IMPACT OF WORK LIFE BALANCE OF TEACHERS DURING COVID 19 PANDEMIC ON TEACHER DEMAND AND SUPPLY

In a post pandemic Covid-19 school environment, it requires immense struggle for teachers to establish Work Life Balance. It is also high time to redefine the forces of demand and supply in teacher labor market in the light of new normal paradigm shifts in school organizational make up. The present paper analyses various factors affecting Work Life Balance and latest trends in teacher labor market. In a completely changed academic environment which was resulted in Work Life Conflicts, teacher demand and supply has taken new shapes and structures. A mixed method approach was adopted to conduct the study using interview schedule and questionnaire.100 teachers working in government, aided and private schools in Kerala and 30 academic administrators constitute the sample. The results showed that there are significant changes in Work Life Balance and those changes influenced the characteristics of key determinants in teacher labor market.

From Teacher Improvement to Teacher Turnover: Unintended Consequences of School Reform in Quincy, Massachusetts, 1872–1893

The “Quincy Method” is widely considered a successful nineteenth-century school reform. Pioneered by Francis Parker in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1875, it fostered broad pedagogic change in an ordinary school system, transforming Quincy into a renowned hub of child-centered instruction. This article revisits the reform and explores its interaction with the Massachusetts teacher labor market. In a market characterized by low wages and an oversupply of teachers but few experienced, well-trained ones, teachers used Quincy's reform to obtain higher-paying, higher-status positions while municipalities used it to recruit competent applicants. Both practices jeopardized Quincy's cohesive system. Though the ensuing turnover may have brought progressive pedagogies to the mainstream, departing teachers frequently assumed positions outside public schools or in systems ill-structured to maintain their expertise. Accordingly, the article probes a celebrated reform's unintended consequences and contributes to scholarship on nineteenth-century progressive school reforms and women teachers.

Former Teachers: Exits and Re-Entries

Despite the large literature on teacher labor market in the United States, only few studies have examined the career choices of former teachers and the factors that affect their decisions to return to the profession. This is surprising given that former teachers represent over a third of teachers entering the teaching workforce, according to some estimates. This paper examines the exit and re-entry decisions of former teachers using a restricted-use data from the Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study (BTLS). We use a discrete time hazard model that estimates the probability that a former teacher returns to teaching in a given year conditional on not having returned in the previous year. Results suggest that female teachers are more likely to return to the teaching profession by somewhere between 10 and 12 percentage points. We also find that teachers who are highly paid are more likely to re-enter teaching.

The Impact of Teacher Labor Market Reforms on Student Achievement: Evidence from Michigan

Over the past decade, many states enacted substantial reforms to teacher-related laws and policies. In Michigan, the state legislature implemented requirements for teacher evaluation based partly on student achievement, reduced tenure protections, and restricted the scope of teacher collective bargaining. Some teacher advocates view such reform as a “war on teachers,” but proponents argue these policies may have enabled personnel decisions that positively impact student performance. Evidence on this debate remains limited. In this study, we use detailed administrative data from all Michigan traditional public schools from 2005-06 to 2014-15. We estimate event study models exploiting the plausibly exogenous timing of collective bargaining agreement expirations. Across a variety of samples and specification checks, we find these reforms had generally null results, with some evidence of heterogeneity by cohort. We investigate several possible mechanisms and conclude that districts with more restrictive teacher contracts prior to reform and districts with more rigorous use of teacher evaluations experienced more positive impacts after reform exposure.

Race, Climate, and Turnover: An Examination of the Teacher Labor Market in Rural Georgia

Teacher turnover across the country presents a persistent and growing challenge for schools and districts, with the highest rates of turnover geographically concentrated in the American South. Research on teacher staffing and turnover problems consistently highlight two subsets of schools as struggling to attract and retain well-credentialed, effective educators—predominantly Black schools and rural schools. However, research has rarely explicitly examined the schools that meet both these criteria. We use administrative records and unique climate survey data from Georgia to examine how the intersecting roles of race, money, and school climate shape evolving teacher turnover patterns in rural schools. Findings suggest that while teacher mobility is generally less common in rural schools, considerable inequities exist within the rural space, with majority Black rural schools bearing far more of the brunt of rural teacher turnover. Among rural teachers, Black teachers have higher mobility rates—more likely to make interdistrict moves and to exit rural settings for teaching opportunities in urban and suburban contexts. However, in majority-Black rural schools, higher salaries and school climate factors, such as relational climate and parental involvement, were strong predictors of retention, even after controlling for a rich set of covariates.

