In a new working paper from the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), the authors take a closer look at the current policy vogue of redistributing highly effective teachers from low- to high-needs schools. The underlying assumption of this policy “is that teacher productivity is portable across different school settings.”
In Portability of Teacher Effectiveness Across School Settings, the authors, using data from elementary and secondary schools from North Carolina and Florida, investigate the validity of this discussion. They found that 11-13% of teachers in both states switched schools at least once during the study period, and these moves were generally from high-needs to lower-needs schools. Furthermore, teachers who switched schools were more likely to be inexperienced (0-5 years of experience) and less likely to have graduate degrees.
The authors also found that teachers who switched between schools with different levels of poverty or academic performance, regardless of the direction of that change (low to high or high to low), have no change in their measured effectiveness before and after the move. They also found that high-performing teachers’ value dropped and low-performing teachers’ value-added gained in the post-move years, but the authors do not believe this is connected to school setting.
Overall, teachers who were high-performing before they switched school settings still outperformed low-performing teachers after moving to schools with different settings. The authors believe that their findings “cast doubt on the ‘match quality’ theory,” which predicts that the reason teachers change schools is to find a better match, and therefore teacher performance improves after a school move as the result of better matching quality. Though their empirical estimates appear to be consistent with this theory, the authors interpret it differently:
“There is a clear and consistent pattern that teachers who were high performers before a school move tended to have lower value-added in post-move years, whereas the reverse is true for teachers who were low performers in the pre-move period. As a result, the higher average post-move value-added could simply be driven by the higher proportion of movers who were low performers.”
To read the full study, please visit http://www.caldercenter.org/publications/upload/wp77.pdf
