Educators raise concerns about what happens to students when they are exposed to new or new-to-school teachers. However, even when teachers remain in the same school they can switch roles by moving grades and/or subjects. We use panel data from New York City to compare four ways in which teachers are new to assignment: new to teaching, new to…

Tenure is intended to protect teachers with demonstrated teaching skills against arbitrary or capricious dismissal. Critics of typical tenure processes argue that tenure assessments are superficial and rarely discern whether teachers in fact have the requisite teaching skills. A recent reform of the tenure process in New York City provides an…

The relatively low status of teaching as a profession is often given as a factor contributing to the difficulty of recruiting teachers, the middling performance of American students on international assessments, and the well-documented decline in the relative academic ability of teachers through the 1990s. Since the turn of the 21st century,…

This paper describes teacher tenure reforms first enacted by the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) during the 2009-10 academic year (AY) and the changes in the district's teacher workforce following the reforms. We show that the reforms dramatically changed the proportion of eligible teachers receiving tenure, as well as the career…

Measures of teachers' "value added" to student achievement play an increasingly central role in k-12 teacher policy and practice, in part because they have been shown to predict teachers' long-term impacts on students' life outcomes. However, little research has examined variation in the long-term effects of teachers with similar…

This report addresses the comparison of teacher evaluation systems in the context of a particular administrative and legislative challenge: How a state or the federal government could achieve a uniform standard for dispensing funds to school districts for the recognition of exceptional teachers without imposing a uniform evaluation system on those…

The capacity of the nation's public schools to recruit and retain highly skilled teachers is a perennial concern of policy makers and school leaders. Over the past two decades, major policy strategies including the federal No Child Left Behind Act and alternative pathways to teaching, as well as changes in the broader labor market, have altered…

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 students and teachers in grades 3-8, this study assesses the effects of pathways into teaching in New York City on the teacher workforce and on student achievement. We ask…