In it for the long run: How teachers transition between different types of school during their careers.

Studying teacher career paths offers valuable insights into how teachers´ career decisons impacteducational inequality. However knowledge on teachers´ career paths across long time horizons is scarce.In this study, I investigate how teachers’ teachers transition between schools in which students havedifferent levels of SES, or opt out of teaching, and how these transitions shape teachers career pathsacross 35 years. Using Danish register data 13283 teachers who graduated between 1980 and 1985, Iemploy sequence analysis and cluster analysis to map out teacher career paths over 35 years. The mainfinding of the paper concerns the identification of four distinct types of career paths: 1) Teachers workingalmost exclusively outside of public elementary schools, 2) Teachers primarily working in schools servingless affluent students, 3) Teachers primarily working in schools serving affluent students and 4) Teachersworking in schools serving middle-class students. Further, the analysis reveals that teacher career pathsare highly stable. Once teachers begin their careers in a particular type of school, they tend to remainin that type throughout their careers. This contradicts the theoretical expectation that teachers wouldswitch schools or types of schools as they gain experience. Lastly, teacher characteristics such as highschool GPA, gender, and age at graduation show weak associations with the type of career path teachersfollow. The paper contributes to the literature on teacher sorting by providing a long-term view of teachercareers, emphasizing early career decisions’ lasting effects. It also challenges the idea that teacher sortingpatterns evolve dynamically throughout