We use 35 years of data on public school teachers in Washington to calculate several different measures of teacher attrition and mobility. We explore how these rates vary over time and their relationship with the state unemployment rate. Annual rates of teacher attrition from the workforce have been between 5% and 8% for each of the past 35 years,…

Numerous stories raise concerns that as the pandemic ends, there might be a rash of public school teachers that opt to leave teaching. Will a recovering economy combined with an extremely challenging school year lead to very high levels of teacher attrition just when school recovery efforts are kicking into high gear? Of course, it is too soon to…

We contextualize the magnitude of teacher attrition during the pandemic, including from the 2020-2021 school year to the 2021-2022 school year, using longitudinal data on teachers in Washington since the 1984-1985 school year. The teacher attrition rate after the 2020-2021 school year (7.3%) increased by almost one percentage point from the…

In many school districts, the policies that regulate teaching personnel are governed by collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). While there is significant policy attention that has affected the scope of these agreements, there is relatively little research on how CBAs vary over time, or whether they change in response to states' legislative…

We use data on over 14,000 teacher candidates in Washington state, merged with employment data from the state's public schools and Unemployment Insurance system, to investigate the career paths and earnings of teacher candidates in the state. Around 75% of candidates are employed in some education position in each of the 5 years after student…

Prior research has connected characteristics of cooperating teachers who supervise student teaching to performance measures of the teacher candidates they host, suggesting more effective teachers may also be better mentors. The specific measures of cooperating teacher effectiveness considered in this prior literature (value added and performance…

We use data on over 14,000 teacher candidates in Washington state, merged with employment data from the state's public schools and Unemployment Insurance system, to investigate the career paths and earnings of teacher candidates in the state. Around 75% of candidates are employed in some education position in each of the 5 years after student…

The overwhelming majority of public school teachers enter the teaching profession only after completing an apprenticeship as a student teacher. A growing body of research demonstrates how important the student teaching experience, also known as clinical practice, is for developing teaching capacities and shaping teacher career paths. But recent…

We use data on over 14,000 teacher candidates in Washington state, merged with employment data from the state's public schools and Unemployment Insurance system, to investigate the career paths of recently certified teacher candidates in the state. About two thirds of these candidates are observed as public school teachers at some point within 5…

Over the last few months, media outlets including Axios, CNN, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal have raised the specter that there may be a rise in teachers exiting the profession. The concern is that a post-pandemic private sector boom, combined with relatively low teacher pay and burnout from online teaching, are a combustible mix…

As school districts face ongoing and, in some cases, worsening staffing challenges, policymakers often lack the timely information to make key decisions to address these challenges, as administrative data is usually available too late to inform policy debates or decision making. We summarize research that uses teacher job postings data from public…

We use a novel database of over 15,000 teacher candidates from 15 teacher education programs in Washington state to investigate the connections between specific teacher preparation experiences (e.g., endorsements, licensure test scores, and student teaching placements) and the likelihood that these candidates enter and leave the state's public…

A growing quantitative literature finds evidence that student teaching placements predict later outcomes of teacher candidates and their students, but there is little large-scale quantitative evidence about the mechanisms for these estimated relationships. We use data from a survey of STEM teachers in Washington State to better understand how…

We use data on the teacher preparation experiences and workforce outcomes of more than 1,300 graduates of special education teacher education programs in Washington to provide a descriptive portrait of special education teacher preparation, workforce entry, and early career retention. We find high rates of workforce entry for special education…

We use longitudinal data from Washington State to provide estimates of the extent to which performance on the edTPA, a performance-based, subject-specific assessment of teacher candidates, is predictive of the likelihood of employment in the teacher workforce and value-added measures of teacher effectiveness. While edTPA scores are highly…