Impact Evaluation Of Moving High-Performing Teachers to Low-Performing Schools

Contractor: Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.; The New Teacher Project; Optimal Solutions Group

Background/Research Questions:

Title II, Part A, the Improving Teacher State Formula Grants program, is the primary federal funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to support a high quality teacher in every classroom. The program, funded at $2.5 billion in FY12, targets high poverty districts and funds a broad array of allowable activities including recruitment, retention, and merit-based teacher pay strategies.

Research indicates that high quality teachers are critical to raising student achievement in low-performing schools, but schools most in need often have difficulty in attracting and retaining high-quality teachers. This evaluation studies implementation of a policy, known to participating study school districts as the Talent Transfer Initiative (TTI), that provides incentives to identified high value-added teachers to teach in low-performing schools with high-need students. The research questions are:

• What can we learn from the implementation of TTI? Specifically, what can we learn about timing and scale of implementation, who transfers, and from where they transfer?
• What were the intermediate impacts on participating schools? Specifically, how did TTI affect the dynamics within the school, such as the allocation of resources, staffing patterns, assignment of students to teachers and courses, and school climate?
• What was TTI's impact on student test scores?
• What was TTI's impact on teacher retention?

Design:

The study is being conducted in 10 school districts (168 school-grade teams in 112 schools) and the design consists of segmenting the schools within districts to those eligible and not eligible for the treatment (the pay incentive). The treatment eligible schools are randomly assigned to receive the treatment or not. Using value added, high-performing teachers teaching in the non-eligible schools are identified. The two-year treatment, conducted in school years 2009–10 and 2010–11 (in 7 of the districts) and 2010–11 and 2012 (in an additional 3 districts), consists of hiring among the pool of those identified as high performing and interested in teaching in the treatment schools. The control schools follow normal hiring practices. Program transfer teachers receive a transfer incentive of $10,000 for each of the two years that they remain in the treatment school. Existing teachers in study eligible schools that meet program criteria and remain in their school receive a retention payment of $5,000 a year. Data collection includes measures of teacher characteristics and hiring experiences, district/school hiring experiences and practices, and student achievement obtained from administrative records.

Cost/Duration: $11,682,525 over 5 years (September 2007 – October 2013)

Current Status:

Analyses are underway for a final report expected to be released in the summer of 2013. An Evaluation brief was released in April 2011 (see http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20114016/index.asp). The first report was released in April 2012 (see http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20124051/index.asp).

Key Findings

• Filling teacher vacancies using transfer incentives was shown to be feasible, but required a large candidate pool. Identification of highest-performing teachers using value added analysis followed by an intensive recruitment of teachers to respond to the opportunity led to 90 percent of vacancies being filled. On average six percent of eligible candidates ultimately transferred to low-performing schools.
• TTI transfer teachers came from sending schools and classrooms with significantly different characteristics, on average than the schools and classrooms to which they transferred. The average transfer teacher was from a school in the 60th percentile for average test scores and transferred to a school in the 18th percentile. For districts where data were available, the average student for these teachers before they transferred scored in the 48th percentile on prior math tests, but after the teachers transferred the average student scored in the 32nd percentile on prior math tests compared to the rest of the district.
• TTI transfer teachers were more experienced than teachers normally tapped to fill such positions. The average difference in teaching experience between treatment and control teachers was five years.
• TTI transfer teachers used less mentoring and provided more mentoring than their control-group counterparts. Thirty-nine percent of teachers who filled the vacancies designated as TTI transfer positions reported having a mentor compared to 66 percent of their control-group counterparts. In addition, TTI transfer teachers reported providing on average 25 more minutes per week in mentoring support to their colleagues than their control-group counterparts.