Implications for Teacher Supply and Methodological Lessons for Research

Abstract

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.

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