Moving High-Performing Teachers: Implementation of Transfer Incentives in Seven Districts

There is growing concern that the nation’s most effective teachers are not working in the schools with the most disadvantaged students (Goldhaber 2008; Peske and Haycock 2006; Tennessee Department of Education 2007; Sass et al. 2010; Glazerman and Max 2011). Policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels have considered a range of policies for helping struggling schools attract and retain effective teachers. One goal of such policies is to improve the access that disadvantaged students have to top teachers. Strategies for advancing this goal include alternative teacher preparation and certification, recruitment bonuses for serving in hard-to-staff schools or subjects, intensive mentoring and professional development, and performance-based pay. These strategies have been implemented with funding from the federal government, state and local governments, and nongovernment sources. Some have also been implemented in the context of research intended to gauge their effectiveness (Glazerman et al. 2006; Glazerman et al. 2010; Glazerman and Seifullah 2010; Springer et al. 2011). But to date, there is little rigorous evidence of any of these strategies demonstrating clear success in raising student achievement in the U.S.
This report describes the implementation and intermediate impacts of an intervention designed to provide incentives for a school district’s highest-performing teachers to work in its lowest-achieving schools. The report is part of a larger study in which random assignment was used to form two equivalent groups of classrooms organized into teacher “teams” that are composed of teachers in the same grade level and subject (math, reading, or both in the case of an elementary school grade). Teams were assigned to either a treatment group that had the chance to participate in the intervention described below and or a control group that did not. Intermediate outcomes, measured for both the treatment and control teams, include the mix of teachers who make up the team, the climate of collaboration and cooperation in the team, and the way in which resources are allocated within the teacher team. A future report will focus on the impacts of the intervention on student achievement and other outcomes like retention.