Abstract
Hiring is an opportunity for school districts to find educators with values and beliefs that align with district goals. Yet beliefs are difficult to measure. We use administrative data from more than ten thousand applications to certificated positions in an urban California school district in which applicants submitted essays about closing achievement gaps. Using structural topic modeling (STM) to code these essays, we examine whether applicants systematically differ in their use of these themes and whether themes predict hiring outcomes. Relative to white applicants, Hispanic and African American applicants are more likely to identify structural causes of inequities and discuss educators’ responsibilities for addressing inequality. Similar differences in themes emerge between applicants to schools with different student populations. Techniques like STM can decipher hard-to-measure beliefs from administrative data, providing valuable information for hiring and decision making.
- © 2019 Russell Sage Foundation. Penner, Emily K., Jane Rochmes, Jing Liu, Sabrina M. Solanki, and Susanna Loeb. 2019. “Differing Views of Equity: How Prospective Educators Perceive Their Role in Closing Achievement Gaps.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 5(3): 103–27. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2019 .5.3.06. Support for this project was provided by grants from the National Science Foundation (IBSS-L1620419), Institute for Education Sciences (R305B130017), and the Stanford Graduate School of Education Incentive Fund. Direct correspondence to: Emily K. Penner at emily.penner{at}uci.edu, 3200 Education, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697; Jane Rochmes at jane.rochmes{at}cnu.edu, Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Anthropology, Christopher Newport University, 1 Avenue of the Arts, Newport News, VA 23606; Jing Liu at jing_liu3{at}brown.edu, Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Brown University, 383 Benefit St., Providence, RI 02903; Sabrina M. Solanki at ssolanki{at}uci.edu, 3200 Education, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697; and Susanna Loeb at loeb{at}brown.edu, Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Brown University, 383 Benefit St., Providence, RI 02903.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.