The Effect of Subgroup-Specific Accountability on the Working Conditions, Turnover, and Attrition of Black Teachers in North Carolina

• In Event: 73.046 - School Working Conditions and Teacher Turnover: Implications for Diversifying the Teacher Workforce

Abstract

In an effort to close the achievement gap between minority and nonminority students, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) required schools to make yearly improvements not only in overall student achievement, but also in the achievement of students of racial/ethnic minority subgroups. Recent research has suggested that this “subgroup-specific accountability” was somewhat successful: the policy had the intended effects of raising minority student achievement (Lauen & Gaddis, 2012), and of narrowing at least some racial/ethnic achievement gaps (Reardon, Greenberg, Kalogrides, Shores, & Valentino, 2013). Little research, however, has examined the effects of this policy on teachers. Large scale institutional policies are an important aspect of school working conditions (Johnson, 2006), and these working conditions strongly predict teacher turnover and attrition (Ingersoll, 2001; Johnson & Birkeland, 2003; Johnson, Kraft, & Papay, 2011; Loeb, Darling-Hammond, & Luczak, 2005). Building on this work, this study examines the effects of NCLB’s subgroup-specific accountability on school working conditions, teacher turnover, and teacher attrition.

To explore the effects of subgroup-specific accountability on teachers, this study uses a regression discontinuity (RD) design. NCLB allowed states to determine the minimum number of students in a subgroup that were required for that subgroup to “count” towards schools’ accountability scores. These minimum subgroup size rules created discontinuities in schools’ exposure to subgroup-specific accountability for various subgroups; this study estimates whether there were “jumps” in measures of school working conditions (class sizes, composition of teachers’ classes), teacher turnover, or teacher attrition in schools whose numbers of students in a subgroup fell exactly at the minimum subgroup size cutoff.

To explore these effects, this study uses administrative data on the job assignments of every North Carolina elementary school teacher between the 1999-2000 and 2003-04 school years. Data on teacher outcomes were matched with data on North Carolina’s implementation of NCLB during the law’s first year (2002-03). The final sample for this study includes 29,387 teachers in the pre-NCLB period and 31,211 teachers in the post-NCLB period.

A central finding is that subgroup-specific accountability caused Black teachers in schools that were held accountable for the performance of the Black subgroup to leave teaching at significantly lower rates than Black teachers that taught in schools not accountable for the Black subgroup’s performance. Accountability for the White subgroup, in contrast, had no effect on Black or White teachers. In analyses exploring some possible explanations for this finding, this study finds that within schools, Black teachers taught significantly greater percentages of Black students than their colleagues, suggesting that Black teachers may respond strongly to accountability for the Black subgroup because they work with these students more than other teachers.

This study presents the first empirical findings on the effects of subgroup-specific accountability on working conditions, teacher turnover, and teacher attrition. Besides suggesting revisions to future accountability systems, this study also demonstrates that subgroup-specific accountability had particularly strong effects on Black teachers. With minority teacher attrition a significant concern for schools and districts (Ingersoll & May, 2011), this finding warrants further attention.

Author

• Matthew A. Shirrell, Northwestern University