Teacher Working Preferences Related to the Performance of Schools - an Empirical Study on the Stockholm Elementary Schoolteacher Labor Market

Sammanfattning: The Swedish school system is in a state of crisis. From having been one of the top nations in international reports regarding both knowledge and equality between schools, the results have been deteriorating for more than a decade. The teaching profession is screaming for highly skilled workers, but the teacher education program is one of the lowest ranked educations in Sweden today. The educational system has been under scrutiny in research and various reports where factors such as socioeconomic aspects and teacher quality and characteristics have been the main focus. This report opens a black box in the Stockholm teacher labor market, where the teacher supply is investigated through an examination of the preferences of teachers at the ten highest and ten lowest performing schools in the municipality of Stockholm. Through ordinary least squares estimations on the answers from a survey sent to all grade nine teachers in the selected schools, it is our aim to increase the knowledge of the driving forces behind teacher labor supply. When the educational market is moving toward a dichotomy between high and low performing schools and high and low quality teachers, it is important to understand the driving forces behind teacher labor decisions in order to optimize the allocation of teacher resources.