IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cen/wpaper/10-05.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Effect of Class Size on Teacher Attrition: Evidence from Class Size Reduction Policies in New York State

Author

Listed:
  • Emily Pas Isenberg

Abstract

Starting in 1999, New York State implemented class size reduction policies targeted at early elementary grades, but due to funding limitations, most schools reduced class size in some grades and not others. I use class size variation within a school induced by the policies to construct instrumental variable estimates of the effect of class size on teacher attrition. Teachers with smaller classes were not significantly less likely to leave schools in the full sample of districts but were less likely to leave a school in districts that targeted the same grade across schools. District-wide class size reduction policies were more likely to persist in the same grade in the next year, suggesting that teacher expectations of continued smaller classes played a role in their decision whether or not to leave a school. A decrease in class size from 23 to 20 students (a decrease of one standard deviation) under a district-wide policy decreases the probability that a teacher leaves a school by 4.2 percentage points.

Suggested Citation

  • Emily Pas Isenberg, 2010. "The Effect of Class Size on Teacher Attrition: Evidence from Class Size Reduction Policies in New York State," Working Papers 10-05, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    • Handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:10-05
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2010/CES-WP-10-05.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2010
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    class size; teachers; teacher attrition;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I29 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Other
    • J45 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Public Sector Labor Markets
    • J62 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Job, Occupational and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:10-05. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dawn Anderson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesgvus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.