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

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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.