The World's Longest Job Interview: Student teaching and teacher effectiveness
Abstract
School districts base hiring decisions on observable factors that fail to accurately distinguish effective from ineffective teachers. I argue that districts already hold the world’s longest interview, provide on-the-job training, and reveal credible signals about job performance through student teaching. If districts fully utilize student teaching data from within their district, they could potentially predict effectiveness for a third of all applicants. This study provides a first look into this information-rich signal that has been largely overlooked by researchers. I evaluate the relationship between student teaching and teacher effectiveness by exploiting new data from a large urban Midwestern school district. Using ordinary least squares regressions, preliminary results reveal that students rate teachers higher than average on classroom surveys for two cohorts: teachers hired into the same school where they student taught and high school teachers who student taught at any school in the district.
The World's Longest Job Interview: Student teaching and teacher effectiveness
School districts base hiring decisions on observable factors that fail to accurately distinguish effective from ineffective teachers. I argue that districts already hold the world’s longest interview, provide on-the-job training, and reveal credible signals about job performance through student teaching. If districts fully utilize student teaching data from within their district, they could potentially predict effectiveness for a third of all applicants. This study provides a first look into this information-rich signal that has been largely overlooked by researchers. I evaluate the relationship between student teaching and teacher effectiveness by exploiting new data from a large urban Midwestern school district. Using ordinary least squares regressions, preliminary results reveal that students rate teachers higher than average on classroom surveys for two cohorts: teachers hired into the same school where they student taught and high school teachers who student taught at any school in the district.