of Washington), and Daniel Player (Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.)
Judging by various measures of academic proficiency, public schools appear, over time, to lose the most skilled teachers. While this trend may be alarming given mounting evidence that teacher quality is the key schooling factor influencing student outcomes, numerous studies also show that contributions to student achievement are only weakly correlated with teachers' academic proficiency. Given this weak link, researchers have begun to ask: "Are public schools really losing their ‘best' teachers?"

In an extension of studies by Hanusheck (2005) and Krieg (2004), we examine the transfer of teachers within and across districts, as well as attrition out of the classroom, using panel data of teachers that entered the North Carolina educational system between the 1995-96 and 2001-02 school years. Using survival models and multiple indicators of a teacher's effectiveness, we confirm that teachers with higher SAT scores tend to have shorter stays in teaching, but also find that teachers making the greatest achievement gains with their students are more likely to stay. However, we also find that teachers do tend to transfer out of districts' most challenging schools—indicating a continued need to develop policies that will help distribute good teachers to the disadvantaged schools that need them most.

"Monetary Returns to Academic Ability in the Public Teacher Labor Market" Daniel Player (Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.) Previous research has established the returns to academic ability in the general labor market, and this paper investigates such returns in the teacher labor market.  Using a nationally representative sample of public school teachers, I find that teachers who graduate from the most selective undergraduate institutions have salaries that are between 7% and 14% higher than those who graduate from the least selective colleges.  An empirical investigation of the source of these returns reveals that the majority of this difference is due to high-ability teachers sorting into higher paying districts, though a non-trivial amount arises from within-district deviations from the salary schedule.

"Gender Gaps in College and High School Graduation by Race, Combining Public and Private Schools" Duncan Chaplin (Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.) and Daniel Klasik (The Urban Institute)
Each year our college system gives twice as many bachelor's degrees (BAs) to African American females as males.  Large gender gaps favoring women also exist for other groups.  Indeed, on average our college system gives 35% more BAs to females than males across all racial and ethnic groups.  Traditional explanations for this pattern have focused on what happens in college.  In this brief we note that at least part of the story can be found in differences in high school graduation rates.  While the differences in high school graduation rates are far smaller, the variations by race and gender follow the same pattern as those found in college.  We find that our high schools are graduating about 23% more African-American females than males each year and our estimates suggest about a 4% difference that favors females across all ethnic groups.

In order to conduct this analysis we build on methods of calculating public high school graduation rates used in previous Urban Institute work and enhance them by adding in graduates from private high schools.  We then compare this new method to other methods that have been used to estimate high school graduation rates.

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