Equitable Access to High-Quality Teachers and School Leaders

This body of research evaluates strategies for improving access to highly effective teachers and school leaders, especially for students from low-income backgrounds and students of color.

Evaluation of Pathways to Leadership in Urban Schools

Funder: U.S. Dept. of Education School Leadership Program Grant to TNTP and the RAND Corporation
Years: 2014-2018

Steele, J. L., Steiner, E. D., & Hamilton, L. S. (2020). Priming the leadership pipeline: School performance and climate under an urban school leadership residency program. Educational Administration Quarterly, 57(2), 221–256.
We evaluated a school leadership residency program that prepared a pipeline of educators from the local community to become future school principals. The two-year residency experience combined at least 370 hours of professional development with on-the-job training. Residents were employed as either assistant-level administrators in traditional or charter schools, or as teacher leaders in traditional schools. Of the 37 educators who completed the program, 1 became principal in the first 3 years due to few openings, so we estimated the effects of schools’ cumulative exposure to program residents and graduates, whose work focused on instructional practice and school climate. We used school-by-year panel data and school fixed effects to estimate program effects net of stable school characteristics. An additional resident-by-year in an administrative role in high schools was linked to an additional 15% of a school-level SD in math scale scores and an additional 3.6 percentage points in graduation rates, but also to an additional 10 percentage points in suspension rates. Results were sensitive to model specification, school level, and to residents’ placement in administrative or teacher leader roles. Highlighted results are from a more-conservative specification in which time trends can vary between the program city and the rest of the state. We found few effects on teachers’ perceptions of school climate in treated relative to comparison schools, though school climate was improving across the city during the study period.
Article Preprint Bibtex

Steele, J. L., Steiner, E. D., & Hamilton, L. S. (2021). Growing your own leadership pipeline: The case of an urban school leadership residency. In P. Youngs, J. Kim, & M. Mavrogordato (Eds.), Exploring Principal Development and Teacher Outcomes: How School Leaders Can Strengthen Teacher Efficacy and Commitment (1st ed., pp. 11–26). Routledge.
Drawing on a five-year study of a school leadership pipeline effort in a small city, this qualitative chapter offers recommendations for school districts about how to foster distributed leadership even when principal jobs are scarce. Based on annual focus groups and interviews with leadership residents and on interviews with school, district, and charter management organization (CMO) leaders, we found that aspiring leaders appreciated the residency program’s focus on instructional improvement but also wished for more guidance in culturally relevant and operational leadership. Recommendations include the need for cities to anticipate human capital needs at program inception and to formalize the mentoring role of existing school principals.
Chapter Preprint
Bibtex Related RAND Working Paper

Improving Equitable Access to High-Quality Teachers

Funders: Spencer Foundation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Years: 2007-2014

Steele, J. L., Pepper, M. J., Springer, M. G., & Lockwood, J. R. (2015). The distribution and mobility of effective teachers: Evidence from a large, urban school district. Economics of Education Review, 48, 86-101.
Using 7 years of student achievement data from a large urban school district in the south, this study examines the sorting of teachers’ value-added effectiveness estimates by student demographics and considers factors that may contribute to such sorting. We find that students in schools in the highest quartile of minority enrollments have teachers with value-added estimates that are about 0.11 of a student-level standard deviation lower than their peers in schools in the lowest minority quartile. However, neither teacher mobility patterns nor between-school differences in teacher qualifications seems responsible for this sorting. Though the highest minority schools face higher teacher turnover, they do not disproportionately lose their highest value-added teachers, nor are teachers with high value-added systematically migrating to lower-minority schools. Instead, teachers in the highest minority schools have lower value-added on average, regardless of experience. We find suggestive but inconclusive evidence that teachers’ improvement rates differ by minority-enrollment quartile. Highlights: (1) Study examines teachers of grades 4-8 in a large, urban district in the south. (2) 13 percent of variation in teacher value-added is between schools. (3) Teacher value-added & qualifications are negatively linked to minority enrollment. (4) Teacher mobility does not seem to drive the sorting of teacher value-added.
Article Preprint Online Appendix Bibtex

Zamarro, G., Engberg, J., Saavedra, J., Steele, J. L. (2015). Disentangling disadvantage: Can we distinguish good teaching from classroom composition? Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness (Special Issue on Measuring Teacher Performance), 8, 84-111.
This article investigates the use of teacher value-added estimates to assess the distribution of effective teaching across students of varying socioeconomic disadvantage in the presence of classroom composition effects. We examine, via simulations, how accurately commonly used teacher value-added estimators recover the rank correlation between true and estimated teacher effects and a parameter representing the distribution of effective teaching. We consider various scenarios of teacher assignment, within-teacher variability in classroom composition, the importance of classroom composition effects, and the presence of student unobserved heterogeneity. No single model recovers without bias estimates of the distribution parameter in all the scenarios we consider. Models that rank teacher effectiveness most accurately do not necessarily recover distribution parameter estimates with less bias. Since true teacher sorting in real data is seldom known, we recommend that analysts incorporate contextual information into their decisions about model choice and we offer some guidance on how to do so.
Article Preprint Bibtex

