Teachers on the move

"Teachers are one of the cornerstones of modern primary education and play a crucial role in ensuring that children can attain an education. However, teacher mobility patterns may negatively affect pupils’ academic attainment, contributing to the overall educational inequality in society. Existing research suggests that teachers with varying degrees of qualification and teaching experience are unequally distributed among schools. Evidence suggests that disadvantaged schools face challenges in attracting skilled teachers. In other words, current research suggests that teachers are deterred from working in the schools that need them most and that teachers gravitate towards those that serve students who already do well in terms of academic achievement, a phenomenon known as ”teacher sorting.” In this dissertation, I study these teacher sorting patterns throughout three individual papers. I use Danish administrative data and different quantitative methods to empirically investigate how teachers’ career decisions give rise to adverse patterns of teacher sorting. In the first paper of this dissertation, I investigate teachers’ career

paths across 35 years. The results suggest that teachers in different types of career paths start and end their career in the same types of schools. I also find that approximately half of teacher college graduates spend almost ttheir entire career working outside public primary schools. In the second paper, my co-author, Nicolai Kristensen, and I investigate how teacher college graduates transition between types of public primary schools, private primary schools, and working outside primary schools. We find that teachers with higher college GPA scores are more likely to begin their careers in schools with high levels of parental education or in private elementary schools. Further, we find that teachers working outside public primary schools earn lower salaries, suggesting that teachers transition outside public primary schools due to improved working conditions rather than increases in salary. In the third paper, I study the impact of commute distance on how well schools can attract newly graduated teachers. Specifically, I investigate the impact of closing teacher training colleges(TTCs) on how well schools can attract newly graduated teachers. I find that the closure of TTCs increased the average commute distance of newly graduated teachers in schools located close to a TTC that closed. Despite the increase in commute distance, I do not find that schools located close to a TTC that closed experienced any changes in how well they could attract newly graduated teachers. The results in this dissertation highlight the importance of the early stages of teachers’ careers. As such, policies and interventions that aim to combat adverse teacher sorting may become more effective if they target newly graduated teachers."