Examining the Teacher Labor Market in Different Rural Contexts: Variations by Urbanicity and Rural States

Using repeated cross-sectional nationally representative data, we demonstrate how the teacher labor markets for rural contexts are different from those in urban-suburban areas. We also show that teacher attrition is not uniform across various rural settings. In particular, novice teachers in rural schools in sparsely populated states are more likely to turn over than novice teachers in urban-suburban schools in sparsely populated states. We also examine how teacher and school characteristics are associated with turnover in different rural contexts. The findings indicate there should be a concerted effort to examine teacher attrition in various rural contexts and not simply as delineation from urban-suburban areas.

The effect of school closings on teacher labor market outcomes and teacher effectiveness

School closings displace thousands of teachers in the U.S. every year. This paper explores how elementary school teachers in North Carolina respond to this labor market shock. After documenting that declining enrollment is a key driver of school closings in our study, we find that while most displaced teachers move to new schools in the same district, a considerable share leave public education altogether. We find that the increase in the propensity to leave teaching is largest for experienced teachers. It is also marginally larger for the highest and lowest value-added teachers compared to teachers in the middle of the value-added distribution, and, strikingly, twice as large for black teachers than white teachers even from the same closing school. Moving schools after a school closing has no impact on teacher effectiveness as measured by value-added. Although the primary goal of school closings is typically to move students out of declining or failing schools, school closings also affect the overall distributions of important teacher characteristics such as experience, race, and effectiveness in raising test scores.

The Effect of School Closures on Teacher Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence From Texas

Recent scholarship has highlighted the phenomenon of urban public school closures and their effects on student academic outcomes. However, we know little about the broader impact of closures, particularly on teachers who are also displaced by closure. We assess labor market outcomes for over 15,000 teachers in nearly 700 Texas schools displaced by closure between 2003 and 2015. Using a unique administrative data set, we find that closures were associated with an increased likelihood of teachers leaving teaching as well as changing school districts. Notably, teachers in charters that closed were particularly likely to leave. In addition, closures appear to push out senior teachers and worsen the already substantial underrepresentation of Black teachers.

Teacher Labor Market Reforms: A Look Ahead to the Next Decade

This chapter outlines recent reforms to the teaching profession, and discuss where and how future policy change is likely to occur. It focuses on teacher evaluation, job security, compensation, and recruitment, and on collective bargaining agreements that teachers’ unions negotiate with their districts, and the authors conclude with the expectation that the next decade will feature new and ongoing debates over each of these issues. Teacher labor issues will continue to vary in their details by state, as do other areas of education law and policy. The chapter notes, however, that new changes to the teacher labor market are unlikely to be substantial enough on their own to change more fundamental economic, demographic, and sociological conditions that provide the backdrop to where teachers work and organize. The chapter also acknowledges that much remains hidden from view. As researchers and policymakers understand more about how children learn, the authors believe that the laws governing not only teachers and teaching but public education more generally will shift to incorporate those new directions—wherever they lead. For teacher advocates, such changes need not undermine the professionalism or the security of employment or of purpose that historically has drawn new educators into the profession. But all stakeholders should hope and expect that whatever new reforms occur—for teachers, their unions’, their contracts, and the schools in which they work—they begin from a perspective that places opportunity for children as the first principle of public education.

Teacher Labor Market Responses to Statewide Reform: Evidence From Michigan

We examine the effect of Michigan’s 2011 reforms to teacher evaluation and tenure policies on teacher retention. Our data are drawn from administrative records containing the population of public school employees from 2005–2006 through 2014–2015. To identify the causal effects of these reforms on teacher attrition, we utilize a difference-in-differences (DD) strategy that compares the exit rates of teachers with the exit rates of other professional staff in the same school districts who were not affected by the policy changes. We find that, on average, Michigan’s teacher reforms had little impact on teacher attrition overall. However, further analyses provide strong evidence that early-career teachers assigned to hard-to-staff districts were more likely to exit post-reform.