National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Symposium on Data Issues in Teacher Supply and Demand
March 26, 2007
On March 26, 2007, NCES held a 1-day symposium on data issues in the study of teacher supply and demand. Several prominent researchers were asked to present papers describing the current knowledge base on teacher supply and demand and data needs for improving and expanding the knowledge base. Synopses of the papers are included in this document; the papers are available from the authors. Presenters and papers included:
After presenting their papers, the researchers responded to questions and comments from NCES staff and the public and participated in a discussion moderated by Jane Hannaway (Urban Institute). Mark Schneider (U.S. Commissioner of Education Statistics) made introductory remarks, and Jack Buckley (U.S. Deputy Commissioner of Education Statistics) made closing remarks.
The pages that follow include a summary of primary concerns and recommendations offered by the researchers, synopses of the papers with author contact information, and the symposium's agenda. More information is available by contacting John Ralph (Program Director, NCES Data Development Program) at john.ralph@ed.gov.
Schools and Staffing Survey
While the researchers recognized the contributions of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS)1 to understanding the current labor market for teachers, several argued that SASS asked too few questions per topic. Typically, SASS asks a "yes/no" question addressing the prevalence of a policy or issue, but does not ask enough follow-up questions to elicit important details that describe the policy or issue.
Suggested changes to SASS:
Other K-12 data structure concerns and suggestions
Sample more students per teacher:
More frequent assessments need to be conducted in longitudinal studies. Two-year gaps in assessment in the ECLS-K and high school longitudinal studies severely compromise efforts to link classroom-, or even school-related, conditions and practices with achievement.
There was interest in the incentive structures offered to teachers and in the mechanics of teacher movement within and across districts. Extant data sources can report on the extent to which teachers vary by qualifications and, to an extent, by quality across schools, but what affects the observed distribution of teachers? Specific ideas for expanded data include
There was also interest in
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)4 and the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B)5 could be used to help identify the supply and quality of potential teachers:
Designed from scratch, a new study of teacher supply and demand would focus on the match between teachers and schools.
Teacher data would include
School/district data would include
Structured in this way, the data would support direct analyses of supply and demand: How does the pool of applicants vary across school and districts? What characteristics of teachers do schools and districts value? What characteristics of schools and districts do teachers value?
The new Teacher Compensation Study (TCS), which is being piloted in spring 2007 by NCES, may provide a backbone for expanding into collecting data to answer such questions. TCS is designed to measure teacher salary and benefits, including how they vary by years of experience and training across schools and districts. Built on administrative records, TCS will collect teacher-by-teacher data on salary and other components of the compensation package along with teacher characteristics. If successful, TCS will be repeated on an annual basis and expanded to more states. This will allow researchers to determine how much movement there is between schools and school districts. Using these data, researchers should be able to gauge the role of salaries and benefits in these moves within states and map other characteristics onto schools and school districts allowing the identification, in more detail, of factors that affect the flow of teachers across schools and school districts.
Bill Hussar
Predicting the Number of Newly Hired Teachers in the United States to 2015-16
This paper examines projections for the number of newly hired teachers in the United States at the national level for the next decade. Projections of the number of newly hired teachers by public and private sector are presented. The paper is a follow-up to the NCES report Predicting the Need for Newly Hired Teachers in the United States to 2008-09 (Hussar 1999). As with that earlier report, the projections are produced using an algebraic model based on teacher demographic data from the 1999-2000 and 2003-04 Schools and Staffing Surveys (SASS) and 2000-01 and 2004-05 Teacher Follow-up Surveys (TFS). In addition to an updated set of projections for new teacher hires by sector, this paper also contains (1) a brief evaluation of the projections from the earlier report; (2) projections of the age distributions of teachers, by sector; (3) a discussion of the relationship of the total new teacher hires with the number of new teacher hires in the fields of mathematics and science; and (4) recommendations for the NCES projections program and future SASS and TFS collections. The model did reasonably well projecting the number of public school teachers needed in 2003-04 but did less well predicting the numbers needed in 1999-2000. The model consistently underestimated the number of private school teachers needed in 1999-2000 and 2003-04. It is important to note that these projections measure the demand for newly hired teachers and that it is assumed that the supply of newly hired teachers will equal the demand. Hence, the projections presented should not be interpreted as predicting teacher shortages.
