2When given the opportunity, many teachers choose to leave schools serving large concentrations of poor, low-performing and non-white students (Boyd et. al., 2005;Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2004;Scafidi, Sjoquist, & Stinebrickner, 2005). While a substantial research literature has documented this phenomenon, far less research effort has gone into understanding what features of the working conditions in these schools drive this relatively higher turnover rate (see Loeb, Darling-Hammond and Luczak (2005) for an exception to this). Excessive teacher turnover can be costly and detrimental to instructional cohesion in schools (National Commission on Teaching and America 's Future, 2003). Consequently, many policies, such as mentoring programs and retention bonuses, have aimed to stem teacher attrition, particularly at those schools that experience high teacher turnover. Yet, without a better understanding of the reasons teachers leave, these approaches may not be as effective as they could be at reducing detrimental attrition. This study contributes to our understanding of teacher attrition by modeling the relationship between teacher turnover and school contextual factors -including teachers' influence over school policy, the effectiveness of the school administration, staff relations, student behavior, safety, and facilities.Using a unique dataset that combines longitudinal survey data with district administrative files, we find that school administration plays a particularly important role in teachers' career decisions. In what follows, we briefly review relevant prior research to motivate our study, describe our data and methods, and present the results. The final section discusses the implications of these results, limitations of the study, and directions for future research. Background and Motivation

There are fierce debates over the best way to prepare teachers. Some argue that easing entry into teaching is necessary to attract strong candidates, whereas others argue that investing in high quality teacher preparation is the most promising approach. Most agree, however, that we lack a strong research basis for understanding how to prepare teachers. This article is one of the first to estimate the effects of features of teachers' preparation on teachers' value added to student test score performance. Our results indicate variation across preparation programs in the average effectiveness of the teachers they are supplying to New York City schools. In particular, preparation directly linked to practice appears to benefit teachers in their 1st year.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact

We are in the midst of what amounts to a national experiment in how best to attract, prepare, and retain teachers, particularly for high poverty urban schools. Using data on students and teachers in grades three through eight, this study assesses the effects of pathways into teaching in New York City on the teacher workforce and on student achievement. We ask whether teachers who enter through new routes, with reduced coursework prior to teaching, are more or less effective at improving student achievement than other teachers and whether the presence of these alternative pathways affects the composition of the teaching workforce. Results indicate that in some instances the new routes provide teachers with higher student achievement gains than temporary license teachers, though more typically there is no difference. When compared to teachers who completed a university-based teacher education program, teachers with reduced course work prior to entry often provide smaller initial gains in both mathematics and English language arts. Most differences disappear as the cohort matures and many of the differences are not large in magnitude, typically 2 to 5 percent of a standard deviation. The variation in effectiveness within pathways is far greater than the average differences between pathways.

Background/Context This study investigates how people are prepared for professional practice in the clergy, teaching, and clinical psychology. The work is located within research on professional education, and research on the teaching and learning of practice. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study The purpose of the study is to develop a framework to describe and analyze the teaching of practice in professional education programs, specifically preparation for relational practices. Setting The research took place in eight professional education programs located in seminaries, schools of professional psychology, and universities across the country. Population/Participants/Subjects Our research participants include faculty members, students, and administrators at each of these eight programs. Research Design This research is a comparative case study of professional education across three different professions—the clergy, clinical psychology, and teaching. Our data include qualitative case studies of eight preparation programs: two teacher education programs, three seminaries, and three clinical psychology programs. Data Collection and Analysis For each institution, we conducted site visits that included interviews with administrators, faculty, and staff; observations of multiple classes and field-work; and focus groups with students who were either at the midpoint or at the end of their programs. Conclusions/Recommendations We have identified three key concepts for understanding the pedagogies of practice in professional education: representations, decomposition, and approximations of practice. Representations of practice comprise the different ways that practice is represented in professional education and what these various representations make visible to novices. Decomposition of practice involves breaking down practice into its constituent parts for the purposes of teaching and learning. Approximations of practice refer to opportunities to engage in practices that are more or less proximal to the practices of a profession. In this article, we define and provide examples of the representation, decomposition, and approximation of practice from our study of professional education in the clergy, clinical psychology, and teaching. We conclude that, in the program we studied, prospective teachers have fewer opportunities to engage in approximations that focus on contingent, interactive practice than do novices in the other two professions we studied.