Teacher Retention: Estimating and Understanding the Effects of Financial Incentives

There is currently much interest in improving access to high-quality teachers (Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2010; Hanushek, 2007) through improved recruitment and retention. Prior research has shown that it is difficult to retain teachers, particularly in high-poverty schools (Boyd et al., 2011; Ingersoll, 2004). Although there is no one reason for this difficulty, there is some evidence to suggest teachers may leave certain schools or the profession in part because of dissatisfaction with low salaries (Ingersoll, 2001).

Thus, it is possible that by offering teachers financial incentives, whether in the form of alternative compensation systems or standalone bonuses, they would become more satisfied with their jobs and retention would increase. As of yet, however, support for this approach has not been grounded in empirical research.

Denver’s Professional Compensation System for Teachers (“ProComp”) is one of the most prominent alternative teacher compensation reforms in the nation.* Via a combination of ten financial incentives, ProComp seeks to increase student achievement by motivating teachers to improve their instructional practices and by attracting and retaining high-quality teachers to work in the district.

My research examines ProComp in terms of: 1) whether it has increased retention rates; 2) the relationship between retention and school quality (defined in terms of student test score growth); and 3) the reasons underlying these effects. I pay special attention to the effects of ProComp on schools that serve high concentrations of poor students – “Hard to Serve” (HTS) schools where teachers are eligible to receive a financial incentive to stay. The quantitative findings are discussed briefly below (I will discuss my other results in a future post).

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The full paper can is below:

TEACHER RETENTION: ESTIMATING AND UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTS OF FINANCIAL INCENTIVES IN DENVER

Teacher Attitudes about Compensation Reform

We want to bring to your attention 3 study papers from The National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER). Some of it is pretty dense reading and probably isn't for everyone on a sunny summer's day. However we are heading into a period where lots of these issues are now front and center in how it impacts the teaching profession. It's worth a few minutes to simply read the conclusions if the entire paper is a little too much.

As Ohio moves towards high stakes teacher evaluations using student test scores, and of course, merit pay based on these high stakes evaluations it will become increasingly important for educators to understand these issues. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses and the state of current understanding will be crucial, for it is certain that there are lots of corporate education reformers who care less about whether new approaches actually work, and care more about profit seeking or their ideologically driven agendas.

The first paper looks at Value-Added Models and the Measurement of Teacher Productivity, and unsurprisingly finds that while VAM has some interesting uses, the data and measurement techniques are not mature enough to be reliable for high stakes decision making.

Value-Added Models and the Measurement of Teacher Productivity

The second paper looks at Teacher Attitudes About Compensation Reform, and finds that

We conclude with a reminder that our analysis says nothing of the politics of adoption. Whether a district is able to successfully adopt compensation reform clearly depends on its relationship with its teachers union, not just the attitudes of individual teachers. And while the WSTCS presents these various incentive plans as if they are separate from each other, if compensation reform is to have the types of effects that advocates and reformers hope for, various combinations of incentives may need to be considered: not just merit pay alone but merit‐pay combined with subject‐area pay and/or combat pay and/or NBPTS incentives. Teacher opinions about such combinations are an important topic for future research.

The final paper we want to bring to your attention covers Stepping Stones Principal Career Paths and School Outcomes, simply to highlight that school and student performance is affected by many complex variables, including school leadership itself.

We hope you continue to find the research we bring to your attention useful and informative and if you are aware of any research we haven't uncovered please let us know.

The Buckeye Institutes doesn't understand simple things

The Buckeye Institute just released a tool to compare salaries. The only trouble with this hackish tool is they don't understand how anyone is paid apparently.

In their effort to make public sector workers appear over compensated, they add vacation and sick pay to salaries, without understanding sick and vacation pay is paid instead of salary, and therefore can't be added to create a juicy big total salary they can get all indignant about.

What kind of a "think tank" doesn't understand the basic principles of employee compensation?