Richard Ingersoll and David Perda
What the National Data Tell Us About the Teacher Shortage
Contemporary educational thought holds that one of the pivotal causes of inadequate school performance is the inability of schools to adequately staff classrooms with qualified teachers, especially in fields such as mathematics and science. Shortages of teachers, it is commonly believed, are at the root of these staffing problems, and these shortfalls are, in turn, thought to arise primarily from recent increases in teacher retirements and student enrollments. This analysis reexamines this view. This paper analyzes nationally representative data on the demand, supply, and turnover of teachers, focusing in particular on comparisons between mathematics, science and social studies teachers. Data are drawn from the 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey and three other datasets from approximately the same time period-the 2000-01 Teacher Follow-up Survey, the 1999-2000 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, and the 2000-01 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study. The analysis shows widespread school staffing problems. That is, many schools experience difficulties filling their classrooms with qualified candidates. Moreover, the severity of these problems varies across types of schools and fields. However, these school staffing problems are not primarily the result of shortfalls in the number of new teachers produced each year to replace retirees or meet increased demand from rising student populations. Although student enrollments are increasing, the demand for new teachers is primarily occasioned by turnover-teachers moving from or leaving their jobs at relatively high rates. Moreover, although teacher retirements are increasing, the overall amount of turnover accounted for by retirement is relatively minor when compared to that resulting from other causes, such as teacher job dissatisfaction and teachers seeking to pursue better jobs or other careers. The analysis reveals important differences across teaching fields. Mathematics and science teachers have about the same rates of turnover as do other teachers. However, unlike the case of social studies teachers, the education system does not enjoy an overwhelming surplus of newly prepared mathematics and science teaching candidates. The new supply of mathematics and science teachers in the pipeline is more than sufficient to cover the losses of teachers from retirement. However (and again, unlike social studies), the new supply of mathematics and science teachers in the pipeline alone is less able to cover losses from preretirement turnover-especially the high numbers tied to job dissatisfaction. In short, for mathematics and science there is a tighter balance between supply and demand than fields like social studies, leaving mathematics and science fields more vulnerable to the consequences of turnover.
Dan Goldhaber and Michael DeArmond
Teacher Characteristics, Workforce Policies, and the Search for Teacher Quality: Implications for Research and Data
This paper considers what the combination of urgency and elusiveness surrounding teacher quality implies for policy-relevant research and data collection. Overall, it makes two key points. First, the ongoing difficulty of identifying good proxies for teacher quality places a premium on data that allow researchers to measure quality directly, by looking at individual teacher performance. So far, only a few state data systems and a small number of datasets collected by NCES include the type and quantity of disaggregated, longitudinal information that makes this possible. Second, although it is important to continue to explore the relationship between individual characteristics and teacher quality, the clear difficulty of a priori distinguishing good teachers from bad ones strongly suggests a need to concentrate more research attention on understanding the relationship between workforce policies (e.g., compensation and human resource practices) and teacher quality. Such a focus requires both a particular data structure and new types of data, neither of which are widely available today.
Mark Ehlert and Michael Podgursky
Teacher Pensions and Retirement Behavior: How Teacher Pension Rules Affect Retention, Mobility, and Retirement
This paper examines late career mobility and retirement decisions for a cohort of mid-career Missouri public school teachers. Specifically, the paper follows a cohort of teachers whose combined age and experience totaled 45 or more years in fall 1991 through the 2005-06 school year. Like many public employee pensions, Missouri has a system that permits teachers to receive full benefits if the sum of their age and experience is at least 80 ("rule of 80"). Thus, the sum of age and experience for most of the teachers in this cohort will hit 80-full retirement eligibility-in the 16-year window studied. Traditional defined benefit pension systems provide teachers with a large annuity value on retirement. The accrual of this annuity value occurs over the teacher's entire worklife; however, the rate of accrual is highly nonlinear and backloaded, with most of the gain occurring in the final years prior to retirement. In addition, these pension systems have various rules that introduce kinks or discontinuities in the rate of accrual after 30 years. This paper explores the effect of these pension rules on retirement patterns, as well as general descriptive data on retirement patterns. Like many states, Missouri permits teachers to continue teaching part time while collecting benefits (e.g., deferred retirement option plans). Teachers can also retire from one pension system and begin teaching in another. The paper examines both types of behavior. The primary source of data for this study is administrative teacher records maintained by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. These records include data on teacher experience, demographics, teaching field, compensation, retirement, and workforce exit, as well as the employing school and district. The paper also compares teacher retirement data from the Missouri administrative records with data from the 2000-01 Teacher Follow-up Survey.
