Teacher turnover can have a positive impact on struggling schools, potentially improving the quality of instruction. However, a new study conducted by Michael Hansen, a research associate at the American Institutes for Research, reveals that there is no guarantee that the best teachers will be retained during school turnaround efforts, while the worst teachers may still remain. The study, which is part of the Turning Around Low-Performing Schools project, is the most comprehensive federal investigation into turnaround schools to date.
Mr. Hansen’s contribution to the project involved analyzing administrative data from 111 chronically low-performing elementary and middle schools in Florida and North Carolina. This included 17 schools that showed significant improvement in student performance in math or reading between the 2002-03 and 2007-08 school years. However, Texas, the third state in the project, was unable to link student achievement data to its teachers due to state law. The study relied on students’ test scores to compare the effectiveness of teachers who left during the turnaround process, those who remained throughout, and those who joined after the turnaround. It did not distinguish between teachers who left voluntarily or due to being fired.
The study found that teacher demographics were similar in schools that improved and those that did not during the designated period. In Florida’s turnaround schools, there were fewer teachers with four or more years of experience, whereas in North Carolina’s schools, there were more experienced teachers. It was also discovered that teachers who left during the improvement process varied in terms of their effectiveness, ranging from poor to excellent. However, the replacement teachers were at least as effective as the average teacher in the school, leading to an overall increase in the effectiveness of the teaching force due to turnover.
Another significant finding was that requiring all teachers in a school to reapply for their positions, which is often done under the turnaround model of the federal School Improvement Fund, can have unintended consequences. Many teachers apply to other schools as backups, leading to the loss of potentially high-performing teachers. Mr. Hansen recalled a case where a high-performing teacher at a turnaround school received a renewal offer but also received another offer from a different school, which she accepted. This highlights that even when specific teachers are targeted for termination or counseling out, there is still a likelihood of high general teacher turnover, resulting in the departure of valuable teachers.
On the other hand, teachers who remain at low-performing schools throughout the improvement process also experience growth in their ability to enhance student achievement. With experience and professional development, the caliber of teachers can improve if they stay long enough to seize new learning opportunities. Mr. Hansen observed, "It doesn’t appear that we are losing the worst teachers and having them replaced with better ones. What does appear is that the teachers who stayed there all moved up a little bit. Overall, everyone does appear to be getting better."
The complete study will be published later this month by the National Center for Analyzing Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at AIR.
