Building Capacity for Interdisciplinary Analysis of Longitudinal Data for Education Policy Research: Understanding Science and Math Teacher Labor Market Pipelines

对具有数学和科学技能的工人的需求的增长给 K-12 教育带来了竞争性的挑战。学校预计会为科学、技术、工程和数学 (STEM) 行业培养一批新的、更加多元化的领导者，而接受过数学和科学培训的教师在私营部门中越来越有价值。教师短缺，主要是在数学和科学领域，通常需要学校领导用不合格的教师来填补职位。关于这个问题的研究有限，因为将教师与学生个体联系起来或将教师劳动力市场与非教师劳动力市场联系起来的纵向数据有限。因此，州和地区的政策制定者往往缺乏必要的证据来说明如何改革教师劳动力市场政策，以减少地区和特定学科的短缺，并改善学生接触高素质教育工作者的机会。德克萨斯大学埃尔帕索分校 (UTEP) 将通过利用大规模纵向学生水平数据集来开发该领域的跨学科研究专业知识。该项目的总体目标是为下一代教育数据密集型研究开发和链接数据库，并在 UTEP 建立一个跨学科的学者社区，在未来的研究中继续分析这些数据集。该研究项目将探索数学和科学教师管道的三个阶段：（a）通过预备课程或替代认证进入教师候选人； (b) 将目前雇用的教师分配到教室，以及随后将其转移到其他学校和地区； (c) 退出教学劳动力市场并进入非教学教育职位或私营部门就业。这些分析得益于德克萨斯州私营部门雇员的数据，这些数据可以链接到多个纵向学生和教师级别的数据集，涵盖 20 多年的时间，每年覆盖 25 万名教师和超过 500 万学生。构成本研究基础的研究主题是：(a) 教师供应、短缺和教师准备渠道； (b) 为历史上服务不足的学生提供有效的教师； (c) 导致教师流失的因素。该研究的结果将引起政策制定者和学术界的极大兴趣。

Growth in the demand for workers with math and science skills places competing challenges for K-12 education. Schools are expected to prepare a new and more diverse group of leaders for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) industries, yet teachers with math and science training are increasingly valuable in the private sector. Teacher shortages, primarily in the fields of math and science, often require school leaders to fill positions with under-qualified teachers. Research is limited on this problem because there is limited longitudinal data linking teachers to individual students or linking teacher labor markets to non-teacher labor markets. As a result, state and district policymakers often lack necessary evidence on how to reform teacher labor market policies in ways that both reduce regional and subject-specific shortages and improve students' access to highly-qualified educators. The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) will develop interdisciplinary research expertise in this area by drawing on large scale longitudinal student-level datasets. The project's overarching goals are to develop and link databases for next-generation data-intensive research in education and to build an interdisciplinary community of scholars at UTEP that will continue to analyze these datasets in future research.The research project will explore three stages of the math and science teacher pipeline: (a) entrance of teacher candidates through preparation programs or alternative certification; (b) assignment of currently employed teachers to classrooms, and their later transfers to other schools and districts; and (c) exit out of the teaching labor market and into non-teaching educational positions or private sector employment. These analyses are facilitated by data on private sector employees in Texas that can be linked to multiple longitudinal student- and teacher-level datasets covering 250,000 teachers and over five million students each year for more than a 20-year period. The research topics that form the basis of this study are: (a) teacher supply, shortages, and the teacher preparation pipeline; (b) access to effective teachers for historically underserved students; and (c) factors leading to teacher attrition. Findings from the study will be of substantial interest to policymakers as well as the academic community.