Trajectories into Teaching of Arkansas Educator Preparation Program Enrollees
Teaching is one of the largest and most important professions in the United States, but there are important concerns about the current health of the profession, including some acute geographic and subject area shortages, declining professional prestige, dwindling student interest in pursuing teaching as a career, and a marked drop in enrollment in traditional Education Preparation Programs (EPPs). As a result, it is increasingly important to understand how teachers move through their preparation programs and into the teaching workforce. A better understanding of the early teacher pipeline could help states design policies and programs that strengthen the pipeline and alleviate teacher shortages. In this respect, prior research from Washington State found that a significant proportion of recently certified teacher candidates start their public school careers in non-teaching positions but transition to teaching within 5 years (Goldhaber et al., 2022). If such a “bench” of teachers exists in a state like Arkansas, which has documented teacher shortage areas, policies could potentially be designed to help place these qualified teachers in areas of need. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of Arkansas EPP enrollees’ labor market trajectories, using rich, statewide, linked administrative data capturing the universe of traditional public and charter school employees from higher education to the labor force. Our results indicate the presence of a “bench” of teachers in Arkansas who start their careers in non-main teacher positions (4%), but of a much smaller size than the one reported in prior work. We then study factors associated with the “bench” of teachers and find that this bench is partially explained by certification area and salary differentials across school districts.