The Effect of Mutual Consent Hiring Reforms on the Diversity, Effectiveness, and Retention of Teachers

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

Abstract

Background and Objectives

Hiring is a two-way matching process where schools select candidates who best meet their needs and teachers select schools where they can best see themselves teaching. However, the labor market for teachers often functions in ways that can hinder effective matching. Tenure rules and collective bargaining agreements can limit the flexibility of principals to hire the teachers they believe could best meet the needs of their students. District transfer policies and hiring processes can also lead administrators to wait to fill positions until late in the summer or even well after the school year has started.

We study one district’s efforts to address these challenges by decentralizing the hiring process and liberalizing the rules governing how teachers are hired. Starting in 2014-15, Boston Public Schools (BPS) has undertaken large and ambitious efforts to address structural and policy barriers that constrain administrators’ ability to staff their schools both on time and with teachers who are well matched to their school. We estimate the causal impact of these reforms on a range of outcomes including the timing of new teacher hires, teacher diversity, teacher effectiveness, and teacher turnover.

Data and Methods

Our analyses draw on a unique hiring dataset which records detailed information for the universe of job applications received by BPS. We link these data to administrative records on students, teachers and schools in BPS over an eight year period from 2009-10 to 2016-17. We first present descriptive event-study evidence of changes in our four primary outcomes of interest. We then estimate the causal effect of this sudden and largely unanticipated policy change using comparative interruptive time series methods where traditional BPS schools serve as the treated group and charter, pilot and Horace Mann schools that operated with autonomy prior to 2014-15 serve as the comparison group.

Results

Preliminary analyses suggest that BPS’s mutual consent hiring reforms moved the hiring timing up in the district substantially. Prior to the reforms only 8.7 percent of new teachers were hired by July 1st, whereas over 50 percent of new teachers were hired by this date in the years following the reforms. The reforms also appear to have helped to increase the diversity of new hires. The percent of African American and Hispanic new hires increased by approximately 4 and 7 percentage points, respectively, in the early months of the new hiring process. Analyses of effects on teacher quality and turnover are currently in progress.

Significance

Advancing our understanding of the hiring process is essential given the critical consequences it has for the effectiveness and diversity of the teacher workforce as well as the equitable distribution of teacher quality. We present some of the first empirical evidence showing how moving up hiring timelines and relying on mutual consent hiring practices influence teacher diversity, teacher effectiveness, and teacher retention. As districts across the country are struggling with hiring delays and a lack of school autonomy in staffing, the lessons from this substantial policy shift in Boston can have far-reaching impacts.

Authors

• Matthew A. Kraft, Brown University

• John Papay, Brown University

• Nathan Jones, Boston University