School District Staffing Policies and Student Achievement Gaps

• In Event: The Effects of District Human Resource Policies for Schools, Teachers, and Students

Abstract

Using the Schools and Staffing Surveys 2007-08 and 2011-12 and the Stanford Education Data Archive 2009-13, we investigate the relationship between school district staffing policies and academic achievement gaps. Specifically, we examine recruitment policies such as signing bonuses, loan forgiveness program, relocation assistance, and referral fees. Moreover, we examine pay incentives such as rewards for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification, excellence in teaching, incentives to teach in less desirable location, incentives to teach in shortage subjects.

We employ the Oaxaca decomposition technique to explain the test score gap between different racial groups. We ask the following research questions:

1. What proportion of the test score gap can be explained by students’ and school characteristics such as poverty level and racial composition?

2. What proportion of the test score gap can be explained by school district staffing policies such as teacher loan forgiveness, tuition reimbursement, recruitment, and retention policies for less desirable location or shortage subject areas?

A priori, it is not clear whether and how these policies might affect student test scores and test score gaps between white and black students or white and Hispanic students. On one hand, district-level policies that aims at recruiting and retaining teachers may be effective at keeping teachers in these districts, thus increasing students’ test scores overall. On the other hand, districts that have traditionally experienced a lot of teacher shortage or teacher turnover may opt to implement these policies. These staffing policies may be correlated with lower student test scores.

Given that prior literature has demonstrated that minority students do not have equal access to highly effective teachers as measured in value-added test scores (Isenberg, et al. 2013; Sass et al. 2012; Xu, et al. 2015) and recent empirical evidence that certain staffing policies such as recruitment and retention bonuses for hard-to-staff schools and hard-to-fill subject areas are effective at retaining teachers (Clotfelter et al. 2008, Feng and Sass 2015, Protik et al. 2015), we hypothesize that certain staffing policies may be promising in reducing white-and-black or white-and-Hispanic student test score gaps.

We find that the most commonly used teacher incentive policy is attainment of National Board certification (36%) followed by incentives to teach in hard-to-staff subject areas (19%). The rest of the incentive policies such as excellence in teaching and teaching in less desirable location are used less frequently (7%). Teacher recruitment policy adoption rates are in the single digits. However, training programs targeting aspiring administrators and staff members to teach in shortage fields are both widely adopted (30%).

After controlling for student, neighborhood and school characteristics, we still find statistically significant negative effects of incentive policies targeting shortage areas on White-Black test score gap. The same can be said about the training program targeting staff members to teach in shortage areas.

Authors

• Li Feng, Texas State University - San Marcos

• Michael Hansen, The Brookings Institution