Urban schools and those with lower-performing students tend to employ the least qualified teachers. But contrary to popular belief, this might not just be due to the fact that teachers prefer working with higher-performing kids.

New research shows that teachers seeking their first jobs overwhelmingly choose to teach in school districts near to where they grew up. Thus the fact that certain schools or areas aren’t producing a lot of college graduates—and that the college graduates they’re producing aren’t as skilled as the college graduates in other places—is leading to a “cycle of poverty” in education. “It’s not just the specific preferences of teachers for certain kinds of kids, but the fact that history plays a role in the labor market that is causing this,” said Susanna Loeb, associate professor in the Stanford School of Education.

Click here to read this interesting report from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.