Student Teaching and the Geography of Teacher Shortages

We use a unique dataset of student teaching placements in the State of Washington and a proxy for teacher shortages, the proportion of new teacher hires in a school or district with emergency teaching credentials, to provide the first empirical evidence of a relationship between student teaching placements and teacher shortages. We find that schools and districts that host fewer student teachers or are nearby to districts that host fewer student teachers tend to hire significantly more new teachers with emergency credentials the following year. These relationships are robust to district fixed-effects specifications that make comparisons across schools within the same district. This descriptive evidence suggests exploring efforts to place student teachers in schools and districts that struggle to staff their classrooms.