John Krieg

A Foot in the Door Exploring the Role of Student Teaching Assignments in Teachers’ Initial Job Placements

We use data from Washington State to examine two stages of the teacher pipeline: the placement of prospective teachers into student teaching assignments and the hiring of prospective teachers into their first teaching positions. We find that prospective teachers are likely to complete their student teaching near their college and hometowns but that prospective teachers’ student teaching positions are much more predictive of their first teaching positions than their hometowns. This suggests that student teaching assignments may contribute to the “draw of home” in new teacher hiring. We also find that more qualified prospective teachers tend to student teach in more advantaged districts, suggesting that patterns in student teaching assignments may contribute to the inequitable distribution of teacher quality.

Collective Bargaining and Faculty Job Satisfaction

Estimates of the impact of union membership on job satisfaction suffer from nonrandom self‐selection of employees into unions. In this paper, we circumvent this problem by examining the impact on satisfaction of collective bargaining representation, rather than of union membership. We use a two‐stage technique that controls for nonrandom selection of faculty into institutions, and apply that to a panel of faculty at repeatedly observed four‐year universities. We find that bargaining agreements increase satisfaction with compensation but reduce satisfaction with faculty workload. Bargaining has no statistically measurable impact on overall job satisfaction or on facultys satisfaction with their authority to make decisions regarding their instructional duties.

Refueling the STEM and Special Education Teacher Pipelines.

Improving the quality of the teacher workforce is high on the nation’s education policy agenda, but school systems continue to face difficulties in staffing STEM and special education classrooms with qualified teachers. This article documents the mismatch between the supply and demand of STEM and special education teachers in Washington State, where almost 4,000 more STEM and special education teachers have left the profession than have been produced by in-state teacher training institutions over the past 25 years. There are a number of potential solutions to this problem, including differential pay systems, reduced barriers to entry, and incentives for teacher training institutions.