Explaining the Short Careers of High-Achieving Teachers in Schools with Low-Performing Students

Low-achieving students often are taught by the least-qualified teachers. These disparities begin when teachers take their first jobs, and in urban areas they are worsened by teachers’ subsequent decisions to transfer and quit. Such quits and transfers increase disparities in at least two ways. First, more qualified teachers are substantially more likely to leave schools having the lowest-achieving students. For example, of the new teachers hired in New York City’s lowest-achieving schools in 1996–1998, 28 percent scored in the lowest quartile on the general-knowledge certification exam. Of those remaining in the same schools five years later, 44 percent had scores in the lowest quartile. In contrast, 22 percent of the new teachers in the higher-achieving schools were in the lowest quartile, which only increased to 24 percent for those remaining after five years. Second, the generally high teacher turnover in lowerperforming schools disadvantage students in those schools since the effectiveness of teachers increases over the first few years of their careers. Twenty-seven percent of first-year teachers in New York City’s lower-performing schools do not return the following year, compared to 15 percent in the quartile of schools having the relatively highest student achievement. In this paper we examine New York City elementary school teachers’ decisions to stay in the same school, transfer to another school in the district, transfer to another district, or leave teaching in New York State during the first five years of their careers. Our model allows us to go beyond past research in three important ways: examining how transfer and quit behavior is influenced by (i) interactions between teacher qualifications and school-level student achievement, (ii) unobserved heterogeneity in teachers’ responses to school-level student attributes, and (iii) the distance from new teachers’ prior homes to their initial job. Many factors influence teacher transfers and quits. Teachers respond positively to increased salary, although the variation in salary across districts often is not large enough to strongly affect teacher sorting. Non-pecuniary job characteristics such as class size, preparation time, facilities, student characteristics, and school leadership also can affect teacher decisions, and differences in these characteristics can be great across schools, especially in large urban areas (see Eric Hanushek et al., 1999; Loeb et al., 2005). In addition, teachers prefer schools and districts similar and geographically close to those they attended in high school (Boyd et al., 2004, 2005). Several recent state-specific studies have considered student characteristics. Benjamin Scafidi et al. (2003) use a competing-risk model and find that Georgia elementary teachers move from schools with higher proportions of minority students and from low-performing schools, but the latter is explained by teacher preferences for fewer minority students. Hanushek et al. (2004), using a similar model and Texas data, find that teachers prefer higher-achieving students even after controlling for student racial composition. Both studies interact teacher race * Boyd, Lankford, and Wyckoff: University at Albany, Albany, NY 12222; Loeb: Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. We are grateful to Richard Murnane for comments and to the Smith Richardson Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education for financial support. We also appreciate assistance with data from the New York State Education Department. None of these organizations necessarily supports the views expressed in this paper. Any errors are attributable to the authors. 1 School performance is based on the 4th-grade English Language Arts exam. 2 The 28 versus 22 percent comparison for entering (mostly certified) teachers understates the actual difference in the qualifications of new teachers across schools. For example, approximately half of the new teachers in the lowest-achieving schools were not certified, compared to 20 percent in the higher-achieving schools. 3 Recent studies include Peter Dolton and Wilbert van der Klaauw (1999) and Todd Stinebrickner (2000).