K–12 education labor markets vary considerably across the country and can change quickly during recessions. We use data from the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) on staff and teachers in elementary and secondary schools from 2000–01 to 2023–24. We demonstrate how to transform the quarter-level data in the QWI to construct valid education labor market measures. The strengths of the QWI address the limitations of other sources of labor market data, including (1) nonstandardized definitions, (2) sampling that is useful for describing local and regional trends, (3) contemporaneous availability, and (4) lack of data for subgroups. We demonstrate how the QWI addresses each of these data gaps and describe how education labor markets vary across time, region, and demographic characteristics. Finally, we show how the QWI can be used by education leaders or policymakers to examine how policy influences K–12 education labor markets.
Bleiberg et al. (Thu,) studied this question.