This repository provides reproduction code for the paper Teacher Turnover in Wisconsin, which can be downloaded here. The paper was compiled with rmarkdown through knitr; the .Rmd document for the paper is this one.

There are three public sources of data for this paper:

1. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) collects and releases annual WISEstaff PI-1202 reports which give teacher- (more specificaly, assignment-) level snapshots of the full panoply of school employees in the state. These are available here. The R script raw_data_cleaner.R will download these files and do some baseline touchup to the raw files (which are mostly in fixed-width format) before producing easy-to-use .csv versions of the raw data. The script can be run at the command line with Rscript raw_data_cleaner.R; be sure to customize the wd.data variable to the local paths to which to download the data and write the .csvs.

2. Wisconsin's WKCE test score data is also released by DPI at the district and school level. As per here, the WKCE is part of the WSAS battery of tests; the full set of these results can be downloaded through the WINSS historical data file repository here.

3. The NCES Common Core of Data District- and School-level data files.

turnover_paper.Rmd runs the turnover_data_cleaner.R script internally (which does some final data wrangling and runs the COBS routine, but relies on two scripts to be run beforehand:

1. background_data_cleaner.R assembles school- and district-level files from the DPI and NCES; be sure to customize wds here as well, which tell the script where to find these raw data files and where to write the output.

2. teacher_match_and_clean.R runs the teacher matching algorithm described in the paper's Appendix in order to create a panel of data from the DPI's cross-sections.

Feel free to file an issue or e-mail me for any further clarification/concerns.