Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Teacher licensure is a regime where schools are forbidden from hiring teachers who have not completed a program of study in a teacher education program and/or other preparation requirements. This paper specifies a theoretical model of a school hiring teachers who are either traditional—completed a program of study in a teacher education program or alternative—entered teaching through an alternative path. We combine the implications of the theoretical model with the empirical literature on teacher labor markets to reach conclusions about how labor market policies would impact teacher quality. Perhaps the most important conclusion is that it is very likely that a regime of teacher licensure would lower teacher quality and student achievement. The key reason why licensure would lower teacher quality is that licensure fails to make the important distinction between marginal and average quality in hiring decisions.

The paper provides evidence on the neighbourhood contact hypothesis, which states that interracial neighbourhood contact acts to break down prejudice. Contact, therefore, may result in stable racially integrated neighbourhoods. By exploiting unique features of new data from the Multicity Study of Urban Inequality, our estimates are the first to account directly for the endogeneity of contact. Results indicate that neighbourhood contact affects Whites' attitudes towards Black neighbours only if this contact is with Blacks of the same or higher social status. Blacks' attitudes towards White neighbours, on the other hand, are affected by neighbourhood contact regardless of the relative social status of participating Whites, although the effect is twice as strong if the contact is with Whites of equal or higher status.

We employ an empirical approach designed to control for selection issues to estimate the effect of taking Advanced Placement (AP) Economics in high school on student performance on a high-stakes, statewide End-of-Course Test (EOCT). Using data on all Georgia students who took economics from 2006 to 2008, we use propensity score matching to control for the selection of students into AP Economics. Our most conservative estimate makes an adjustment for teacher effects and suggests that students who take high school economics in an AP class score 0.283 standard deviations higher on the economics EOCT than "matched" students who are in high schools that do not offer AP Economics. We find large differences in "AP effects" across subpopulations—in particular, students from low income backgrounds, African Americans, and students who performed poorly in prior mathematics courses benefit the most from AP Economics. All estimates of AP effects are substantially below OLS estimates, suggesting positive selection into AP Economics. The results are robust to different matching techniques for the full sample and all large and medium sized subpopulations. After controlling for teacher effects, the choice of schools as to whether or not to offer AP Economics does not appear to impact estimates of AP effects.

Abstract
There is a common perception that teacher attrition is driven in large part by the allure of higher paying jobs in alternative occupations. However, little is known about what teachers do when they leave teaching. We examine the extent to which teachers leave teaching for higher paying jobs by merging several years of administrative teacher records from the education system in Georgia with salary information from the Georgia Department of Labor. We find strong evidence that very few of those who leave teaching take jobs that pay more than their salary as teachers.