To complement The Line’s exploration of equity and opportunity, analysts at the Institute further examined how much the geographic location of a school district influenced hiring managers’ decisions about whether to hire a prospective candidate. For example, do candidates with a word-of-mouth referral have a better chance at getting a job in a suburban district than in a rural district? It turns out, they do.

While school districts and organizations across geographies demonstrate a consistent and notable preference for candidates who come from local referral sources (e.g. word-of-mouth), the size of the gap is greatest in suburban school districts. While the average number of individuals hired is about 1.3 times greater than those who are referred by local sources in the overall pool, that number rises to 1.4 for suburban schools—that may seem like a small difference, but it translates to about 151,921 more people across the sample of 825,662 suburban applicants who were hired perhaps because they were referred locally.

These findings suggest that students in suburban districts may be more likely to have teachers who were previously known to district leaders or people they knew, suggesting that suburban students end up with the least diverse candidate pipelines when it comes to educators having different backgrounds or demographics from the existing educator workforce. Perhaps unexpectedly, that means suburban students are less likely than their peers in urban, rural and town-located districts to have access to broad diversity of experiences in their teaching population.

While most districts, regardless of their location, seem to prefer “known quantities” over candidates from more public sources like job boards, the extraordinary effect in suburban locations suggests that hiring managers and leaders ought to consider looking more carefully at their hiring practices to avoid inadvertently undermining the natural diversity of their workforce pipeline. In suburban districts where leaders might feel pressure to hire more educators like those already in teaching roles, the first step might be to review the data and convene a team of school leaders to discuss findings and, if indicated, establish a more rigorous hiring protocol.

Even among schools and districts where providing students access to the most rigorous learning activities and diversity of opinion are central, sometimes small changes can make a big difference when it comes to maximizing opportunity for all students.

TEACHER APPLICANTS FROM LOCAL REFERRAL SOURCES VS. TEACHERS HIRED FROM LOCAL REFERRAL SOURCES //