Abstract
This article investigates the effect of schools’ organizational features on teacher staffing decisions at the secondary level cross-nationally. I examine the importance of the principal’s administrative leadership style and school-level autonomy in making staffing decisions to understand variation in assignments of out-of-field teachers (OFT) to teach mathematics and science. I conduct secondary analysis based on a new international data set compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on lower-secondary school administration and teachers in 15 countries. I utilize a country fixed-effects model to study the effect of different types of organizational characteristics on the extent of reliance on out-of-field teaching in mathematics and science cross-nationally. The results indicate that the use of OFT is a school-specific issue. Several school characteristics affect levels of out-of-field teaching. After controlling for country fixed effects, I do not find a systematic relationship between the principal’s administrative leadership and the school’s reliance on OFT. However, higher school-level autonomy in making staffing decisions is significantly associated with lower reliance on out-of-field teaching.
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Notes
I have to remind readers that because of the way in which the TIMSS teacher survey is constructed, the teacher sample is not nationally representative, but the student sample is. Any generalized reference to teacher characteristics must be made in association with the student population, which can be quite cumbersome in the out-of-field teaching case.
In economics, any imbalance between labor supply and demand can be labeled a shortage. However, in conventional usage, shortage typically refers to insufficient supply. Ingersoll and Perda (2010) made this important distinction in their discussion. Though not stated explicitly, previous discussions on out-of-field teaching typically refer to teacher shortage as undersupply of teachers, which may not be the sole explanation for vacancies in certain teaching positions.
There are 24 countries in the original TALIS sample. I exclude nine countries for various reasons. Iceland withdrew from the TALIS database after the data were released due to quality concerns. Italy was excluded because the teacher-level subject matter identifier variable was completely missing. Australia, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Malaysia, the Netherlands, and Poland are excluded because their first stage sampling unit (school) was not chosen based on the number of teachers, which could potentially affect the generalizability of the findings.
All teachers surveyed are ISCED 2 level teachers. An ISCED 2 teacher may teach in a range of grades depending on the national context.
There are certainly limitations to this measure. For instance, even though it was common for teachers to take multiple assignments at lower secondary levels, the teacher questionnaire does not differentiate between primary and secondary teaching assignments. Thus, I was not able to discern whether OFT are teaching multiple subjects at the same time. I was also not able to differentiate out-of-field teaching by assignment type. The school-level estimates use a generated school-level sampling weights of teachers by separating the school weight variable (SCHWGT) from the teacher weight variable (TCHWGT).
Note that, the estimates from FRM models are not directly comparable to those from OLS. I calculated the partial effect of each estimate as suggested by Wooldridge (2010). A fully robust sandwich estimator is implemented using the QMLE estimation method.
Readers should bear in mind that the estimates from TALIS are not directly comparable to those from the United States because of different measurements of OFT. TALIS employs a more general definition. Because of the wording of the survey item, individual respondents may interpret the out-of-field question differently. For instance, someone with high school–level academic training could justify this training as sufficient. By using this measure, the survey probably underestimates out-of-field teaching levels because of its relaxed definition of academic training. The true levels of out-of-field teaching may be higher, as suggested by estimates from other international databases such as TIMSS.
I partition the variance by specifying a basic two-level fully unconditional linear model within each country.
Hungary is excluded because all of the Hungarian teachers in the TALIS sample held a bachelor’s degree.
I show only results with statistical significance. Specifications in which no statistical significance was detected are not shown.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Amita Chudgar, Peter Youngs, David Arsen, and Richard Houang from Michigan State University for their critical feedback and informative participation in this project.
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Zhou, Y. The Relationship Between School Organizational Characteristics and Reliance on Out-of-Field Teachers in Mathematics and Science: Cross-National Evidence from TALIS 2008. Asia-Pacific Edu Res 23, 483–497 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40299-013-0123-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40299-013-0123-8