Early Career Teaching Supports, Instructional Growth, and Employment Decisions

Abstract

This three-paper dissertation studies the relationship between teaching supports and early-career teachers’ instructional growth and employment decisions, including to migrate schools or leave teaching. Using extensive survey and administrative data, I develop latent measures for teaching supports that I use to explore their relationships with measures of early-career teachers' instructional effectiveness and employment decisions.

In Paper 1, I analyze the associations among the instructional support measures and instructional effectiveness. I find that reporting higher levels of teaching supports are associated with faster improvement in observation ratings but not teacher value-added measures. Professional learning & development supports and evaluative feedback have stronger associations with growth than the other types of supports. Working conditions have the lowest among them. Early career teachers who report teaching supports one standard deviation above the average become eligible for tenure one year sooner than their peers (three vs. four years on average). These results suggest that high levels of teaching supports, particularly ones that are sustained over many years and targeting early career teachers, have promise for supporting instructional improvement.

In Paper 2, I study which teaching supports for early career teachers relate to early career teachers' employment decisions, including moving schools, moving districts, or leaving teaching. Furthermore, I study the extent to which the relationships between teaching supports and employment decisions is influenced by changes in instructional effectiveness. I find that, while teaching supports are associated with reductions in all forms of turnover, the magnitudes are greatest regarding leaving the profession and moving districts as compared with migrating schools within the same district. Improvement in instructional effectiveness due to teaching supports mediates about twenty percent of this relationship. These results suggest that investment in teaching supports improves teacher retention, both though direct effects on teachers' employment decisions and instructional improvement that results in greater teacher retention.

In Paper 3, I describe the development of the teaching supports measures and assess their variation across different kinds of teachers, schools, and districts. I find that my measures of teaching supports have adequate psychometric properties. More within-school rather than between-school variation in terms of average teaching supports offered to teachers, as I observe the majority of variation in teaching supports between-teachers within the same school. Finally, some variation in these scores along teacher and school characteristics. Teachers in their first three years of teaching report higher levels of teaching supports than more experienced teachers while STEM teachers and teachers working in schools that have larger enrollment or that serve more students eligible for free or reduced price lunch report lower level of supports than other teachers.

This dissertation informs both policy decisions around beginning teachers and opens new directions for future research. My results suggest that early career teachers should receive high levels of teaching supports sustained for at least three years in order to be able to observe substantive returns. Programs aimed to support early career teachers might have the best chance for success when they are implemented by school districts or state-wide rather than at the school level. Given that teaching supports are more strongly associated with reduction in leaving the profession and migrating districts than migrating schools within districts, state and district leaders are more likely than school leaders to benefit from investment in teaching supports.