The research will examine how student achievement and teacher retention are affected by various characteristics of schools and teachers, with particular attention paid to school working conditions and teacher professional development. The analysis will employ rich data for middle-school students, teachers, and schools in New York City. This research builds on prior work by Boyd, Grossman, Lankford, Loeb and Wyckoff that developed the core data and examined the effects of teacher preparation on student achievement and teacher retention during the first two years of teaching. This research augments that database with additional information on teachers over their first five years of teaching and the students they teach.
The data includes detailed administrative data for over 600,000 math achievement tests for students, socio-demographic data for the students and their peers, detailed information characterizing the backgrounds, qualifications and career histories of math and science teachers as well as the schools in which they teach. Based upon data from three surveys, this administrative data is augmented with extensive information on school working conditions and the professional development that teachers receive, as well as information about the professional activities of teachers who no longer teach in New York City.
These data will be employed to estimate value-added models of student-level math achievement and teacher retention. The achievement models will isolate the effects of working conditions and professional development on the achievement gains for middle-school mathematics students. Employing detailed information on the career histories of middle-school math and science teachers, the retention models will examine the effects of working conditions and professional development.
The intellectual merit of this research flows from its comprehensive approach and use of detailed data to examine major unresolved questions concerned with improving math achievement and the retention of math and science teachers. To date, there is limited rigorous research that examines the roles of either particular working conditions or professional development with respect to these two important outcomes.
The broader impact of the research flows from the project's ability to examine questions of national importance with important support of policymakers from the state and the largest school district in the U.S. The results of this research will provide useful guidance to local, state and national policy.
