Understanding teacher preferences and allocation processes in secondary mathematics departments

This dissertation study examines the factors that influence teacher decisions about which mathematics courses to teach, where and when. In addition, it looks at how these teacher preferences are negotiated within the high school subject area department to create teaching schedules that are more or less preferable to teaching staff. This negotiation of teacher preferences results in a distribution of teachers (some more qualified than others) across different groups of tracked students within the secondary mathematics department.;This dissertation research makes use primarily of course descriptions, administrative course schedules, and teacher and administrator interviews collected from an urban school district in Northern California. The variety of types of data collected contributes to a contextual understanding of what informs the course preferences of teachers, their assignment to classrooms and the resulting distribution of the least experienced staff to low status mathematics courses that educate those most in need of highly qualified teachers.;Using course descriptions and syllabi from the state standards, state colleges and universities and an urban school district, I conduct a textual analysis of the language used to characterize the mathematical knowledge, skills and students enrolled in various tracked mathematics courses. This analysis reveals that lower tracked courses are consistently described using a "language of remediosity" that codifies the content and type of work assigned to students of these courses. The knowledge and content associated with upper tracked courses, by contrast, move beyond the skilling and memorization of algorithms associated with lower tracked courses to an appreciation of the "beauty" of the field of mathematics. I argue that these descriptions play a role in teachers' calculations of which classes they choose to request, as their association with courses is a reflection of their own skills and knowledge in mathematics.;I also conduct interviews with teachers of these upper and lower tracked mathematics courses at three different high school mathematics departments in this same urban school district. Analyses of these interviews reveal the complex nature of the relationship among the characterizations of these courses, perceptions of students enrolled in these courses, and teacher preferences for assignment to particular courses. Specifically, these analyses show that teacher perceptions of courses and students influence the perceived desirability of these courses and, thus, what they request in their course schedule. In addition, these interviews indicate how mathematics department culture and department chair leadership operate to balance competing desires of teachers and to create (or undermine) the collegiality of the department members.;I end with an analysis of the teaching assignment schedules of these same teachers over ten years. Considering the preferences of teachers to request particular courses in their schedules and the role of the department in allocating teachers to particular courses, I examine how the assignment schedules of teachers change from year to year as they gain more seniority in their departments.;Thus, this study moves through varying levels of contexts that affect the preferences and allocation of teachers to different levels of tracked mathematics courses. From the state and district levels to the department and individual levels, I examine how the intersection of these various contexts results often in a distribution of lesser-qualified teachers to students struggling the most with mathematics. This study also considers the unique characterizations of those qualified teachers, the outliers, who place themselves with the students most in need.