Staffing, Finance, and Operations
Turnover at the Top: Estimating the Effects of Principal Turnover on Student, Teacher, and School Outcomes
One in five schools loses its principal each year. Despite the prevalence of principal turnover, little empirical research has examined its effects on school outcomes. Because principal turnover may occur in response to or contemporaneous with a downturn in student achievement, the effect of a… more →
Reforming Teacher Pension Plans: The Case of Kansas, the 1st Teacher Cash Balance Plan
The ongoing crisis in teacher pension funding has led states to consider various reforms in plan design, to replace the traditional benefit formulas, based on years of service and final average salary (FAS). One such design is a cash balance (CB) plan, long deployed in the private sector,… more →
Stress in Boom Times: Understanding Teachers’ Economic Anxiety in a High Cost Urban District
Despite growing concern over teachers’ ability to live comfortably where they work, we know little about the systematic impacts of affordability on teachers’ well-being, particularly in high-cost urban areas. We use novel survey data from San Francisco Unified School District to identify the… more →
General Equilibrium Effects of Recruiting High-Performing Teachers for School Turnaround: Evidence from Tennessee
Many districts and states have begun implementing incentives to attract high-performing teachers to low-performing schools. Previous research has found that these incentives are effective. However, effects on the schools and students these teachers leave behind has not been examined… more →
The Hidden Costs of Teacher Turnover
High teacher turnover imposes numerous burdens on the schools and districts from which teachers depart. Some of these burdens are explicit and take the form of recruiting, hiring and training costs. Others are more hidden and take the form of changes to the composition and quality of the… more →
School Principal Race and the Hiring and Retention of Racially Diverse Teachers
Exploiting variation from principal and teacher transitions over long administrative data panels in Missouri and Tennessee, we estimate the effects of principal race on the hiring and turnover of racially diverse teachers. Evidence from the two states is strikingly similar. Black principals… more →
The Effect of Increased Funding on Student Achievement: Evidence From Texas's Small District Adjustment
We leverage an obscure set of rules in Texas’s school funding formula granting some districts additional revenue as a function of size and sparsity. We use variation from kinks and discontinuities in this formula to ask how districts spend additional discretionary funds, and whether these… more →
Spending More on the Poor? A Comprehensive Summary of State-Specific Responses to School Finance Reforms from 1990–2014
Sixty-seven school finance reforms (SFRs), a combination of court-ordered and legislative reforms, have taken place since 1990; however, there is little empirical evidence on the heterogeneity of SFR effects. In this study, we estimate the effects of SFRs on revenues and expenditures between… more →
Push or Pull: School-Level Factors That Influence Teacher Mobility in Turnaround Schools
Recruiting and retaining teachers can be challenging for many schools, especially in low-performing urban schools in which teachers turn over at higher rates. In this study, we examine three types of school-level attributes that may influence teachers’ decisions to enter or transfer schools:… more →
Making a Match: How Successful High-Poverty Schools Hire Teachers
Effective teacher hiring is fundamental to improving schools and yet few studies investigate this process. In this exploratory study of six successful, high-poverty schools (three charter, three district) in one Massachusetts city, we analyze the policy contexts that influenced hiring and… more →
The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers
We examine the long-run impacts of having a same-race teacher. First, we leverage data from the Tennessee STAR class-size experiment to show that black students randomly assigned to a black teacher in grades K-3 are 5 percentage points (7%) more likely to graduate from high school and 4… more →
A Tale of Two Types of Schools: An Exploration of How School Working Conditions Influence Black Male Teacher Turnover
This phenomenological study draws on semi-structured interviews with 27 Black male teachers across 14 schools in an urban school district—seven schools with three or more Black male teachers and seven schools with one Black male teacher. Consistent with theories about teacher turnover, findings… more →
School Finance Reforms, Teachers’ Unions, and the Allocation of School Resources
School finance reforms caused some of the most dramatic increases in intergovernmental aid from states to local governments in U.S. history. We examine whether teachers’ unions affected the fraction of reform-induced state aid that passed through to local spending and the allocation of these… more →
School District Operational Spending and Student Outcomes: Evidence from Tax Elections in Seven States
We use close tax elections to estimate the impact of school district funding increases on operational spending and student outcomes across seven states. Districts with passing levies directed new revenue toward support services and instructor salaries but did not increase teacher staffing levels… more →
Delayed Benefits: Effects of California School District Bond Elections on Achievement by Socioeconomic Status
Contradictory evidence of the relationship between education funding and student achievement could reflect heterogeneous effects by revenue source or student characteristics. This study examines potential heterogeneous effects of a particular type of local revenue – bond funds for capital… more →