School accountability and teacher mobility

Abstract

This paper presents the first causal evidence on the effects of school accountability systems on teacher labor markets. We exploit a 2002 change in Florida's school accountability system that exogenously shocked some schools to higher accountability grades and others to lower accountability grades, and measure whether teachers in shocked schools are more or less likely to move. Using microdata from the universe of Florida public school teachers, we find strong evidence that accountability shocks influence the teacher labor market; specifically, teachers are more likely to leave schools that have been downward shocked-especially to the bottom grade-and they are less likely to leave schools that have been upward shocked. We also find that accountability shocks influence the distribution of the measured quality of teachers (in terms of value added measures) who stay and leave their school, though the average differences are not large.

Teacher Quality and Teacher Mobility

“…7 In particular, we employ individual-specific annual salary (excluding supplements for coaching or extended-day services like after-school tutoring and performance-based bonuses), as our measure of teacher compensation. For evidence on the effects of salaries on teacher mobility and retention see Murnane and Olsen (1990); Mont and Rees (1996); Gritz and Theobald (1996); Reed, Rueben and Barbour (2006); Feng (2010); and Clotfelter, Ladd and Vigdor (2011). We also estimated some specifications with district fixed effects to account for differences in the cost of living across counties.…”

“…Using the nationally representative School and Staffing Survey that tracks teachers across state borders and follows them into other occupations, Feng (2010) concludes that misclassifications of the three types of movers (i.e., inter-state movers, movers to private school within same state, and movers to private schools in other states) are not a major concern in geographically large states like Florida. Our analysis of teacher quality and mobility covers school years 2000/01 through 2003/04.…”

“…Though counterintuitive, teachers making intra-district moves 15 In Florida, schools are assigned letter grades based on student performance on standardized exams. See Florida Department of Education (2010) and Feng, Figlio and Sass (2010). School grades were converted to numeric score of 4, 3, 2, 1 and 0 for A, B, C, D, and F schools.…”

“…Similarly, teachers, particularly white teachers, tend to move away from schools with high percentages of minority students (Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin 2004;D. Boyd et al 2005;Imazeki 2005;Scafidi, Sjoquist, and Stinebrickner 2007;Feng 2009;Feng 2010;Feng 2011).…”

How Does School Accountability Affect Teachers?

“…As with all regression discontinuity designs, the analysis used in this paper focuses on schools right next to the grade thresholds, and thus holds fixed the effects of concurrent reforms. This builds on some earlier papers in the literature that used difference-in-differences strategies which could be more subject to these identification concerns (Clotfelter et al, 2004; Boyd et al, 2008), with Feng et al (2010 and Gjefsen and Gunnes (2016) more recent exceptions. Feng et al (2010) use unexpected changes to the school accountability grading system in Florida that exogenously "shocked" some schools' grades, while Gjefsen and Gunnes (2016) uses triple difference specifications.…”