From Candidate to Classroom: Research-Based Practices for Recruiting and Hiring Highly-Effective Teachers
Category: Staffing, Finance, and Operations
In this paper I study how performance-based compensation affects teacher mobility and sorting using the Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA), a statewide program introduced in 2019. TIA gives teachers a tiered quality designation, Recognized, Exemplary, or Master, based on performance evaluations and value-added measures. These designations are portable across schools and come with a salary supplement that rises with school disadvantage and rural status. Using administrative data on Texas public school teachers, I combine a staggered difference-in-differences event-study design with a discrete choice model of school choice that allows for heterogeneous teacher preferences over school SES. I find that TIA increases post-designation mobility, but that the additional movement tilts toward more advantaged campuses rather than the highest-need schools. Preference estimates imply that the average designated teacher requires $6,036 in additional annual compensation to accept a one-standard-deviation increase in school disadvantage, while the salary gradient created by TIA falls short of that benchmark at most designation levels. These results suggest that TIA’s portable credential expands effective teachers’ outside options, but that the SES-targeted pay gradient is too shallow to redirect that added mobility toward disadvantaged schools.
Keywords
Teacher sorting; performance pay; teacher preferences; compensating differentials; educational inequality
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/a02m-8z45
