The Operations and Effectiveness of Teacher Hiring Committees

• In Event: Strategic and Efficient School Staffing

Abstract

Effectively hiring school staff is notoriously difficult. This is because while teachers vary considerably in their effectiveness (Kraft, 2019) and schools commonly receive multiple applications for open positions (Engel et al. 2014), it is difficult to use information collected during the hiring process to predict who will persist and be effective after they are hired (Rockoff, 2011). And since school districts often have high discretion in hiring staff, it is crucial to understand their hiring practices.

One approach to strategic staff selection in schools is the use of school site hiring committees to screen and select applicants. When hiring teachers, these committees commonly include the site principal, some incumbent teachers, and potentially other stakeholders. In principle, formally involving multiple stakeholders can improve hiring decisions by incorporating additional expertise and mitigating biases that might affect any individual screener.

While surveys and interviews provide some indication of administrators’ priorities in hiring (Diamond et al., 2020; Harris et al., 2010), research on how hiring committees operate in schools is nearly non-existent. Consequently, we do not know much about which characteristics are valued by committee members and whether candidates with these characteristics have greater probabilities of being hired. Additionally, the extent to which committee members agree amongst themselves about candidate quality could matter for the committee’s effectiveness (Martinkova & Goldhaber, 2015).

To investigate these issues, we use data from school hiring committees from one medium-sized school district in central Illinois. We analyze three data sources: ballots indicating hiring committee members’ rankings of all candidates, handwritten notes from each committee member describing candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, and information on which candidates are ultimately hired. The mean committee we observe has five voting members and interviews and ranks four candidates. We ask the following research questions.

1. To what extent do hiring committee members agree about the relative rankings of teacher candidates?
2. How are final rankings of candidates related to their strengths and weaknesses as evaluated by the hiring committee?
3. How are the final rankings of candidates related to their hiring probabilities?

Our preliminary results suggest the following findings. First, the hiring committees we observe have a high degree of agreement about which candidates are preferable to others (which we quantify using Kendall’s W statistic). This is especially evident in agreement about which single candidate is best. Second, using text analysis methods, we find several committee-assessed characteristics that are associated with higher candidate rankings, such as ‘interactive,’ ‘using technology,’ and ‘reteaching’. Lastly, candidates who are eventually hired are viewed substantially more favorably by their committees than candidates who are not hired. Ultimately, over half of positions are filled by the committee’s top choice.

To our knowledge, this is the first study to use authentic data from school hiring committees to examine the school staff hiring process. While exploratory in several respects, our study extends previous work, often based on surveys or interviews of school leaders, and deepens our understanding of critical but understudied aspects of school staff hiring practice.

Authors

• Haeryun Kim, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Paul Bruno, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign