Essays on teacher preferences, teacher quality, and teacher expectations [electronic resource]

In the 3 papers that make up this dissertation, I address questions whose findings are directly relevant to education policy debates about school improvement and the personnel management of a large labor market. In paper 1, I use data on teacher transfer requests in New York City to create a novel measure of school desirability. Pooling across boroughs, I find that student body characteristics, test scores, and school climate measures explain about 20 percent of the true variation in school desirability. The percentage of free and reduced price lunch eligible students is the most important predictor of desirability, and school climate measures do little to explain desirability above and beyond student demographics. However, I do show that there are a number of schools serving high proportions of disadvantaged students that are more desirable to teachers than the average school serving low proportions of disadvantaged students. In other words, there are a number of schools that teachers find attractive despite what we would predict based on observable characteristics. Identifying and learning from these schools is a first step towards ameliorating inequitable access to good teachers. In papers 2 and 3, I investigate whether teachers are differentially influential in different subjects or with different students. In paper 2, I ask whether elementary school teachers in Miami-Dade County Public Schools are similarly effective at raising achievement with different students and different subjects. The answer to both questions is yes, though there are bigger differences between subjects. I carry out a thought experiment whereby teachers in my dataset are assigned to subjects based on their comparative advantage within their school and grade, and the result is a small increase in average achievement. I also provide a general mathematical derivation of the expected achievement gains due to subject specialization which are a function of the variance of the teacher effects in each subject, the cross-subject correlation between the teacher effects, and the reliability of the teacher effect estimates. Lastly, paper 3 contributes to a mixed literature on the effects of sex and race congruence between students and teachers. Using The Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002, I investigate whether having a same-sex or a same-race teacher impacts teacher recommendations for advanced courses and expectations for educational attainment. I use a first difference approach to implement a student fixed effects model that compares how two different teachers assess the same student. I find no effects on either outcome for the full sample, but I do find large positive effects for black students who are assigned a same-race teacher on expectations to complete more than high school. The magnitude of this same-race effect is more than half of the black-white gap in teacher expectations. Taken together, these three papers provide policy makers and education sector managers evidence on various aspects of the teacher labor market and school personnel decisions that are influential in shaping students' educational opportunities and trajectories.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Reardon Sean F. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Dee Thomas S. (Thomas Sean) advisor. Thesis advisor
Loeb Susanna advisor. Thesis advisor