Recruiting Highly Qualified Teachers

Abstract

This article presents results from a survey on teacher recruitment practices used in New York State school districts and analyzes whether the level of use of recruitment practices is related to teacher qualifications. We find that most districts employ a wide variety of practices and that the number of recruitment practices used by districts goes up with district size. To examine the effectiveness of recruitment practices, we estimate a model relating a composite measure of teacher qualifications to the level of use of recruitment practices and labor supply and demand factors. The recruitment regressor is treated as an endogenous variable with factors related to district use of these practices as instruments. While we cannot identify which individual practices are important, we find consistent evidence that districts using only a limited set of recruitment practices have hired less qualified teachers in New York.