Implications for Teacher Supply and Methodological Lessons for Research

Attempts to determine whether enough qualified teachers will be available to staff the nation's schools in the coming years have been hampered by methodological difficulties that are inherent in the study of teacher career patterns. In this article, we have applied an analytic technique rarely used in educational research, proportional hazards modeling, to resolve these problems and to investigate the relationship between teachers' background characteristics and their career durations. We find that teacher demographic characteristics and subject specialty are important predictors of length of stay in teaching. Our results call into question several assumptions about teacher career persistence implicit in the national teacher supply and demand model. We also argue that proportional hazards modeling has wide applicability to many educational research questions.

[1]  Richard J. Murnane,et al.  The Effects of Salaries and Opportunity Costs on Duration in Teaching: Evidence from Michigan , 1989 .

[2]  John B. Willett,et al.  Detecting Involuntary Layoffs in Teacher Survival Data: The Year of Leaving Dangerously , 1988 .

[3]  B. Heyns.  Educational Defectors , 1988 .

[4]  John B. Willett,et al.  Doing Data Analysis with Proportional Hazards Models: Model Building, Interpretation and Diagnosis. , 1988 .

[5]  S. Kirby,et al.  Teacher attrition : the uphill climb to staff the Nations's schools , 1987 .

[6]  Barry D. Anderson,et al.  Teacher Survival Rates in St. Louis, 1969–1982 , 1985 .

[7]  Paul D. Allison,et al.  Event History Analysis : Regression for Longitudinal Event Data , 1984 .

[8]  Graham K. Rand,et al.  Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences , 1983 .

[9]  Ronald G. Stansfield,et al.  Sociological Methodology 1982 , 1983 .

[10]  Nancy Brandon Tuma,et al.  Nonparametric and Partially Parametric Approaches to Event-History Analysis , 1982 .

[11]  P. Allison.  Discrete-Time Methods for the Analysis of Event Histories , 1982 .

[12]  J. Kalbfleisch,et al.  The Statistical Analysis of Failure Time Data , 1980 .

[13]  Kenneth C. Land,et al.  Sociological methodology, 1979 , 1980 .

[14]  Michael T. Hannan,et al.  Approaches to the Censoring Problem in Analysis of Event Histories , 1979 .

[15]  Barry D. Anderson,et al.  Teacher Survival Rates—A Current Look , 1978 .

[16]  Howard L. Fleischman,et al.  Teacher turnover in public schools fall 1968 to fall 1969 , 1974 .

[17]  W. W. C. join.  Some Factors Affecting Teacher Survival in School Districts , 1970 .

[18]  D.,et al.  Regression Models and Life-Tables , 2022 .