All politics are local, and so are all teacher labor markets.
National data on staff shortages don’t do much to help school and district leaders get a clear picture of their local prospects for hiring teachers.
But new research provides clues about how to think more holistically about local teacher labor markets—and what factors might be enticing for teachers. Taken together, they suggest that district and school leaders should take into account teachers’ starting salaries, long-term financial goals, job flexibility, and families when designing teacher-staffing strategies.
Here are four forthcoming studies to know about on teacher staffing. All were presented at a conference held last November by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management in Washington.
1. Does it pay to stay?
A teacher’s starting pay can have long-term consequences.
Using administrative data from public schools linked to federal tax records, Quentin Brummet, a principal research methodologist at NORC, an education research center at the at the University of Chicago, tracked 6,200 Oregon teachers who started their careers between 2007 and 2011.
He found the highest-paid quartile of those new teachers earned as much as $40,000 more per year than those in the bottom 25 percent of pay—and those initial gaps largely persisted over the next five years unless the teacher left for a higher-paying district, or left the state entirely. That means that starting salary is a powerful indicator of later earnings, and those who start behind are unlikely to catch up unless they leave their jobs.
Brummet found relationships between salaries and attrition, too. Among teachers who started out earning in the bottom 25 percent of salaries, Brummet found, “five years later they’re much less likely teaching at the same school—and they’re also less likely to be employed at all,” even outside of education.
Brummet found lower-paid beginning teachers with higher-earning spouses were also more likely to leave their schools.
2. Working conditions have continued to fall since the pandemic
Another forthcoming study suggests that teacher working conditions not only haven’t improved since the pandemic, but may be deteriorating faster than before the disruption—at least in one state.
Sofia Baker, an education researcher at the University of Missouri, analyzed pre- and post-pandemic data from Illinois 5Essentials, a survey given to all public school teachers in the state. It asks teachers about five areas considered key to school success, including their sense of whether they have effective leaders, the degree of teacher collaboration and family involvement, whether schools are safe and orderly, and whether their instruction is ambitious.
On average, Illinois teachers said they considered their working conditions similar or improving from 2017-18 to 2018-19 compared with previous years, and experienced a significant drop during the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years. But after that, “instead of rebounding in the post-pandemic period, we show that teacher working conditions have continued to decline” faster since 2021, she said.
3. Evolution of for-profit, contract teachers
Teacher shortages have spurred more school districts nationwide to partner with for-profit agencies to fill teacher vacancies. A study of Washington teacher staffing suggests the profile of teachers hired through these private contracts may be diverging from that of traditional teachers.
Contract teachers are employed by a third party such as a staffing agency instead of an individual district, and they may work different times and hours, and at significantly lower pay, than traditional teachers.
In an analysis of state labor and administrative data, Vanderbilt University researcher Angela Cox found teachers working under a private contract have both increased in the past quarter-century and make up a rising share of all teachers in the state. But the profile of a teacher working under private contract has changed in the last decade.
“What’s resonating with us is the new definition of a profession,” Cox said. “I consider it a reframing of the nature of teaching and the assumption that teachers are dependent on their relationship with organizations and school systems.”
The average Washington teacher working under a private contract in 2022 had significantly less experience, education, and pay than their peers working under a traditional district contract, and those gaps have widened in the decade before. The average contract teacher in districts that used them had two to three fewer years’ experience than a traditional teacher in 2011, but by 2022, this gap had grown: Traditional teachers had more than eight years’ more experience than contract teachers on average.
A similar gap has widened in teacher education. While the share of traditional teachers in the state with at least a master’s degree grew 8 percentage points, to 74 percent, from 2011 to 2022, the share of contract teachers with advanced degrees has grown only 6 percentage points, to 66 percent.
Districts have a financial incentive to use private agency contracts, however. The study found in 2022, contract teachers in districts that used them earned on average just over $42,000 a year, compared to more than $78,500 for teachers under a traditional contract. The pay gap between traditional and contract teachers has grown by more than $25,000 since 2011.
These teachers, Cox said, may be developing careers similar to contract nurses, in which they focus on temporary placements and may or may not stay in teaching.
4. Gaps in district attrition increase staffing pressure
Hiring teachers is only half of the equation—the other half is hanging on to them. Districts have always competed with their neighbors for the best teachers, and the pandemic may have increased this churn.
Joshua Bleiberg, an assistant professor of education policy at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education, and Tuan Nguyen of the University of Kansas, are modeling ways to predict how teacher salaries and local economic conditions will affect teacher attrition across districts. They analyzed local teacher attrition in every district across 40 states from 2016 to 2021, as well as 33 states in 2021-22 and three in 2022-23, along with data on teacher salaries, and federal and county-level economic data.
While teacher attrition dropped in the first year of the pandemic, by 2021-22, more than 11 percent of teachers left their schools—the highest attrition since 1999. While the researchers predict teacher attrition is stabilizing, the gaps between districts remain bigger, Bleiberg said.
