Teacher Tradeoffs: Disentangling Teachers’ Preferences for Working Conditions and Student Demographics

Abstract

One of the greatest differences in resources across schools in California comes from an inequitable distribution of teachers. This study identifies reasons for this sorting of teachers by surveying 531 teachers in a California elementary school district. The surveys ask the teachers to make choices between various workplace characteristics. With this information, the study disentangles student demographics from other characteristics of teaching jobs that are amenable to policy influences. It finds that teachers identify working conditions—particularly, school facilities, administrative support, and class sizes—and salaries as significantly more important than student characteristics when selecting a school in which to work.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 185 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.