TEACHER DIVERSITY

Data Appendix
Section 2: Additional information
on samples and sources of data
TEACHER DATA
The primary task of this project was the acquisition and preparation of data on teacher race and ethnicity, as
well as other variables, in both district and charter schools located in nine cities, from 2002 to 2012. In the end,
we procured 16 datasets pertaining to teachers, most of them teacher-level administrative datasets, which were
provided, with varying difficulty and speed as described in the previous section, by state and district education
agencies, as well as several school-level and district/sector-level datasets containing variables on student characteristics.
We sought to obtain teacher-level data that included the following variables: a unique teacher identifier that
allowed matching teachers across years, teacher ethnicity and school. Other teacher characteristics, such as
gender, experience and certification, were also requested, but with mixed results. This limited the scope and
sophistication of our analysis.
As is often the case with administrative datasets, there were inconsistencies within and between sectors. The
following are the core issues that had to be addressed, along with descriptions of how we approached them, in
general terms. Further city/sector-specific details are available in the table below.
1. Year: Throughout this report, year refers to the first year (fall semester) in the school year. For example,
2001 refers to the 2001-02 school year.
2. Coding of race and ethnicity: Race and ethnicity classifications varied across city/sectors and, in many
cases, over time within city/sectors. We decided to recode all classifications into the following categories:
White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian, Multiracial and Invalid/Missing. All categories
except “Multiracial” were generally available in all years and city/sectors, although, in some cases, they
were provided in more disaggregate form—for example, Asians and Pacific Islanders are both recoded
into the “Asian” category. In a small group of city/sectors, the race and ethnicity classification included
an “Other” and/or “Decline to State” category. We coded these observations as missing, but the frequencies
were in all cases minimal (a fraction of 1 percent). Finally, there are cases in which individual
teachers alter their self-identifed race or ethnicity over time. We did not change these responses. Details
on the specific categories provided by each city and sector are in the table below.
3. Job titles: Some of our datasets (see the table below) included only teachers—i.e., those employees that
the data source classified as teachers. In most cases, however, our datasets included job titles that did
not fit the “traditional” definition of teachers, including administrators, specialists, trainers and similar
job types. Our approach was to retain only classroom teacher job titles and eliminate the others from
the datasets. It is possible, if not likely, that the classification of teachers as we define the term varies
between (and perhaps within) datasets. We did everything we could to check and ensure comparability,
but we acknowledge the inevitable possibility that classification error remains.
4. District office employees: In most of our datasets, a small group of teachers are coded as employed not
in a school but rather in a district (or other type of administrative) office. This might include teachers
whom we want to retain, such as those who rotate between schools. It might, however, also include
teachers who work in nonclassroom settings, whom we would want to exclude. In those cases where
we could not determine the “nature” of teachers’ assignments, we decided to retain them. In general,
their numbers are very small and do not affect our results. These retained teachers, however, are
excluded from any results that rely on the school-level student characteristics data (e.g., Figure 9 in the
city profiles), since these variables generally are not available for district offices.
ALBERT SHANKER INSTITUTE 113 THE STATE OF TEACHER DIVERSITY