View Research by Author - Dan Goldhaber

Publications

Over 2000 teachers in Washington state received reduction-in-force (RIF) notices in the past two years. Linking data on these RIF notices to a unique dataset of student, teacher, school, and district variables the authors determine factors that predict the likelihood of a teacher receiving a RIF notice. A teacher's seniority is the greatest predictor, but (all else equal) master's degree teachers and credentialed teachers in the "high-needs areas" of math, science, and special education were less likely to receive a RIF notice. For a subset of the teachers there is no observed relationship between effectiveness and the likelihood of receiving a RIF notice. Results suggest a different group of teachers would be targeted for layoffs under an effectiveness-based vs. seniority-driven layoff system.

Reform advocates and policymakers concerned about the quality and distribution of teachers among schools support proposals of alternative compensation for teachers in hard-to-staff schools and subject-areas. But the successful implementation of such proposals depends on teacher attitudes. Results from a 2006 survey of teachers in Washington State linked to school and district data confirm that teacher opinion about pay reform is not uniform, and illustrate teacher preferences for different pay structures vary substantially by individual and workplace characteristics. Policymakers interested in implementing new pay systems should carefully assess teacher opinion in determining where (and how) they invest in them.

This paper addresses two questions: How well do teachers understand their current pension plans? And, what do they think about alternative plan structures? The data come from administrative records and a 2006 survey of teachers in Washington State. The results suggest Washington's teachers are fairly knowledgeable about their pensions, though new entrants and mid-career teachers appear to be less knowledgeable than veteran teachers. As for teachers' preferences for plan structure, the survey suggests that when it comes to investing additional retirement savings, a plurality of teachers favor defined contribution plans which offer more portability and choice, but more risk than traditional defined benefit plans. All else equal, teachers newer to the profession are more likely than veteran teachers to favor a defined contribution structure.

Most studies that have fueled alarm over the attrition and mobility rates of teachers have relied on proxy indicators of teacher quality, even though these proxies correlate only weakly with student performance. This paper examines the attrition and mobility of early-career teachers of varying quality using value-added measures of teacher performance. Unlike previous studies, this paper focuses on the variation in these effects across the effectiveness distribution. On average, more effective teachers tend to stay in their initial schools and in teaching. But the lowest performing teachers, who are generally the most likely to transfer between schools, appear to "churn" within the system, and teacher mobility appears significantly affected by student demographics and achievement levels.

Race to the Top encourages states to adopt policies that measure the impact of individual teachers on student learning and use those measures to inform human capital decisions including tenure. As a number of states begin to revamp their tenure-granting policies, the idea that high-stakes personnel decisions need to be linked to direct measures of teacher effectiveness is gaining traction among education policymakers. Contributing to the debate over policies that enhance teacher quality, this brief evaluates how well early-career performance signals teacher effectiveness after tenure.

Reforming teacher tenure is an idea that appears to be gaining traction with the underlying assumption that one can infer, to a reasonable degree, how well a teacher will perform over her career based on estimates of her early-career effectiveness. In this paper, the authors explore the potential for using value-added models to estimate performance and inform tenure decisions. There is little evidence that the variation of teacher effects change over teacher careers, but strong evidence that prior year estimates of job performance predict student achievement, even when there is a multi-year lag between the two.

Considering that having a quality teacher is the foremost in-school predictor of students' success, ensuring teacher excellence is vital to the nation's educational system. In Creating a New Teaching Profession, diverse scholars assess the state of human capital development in the teaching profession today and how to progress.

Using individual teacher and student-level longitudinal data from North Carolina, this research brief presents selected findings from work examining the stability of value-added model estimates of teacher effectiveness, focusing on their implication for teacher tenure policies and making high stakes personnel decisions. Findings show year-to-year correlations in teacher effects are modest, but pre-tenure estimates of teacher job performance do predict estimated post-tenure performance in both math and reading, and would therefore seem to be a reasonable metric to use as a factor in making substantive teacher selection decisions.

This paper brings to bear new evidence from a remarkable five-year survey conducted of a census of public schools in Florida, coupled with detailed administrative data on student performance. We show that schools facing accountability pressure changed their instructional practices in meaningful ways. In addition, we present medium-run evidence of the effects of school accountability on student test scores, and find that a significant portion of these test score gains can likely be attributed to the changes in school policies and practices that we uncover in our surveys.

Most studies that have fueled alarm over the attrition and mobility rates of high-quality teachers have relied on proxy indicators of teacher quality, which recent research finds to be only weakly correlated with value-added measures of teachers' performance. We examine attrition and mobility of teachers using teacher value-added measures for early-career teachers in North Carolina public schools from 1996 to 2002. Our findings suggest that the most-effective teachers tend to stay in teaching and in specific schools. Contrary to common expectations, we do not find that more-effective teachers are more likely to leave more-challenging schools.

Return to list of authors