Opportunity Wages, Classroom Characteristics, and Teacher Mobility

By Li Feng. Southern Economic Journal, 2009

120 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article analyzes the impact of classroom characteristics and opportunity wages on four possible labor market choices of teachers in Florida: remaining at their present school, switching schools within a school district, changing school districts, and leaving teaching. Discrete-time multinomial-logit-hazard model estimates indicate that classroom characteristics play a larger role than school average student characteristics in determining teacher mobility. Opportunity wages based on past teacher movements to other competing districts and professions are found to pull teachers away from their initial placements. Once opportunity wages and working conditions are considered, teachers’ own salaries are found to exert little impact on teacher mobility within the profession; although, they reduce attrition out of the profession. Policy simulations indicate that targeted salary increases based on teacher-specific working conditions are important to retain teachers at a given school.

Subfields: Education

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Citations in the corpus

The Role of Teacher Quality in Retention and Hiring: Using Applications-to-Transfer to Uncover Preferences of Teachers and Schools. NBER Working Paper No. 15966. (2010, unknown): “20 Feng (2009), for example, finds evidence that classroom characteristics, like disciplinary incidents, indeed may influence teacher mobility.”
Teacher training, teacher quality and student achievement (2011, background): “The second meaning, which we use here, is simply the teacher’s marginal product with respect to student achievement. estimating achievement gain models with student-level panel data that use student fixed effects or take advantage of random assignment to control for unobserved student heterogeneity.”
Teacher Quality and Teacher Mobility (2012, unknown): “UWRG Working Papers Usery Workplace Research Group 2-2-2012”
The association between teaching students with disabilities and teacher turnover. (2020, background): “, 2014), and research suggesting that problem behavior is associated with general education teacher turnover (Feng, 2009).”
The Impact of Incentives to Recruit and Retain Teachers in “Hard‐to‐Staff” Subjects (2015, background): “…affluent backgrounds and avoid schools serving primarily minority students, low-achieving students, and students with disciplinary problems (Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2002; Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2004; Boyd, et al., 2005; Imazeki, 2005; Scafidi, Sjoquist, & Stinebrickner, 2007; Feng, 2009).”
Pre-Service Teacher Training in Classroom Management (2014, background): “…(Chesley & Jordan, 2012; Stough, 2006), and difficulty with this contributes to the attrition of teachers from the field (Boyd et al., 2011; Feng, 2009; Henke et al., 2001; Ingersoll, 2001; Johnson & Birkeland, 2003; Kukla-Acevedo, 2009; Luekens et al., 2004; Torres, 2012; Zabel & Zabel,…”
Toward a More Nuanced Understanding of New Teacher Attrition (2011, background): “…across districts, other studies have found that teachers who start their careers in higher-poverty schools or in schools with higher percentages of minority students are more likely to leave their initial school (Boyd et al., 2005; Feng, 2006, 2009; Goldhaber et al., 2007; Scafidi et al., 2007).”
Teacher Career Paths, Teacher Quality, and Persistence in the Classroom: Are Public Schools Keeping Their Best? CEDR Working Paper No. 2010-2.0. (2011, background): “2 A significant amount of research shows that teachers are sensitive to working conditions (Feng, 2009; Ingersoll & Smith, 2003), which to some extent can be proxied by the attributes of their students (Goldhaber, Destler, & Player, 2010; Guarino, Santibanez, & Daley, 2006; Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin,”
Where Should Student Teachers Learn to Teach? (2012, background): “There is no consensus in the literature about what is meant by “difficult-to-staff” and “underserved” schools, or how to measure these kinds of schools (Feng, 2009). As prior literature has shown, schools with higher teacher turnover tend also to have higher proportions of poor, minority, and low-ac”