The Effects of School District Spending Priorities on Length of Stay in Teaching

This paper shows that teachers work for less time in districts that spend more for central administration or for non-teachers involved in classroom instruction, that female teachers stay longer when local teacher salaries increase relative to salaries available in other local employment and that males stay longer when teachers are paid more across the state. The research is based on a new longitudinal dataset providing information on the career histories of 9,756 Washington teachers. The empirical work uses a generalized variant of a transition probability model and conducts simulations to explore the influence of important policy variables