Working Paper: NBER ID: w31051
Authors: Andrew J. Morgan; Minh Nguyen; Eric A. Hanushek; Ben Ost; Steven G. Rivkin
Abstract: Efforts to attract and retain effective educators in high poverty public schools have had limited success. Dallas ISD addressed this challenge by using information produced by its evaluation and compensation reforms as the basis for effectiveness-adjusted payments that provided large compensating differentials to attract and retain effective teachers in its lowest achievement schools. The Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) program offers salary supplements to educators with records of high performance who are willing to work in the most educationally disadvantaged schools. We document that ACE resulted in immediate and sustained increases in student achievement, providing strong evidence that the multi-measure evaluation system identifies effective educators who foster the development of cognitive skills. The improvements at ACE schools were dramatic, bringing average achievement in the previously lowest performing schools close to the district average. When ACE stipends are largely eliminated, a substantial fraction of highly effective teachers leaves, and test scores fall. This highlights the central importance of the performance-based incentives to attract and retain effective educators in previously low-achievement schools.
Keywords: teacher effectiveness; educational equity; performance-based incentives; student achievement
JEL Codes: H0; I21; I28; J01; J45
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| ACE program implementation (C22) | student achievement increase (I24) |
| financial incentives (M52) | teacher retention (M51) |
| teacher retention (M51) | student achievement increase (I24) |
| ACE program implementation (C22) | teacher effectiveness increase (A21) |
| ACE stipends elimination (I24) | teacher departure increase (J63) |
| teacher departure (J63) | student achievement decline (I21) |