Michael Long (Michael.C.Long@macrointernational.com)
Teacher Dismissals: A Review of the Literature and Thoughts for the Future
A common perception among practitioners, policymakers, academics, and the public is that there are a large number of incompetent teachers in U.S. K-12 schools who, for whatever reason, retain their jobs. In fact, there has been very little formal research into the incidence of incompetence among teachers or the dismissal rate of these teachers. Estimates of the percentage of incompetent teachers range widely, from 5 percent to 15 percent, depending on the perspective of administrators surveyed and the definition of incompetence provided by the researcher. Studies of the frequency of public school dismissals have consistently found that significantly less than 1 percent of teachers are dismissed each year. Other, less formal methods of removing poor-performing teachers, such as transfers or "counseling" into retirement, may be more prevalent than dismissal itself. However, very few researchers have been able to measure the frequency of these methods. This paper begins with a review of the existing research on the incidence of teacher incompetence and the frequency of dismissals for poor performance. The paper also draws from qualitative research that the author has conducted with school administrators as part of the preparation for the 2007-08 administration of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). The paper then reviews the history of SASS items on teacher quality and dismissal and comments on the potential value of response data from these items. Finally, the paper provides thoughts on the measurement of the "dismissal gap"-that is, the difference between the number of teachers who are removed from schools and the number that administrators believe should be removed from schools. The paper outlines the missing pieces of data that are necessary to measure this gap and discusses the extent to which the 2007-08 SASS will provide these data. The paper also raises several policy issues that may develop if research of the "dismissal gap" is pursued more vigorously.
Jennifer Imazeki
The Distribution of Teacher Quality Across Schools
This study provides an overview of the distribution and mobility of teachers across schools, particularly within districts. The paper first summarizes the literature that shows that teacher quality is likely to be lower in schools with higher proportions of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The paper then synthesizes what we know-and do not know-about the factors that drive these inequities. Teachers' preferences and mobility choices within districts certainly explain much of the pattern, but less is known about the role of parents, unions, and school or district policies. We also know relatively little about the effectiveness of policies intended to reduce teacher quality gaps. The paper focuses primarily on the data and analysis needed to fill these gaps in our knowledge.
Steve Rivkin
Teacher Characteristics, Market Forces, and the Distribution of Teacher Quality Among Schools and Districts
This paper discusses the evidence on a number of teacher labor market factors, focusing on the methods and data used to identify specific relationships and how existing data weaknesses inhibit efforts to understand better the market forces of demand and supply that jointly determine the distribution of teacher quality. The paper begins with a review of evidence on the relationship between teacher value added and a series of teacher characteristics and on student outcome-based estimation of the distribution of teacher quality. Next it discusses evidence on the sorting of teachers among schools on the basis of salary, location, and student variables. This section both reviews existing research and presents results using administrative data on Texas public schools. The following section uses the Texas public school data to describe the impact of teacher transitions on the distribution of teacher quality, and the final section examines the evidence on administrator evaluations of teacher quality. Unfortunately, existing data weaknesses limit the understanding of certain aspects of teacher labor markets. Of particular importance are the dual roles of administrator decisionmaking and teacher choices on the distribution of teacher quality. On the one hand, large administrative datasets contain abundant information on students and teachers but lack information on the choice processes that underlie teacher transition decisions; on the other hand, the far smaller sets of surveys cannot track teachers or measure the effectiveness on the basis of student performance. This could be a particularly fruitful area for NCES to focus additional data collection efforts.
1 SASS collects data on schools and staffing in U.S. public, private, and Bureau of Indian Affairs/tribal schools. The survey includes four core components: the School Questionnaire, the Teacher Questionnaire, the Principal Questionnaire, and the School District Questionnaire. Data collected address teacher demand and shortage, teacher and administrator characteristics, school programs, general conditions in schools, principals' and teachers' perceptions of the school climate and problems in their schools, teacher compensation, district hiring practices, and basic characteristics of the student population, as well as other topics. More information is available at http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/.
2 FRSS is designed to serve the data needs of Department of Education analysts, planners, and decisionmakers when information cannot be collected quickly through NCES's large recurring surveys. Data are collected from state education agencies and national samples of other education organizations and participants, including local education agencies, public and private elementary and secondary schools, elementary and secondary school teachers and principals, and public libraries and school libraries. To ensure minimal burden on respondents, FRSS surveys are generally limited to three pages of questions, with a response burden of about 30 minutes per respondent. Sample sizes are relatively small (usually 1,000 to 1,500 respondents per survey) so that data collection can be completed quickly. More information on FRSS is available at http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/.
3 The ECLS-K is an ongoing study that focuses on children's early school experiences beginning with kindergarten and following them through middle school. The ECLS-K provides descriptive information on children's status at entry into school, their transition into school, and their progression through eighth grade. More information is available at http://nces.ed.gov/ecls/kindergarten.asp.
4 IPEDS is NCES's core postsecondary education data collection program. Data are collected from all primary providers of postsecondary education in the country in such areas as enrollments, program completions, graduation rates, faculty, staff, finances, institutional prices, and student financial aid. These data are made available on the NCES website to students, researchers and others: http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/.
5 B&B provides information on education and work experiences after completion of the bachelor's degree. B&B provides both cross-sectional information 1 year after bachelor's degree completion, comparable to that provided by the Recent College Graduate (RCG) Survey, and longitudinal data concerning entry into and progress through graduate-level education and the workforce. A special emphasis of B&B is on those entering teaching. More information is available at: http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/b&b/.
