Visit my Google Scholar page for most up-to-date list of publications. 

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Selected Papers

The promises and pitfalls of government-funded teacher staffing initiatives on teacher employment in hard-to-staff schools: Evidence from South Carlina

Policy Futures in Education, 2022, with Tran H. and Smith D.

Abstract

Situated against teacher demand problems worldwide, rising teacher turnover and declining teacher education enrollment have rendered the state of South Carolina a region commonly described as facing a “teacher shortage crisis.” This paper reports results from an evaluation of the Rural Recruitment Initiative (RRI), a state-level teacher staffing policy for SC’s hard-to-staff districts. Based on a decade of data analysis, we assess RRI’s causal effect using a Difference-in-Differences model with Arellano–Bond maximum likelihood design and find that RRI funding reduces teacher turnover rate by 1% for fund-receiving districts. We conclude by discussing how the initiative could be improved and what policymakers can learn from our results.