Missed Opportunities in the Labor Market or Temporary Disruptions? How Late Teacher Hiring Affects Student Achievement

• In Event: Investigating Policies and Practices That Promote Teacher Quality

Abstract

Education policymakers and school administrators expend considerable resources trying to staff all schools with high-quality teachers. Although policymakers have focused on attracting, retaining, and rewarding highly-effective teachers, they have paid less attention to the processes by which these teachers are hired into schools. Across the country, many school districts still begin the year without a full-time teacher in every classroom. We examine the prevalence, distribution, and effects of late teacher hiring.

Late hiring undercuts efforts to raise teacher effectiveness in several ways. Districts that hire late face what Levin and Quinn (2003) call “missed opportunities” to hire the most qualified candidates in the labor market. Late hiring can also have a temporal “disruption effect” on teachers and students. For example, teachers who are hired late may not have sufficient time to prepare, while their students must deal with instability as classes begin. Finally, inadequate person-job matches that result from a “late, rushed, and information-poor” hiring process (Liu & Johnson, 2006) may increase teacher turnover and, in turn, reduce student achievement (Ronfeldt et al., 2012).

We use a comprehensive administrative dataset from a large, urban school district in the southern United States that includes ten years of student, teacher, and test records. Our key predictor measures whether a teacher was hired after the school year began. Our student achievement results derive from different specifications of a covariate-adjusted education production function model, in which we attempt to isolate the effect of late hiring from that of other factors that contribute to student achievement. Our preferred model uses student fixed effects. We decompose the effect of late hiring on student achievement into two pieces: a “labor market effect” that represents the persistent effect on student achievement, and a “disruption effect” that reflects the effect in a teacher’s first year. Our teacher retention results derive from discrete-time survival-analysis.

We find that nearly one in five new teachers is hired after school starts in the fall, and the poorest and lowest-achieving schools struggle the most with hiring on-time. Late hiring has serious consequences for student achievement. Students in classrooms with late-hired teachers do substantially worse than their peers with other newly-hired teachers (0.042 SD in math, 0.037 SD in reading). We find some evidence that late hired teachers are persistently less effective than their peers hired on-time, at least in middle school math. However, we find strong evidence that late hiring has disruptive effects in the first year of teaching for both teachers and students that suppress achievement. Finally, we find that teachers who are hired late leave their schools, and the district, at much greater rates than their peers who are hired on-time.

Teacher hiring is a critical, but often overlooked, element of the larger human capital pipeline in education. In many large urban districts, the process is an end-of-summer scramble that continues well past the beginning of the academic year. Ultimately, students – particularly low-income students in urban schools – pay the price for these delays.

Authors

• John Papay, Brown University

• Matthew A. Kraft, Brown University