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IES Grant

Title: The Impact of Incentives to Recruit and Retain Teachers in "Hard-to-Staff" Subjects: An Analysis of the Florida Critical Teacher Shortage Program
Center: NCER Year: 2011
Principal Investigator: Sass, Tim Awardee: Georgia State University
Program: Improving Education Systems      [Program Details]
Award Period: 3 years Award Amount: $495,575
Type: Efficacy and Replication Award Number: R305A110967
Description:

Previous Award Number: R305A110697
Previous Awardee: Florida State University

Co-Principal Investigator: Li Feng (Texas State University-San Marcos)

Purpose: This project will evaluate the efficacy of programs created under the statewide Florida Critical Teacher Shortage Program (FCTSP) and a related set of teacher bonuses, the Teacher Recruitment and Retention Fund (TRRF). Components of the programs were in place starting in 1984 and ending in 2010 and provided a variety of incentives to become fully certified to teach in hard-to-staff disciplines like math, science and special education.

Project Activities: The research team will study in detail the effects of the incentives embedded in the FCTSP and related bonus program on the supply of teachers, the quality of teachers, and teacher retention. There are three elements to the program: loan forgiveness, tuition reimbursement, and (for a brief time) recruitment and retention bonuses. Researchers will provide a detailed description of participants and non-participants and evaluate whether the FCTSP has been effective at attracting and retaining teachers in targeted subjects. In addition to the program's impact on the quantity of teachers, researchers will also investigate the effects of the program on teacher quality.

Products: Products include peer reviewed publications on the evidence of the effects of the incentives embedded in the FCTSP and related bonus program on the supply of teachers, the quality of teachers, and teacher retention.

Structured Abstract

Setting: This study uses longitudinal data from Florida public schools from 1994/95 through 2009/10.

Population: The Florida data to be analyzed contains individual-level longitudinal data for all public school students and teachers in the state from 1994/95 through 2009/10.

Intervention: The research team will investigate the causal effects of the programs and also address questions related to the general characteristics of the program and participating teachers. Components of the programs were in place from1984 to 2010 and provided a variety of incentives to become fully certified to teach in hard-to-staff disciplines like math, science and special education. The FCTSP provided loan forgiveness to teachers who teach in designated shortage disciplines (e.g., middle and high school mathematics, special education, and English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). The program also compensated teachers for the tuition cost of courses to become certified in a designated shortage area. In addition, for one year the TRRF provided recruitment and retention bonuses to Florida teachers in designated critical-need subjects and then to all teachers in a second year. After the statewide program ended in 2002, a handful of school districts have continued to offer bonuses to teachers in critical-need subject areas. The areas of staff specialization that were eligible for the financial incentives changed periodically throughout the course of this study.

Research Design and Methods: A statistical analysis of secondary data will be carried out. The data will be drawn from the Florida Education Data Warehouse augmented with data from the Office of Student Financial Assistance. These data files contain teacher-level records on FCTSP participants, award amounts, and information from the annual Critical Teacher Shortage Areas List published by the Florida Department of Education. The analysis will first measure teacher quality using various value-added methodologies. These measures will be used to investigate the effects of the FCTSP tuition assistance/loan forgiveness program and the Teacher Recruitment and Retention Fund on teacher quality. The project will investigate how teacher quality changes in different subject areas as disciplines change from untargeted to targeted status and back. Specifically, it will determine if highly effective teachers are recruited and retained as a result of the incentives embedded in the FCTSP and TRRF programs. In addition, the project will use a difference in difference estimator to evaluate the impact of these programs on teacher mobility and retention.

Control Condition: The teaching fields identified to receive incentives varied over time and the availability of recruitment and retention bonuses varied over time and across school districts. These variations will be used compare differences between bonus recipients and non-recipients.

Key Measures: Key measures include Florida's state reading and math tests in each of grades 3 through 10, called the "Sunshine State Standards" Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test (FCATSSS). This is a criterion-based exam designed to test for the skills that students are expected to master at each grade level. In addition to test scores, the data includes an extensive set of student characteristics. For teachers, data collected identifies the base salary for each teacher, and also the amount of every type of supplemental compensation received, including the TRRF bonuses.

Data Analytic Strategy: Simple pre-post tallies will show whether the incentives, individually and collectively, resulted in a larger number of applicants and full-time-equivalent teachers for the targeted hard-to-staff areas. To investigate whether the programs impacted student achievement in the targeted areas, the researchers will employ a variety of quasi-experimental methods in a three-part strategy. First, researchers will estimate models of student achievement that include teacher fixed effects in order to derive "value-added" estimates of teacher quality. In the second stage of the analysis, the teacher value-added scores will be inserted into multinomial logit hazard models to investigate whether the FCTSP incentives and related bonuses encourage entry of high quality teachers into covered disciplines. The final part of the analysis will use instrumental variable and difference-in-difference (DID) techniques to determine the causal impacts of FCTSP incentives on teacher recruitment and retention in designated "critical need" subject areas.

Products and Publications

Journal article, monograph, or newsletter

Feng, L., and Sass, T.R. (2018). The Impact of Incentives to Recruit and Retain Teachers in "Hard-to-Staff" Subjects. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 37 (1), 112–135.

** This project was submitted to and funded under Education Policy, Finance, and Systems in FY 2011.


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