Steele, J. L., Murnane, R. J., & Willett, J. B. (2010). Do financial incentives help low-performing schools attract and keep academically talented teachers? Evidence from California. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 29(3), 451-478.
This study capitalizes on a natural experiment that occurred in California between 2000 and 2002. In those years, the state offered a competitively allocated $20,000 incentive called the Governor’s Teaching Fellowship (GTF) aimed at attracting academically talented, novice teachers to low-performing schools and retaining them in those schools for at least four years. Taking advantage of data on the career histories of 27,106 individuals who pursued California teaching licenses between 1998 and 2003, we use an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the unbiased impact of the GTF on the decisions of recipients to begin working in low-performing schools within 2 years after licensure program enrollment. We estimate that GTF recipients would have been less likely to teach in low-performing schools than observably similar counterparts had the GTF not existed, but that acquiring a GTF increased their probability of doing so by 28 percentage points. Examining retention patterns, we find that 75 percent of both GTF recipients and nonrecipients who began working in low-performing schools remained in such schools for at least four years.
Article NBER Working Paper Bibtex

Murnane, R. J. and Steele, J. L. (2007). What is the problem? The challenge of providing effective teachers for all children. The Future of Children, 17(1), 15-43.
Richard Murnane and Jennifer Steele argue that if the United States is to equip its young people with the skills essential in the new economy, high-quality teachers are more important than ever. In recent years, the demand for effective teachers has increased as enrollments have risen, class sizes have fallen, and a large share of the teacher workforce has begun to retire. Women and minorities have more career options than ever before, making it increasingly difficult to attract and retain the many effective teachers who are needed. Moreover, schools are limited in their ability to identify and reward the most effective teachers. Perhaps the most urgent problem facing American education, say Murnane and Steele, is the unequal distribution of high-quality teachers. Poor children and children of color are disproportionately assigned to teachers with the least preparation and the weakest academic backgrounds. Teacher turnover is high in schools that serve large shares of poor or nonwhite students because the work is difficult, and the teachers who undertake it are often the least equipped to succeed. Murnane and Steele point out that in response to these challenges, policymakers have proposed a variety of policy instruments to increase the supply of effective teachers and distribute those teachers more equitably across schools. Such proposals include across-the-board pay increases, more flexible pay structures such as pay-for-performance, and reduced restrictions on who is allowed to teach. Several of these proposals are already being implemented, but their effectiveness remains largely unknown. To measure how well these policies attract effective teachers to the profession and to the schools that need them most, rigorous evaluations are essential. Murnane and Steele also note that policymakers may benefit from looking beyond U.S. borders to understand how teacher labor markets work in other countries. Although policies rooted in one nation’s culture cannot be easily and quickly transplanted into another, it is important to understand what challenges other countries face, what policies they are using, and how well those policies are working to enhance teacher quality and improve student achievement.
Article ERIC (ungated) Bibtex

Steele, J. L., Engberg, J., & Stecher, B. M. (2014, Aug. 22). Flexibility is key in administration’s call for teacher equity plans. The RAND Blog.

Steele, J. L., Murnane, R. J., & Willett, J. B. (2010, July 14). Are public-service subsidies good for the public? Education Week, 29(36), 30–32.

Steele, J. L., Murnane, R. J., & Willett, J. B. (2010). Do financial incentives draw promising teachers to low-performing schools? Assessing the impact of the California Governor’s Teaching Fellowship. PACE Policy Brief Series. Sacramento, CA: Policy Analysis for California Education.

Enhancing Measures of Teacher and School Performance

Funders: Center for American Progress and the Sandler Foundation
Years: 2010-2012

Hamilton, L., Schwartz, H. L., Stecher, B., & Steele, J. L. (2013). Improving accountability through expanded measures of performance. Journal of Educational Administration, 51(4), 453-475.
The purpose of this paper is to examine how test-based accountability has influenced school and district practices and explore how states and districts might consider creating expanded systems of measures to address the shortcomings of traditional accountability. It provides research-based guidance for entities that are developing or adopting new measures of school performance. The study relies on literature review, consultation with expert advisers, review of state and district documentation, and semi-structured interviews with staff at state and local education agencies and research institutions. The research shows mixed effects of test-based accountability on student achievement and demonstrates that teachers and administrators change their practices in ways that respond to the incentives provided by the system. The review of state and district measurement systems shows widespread use of additional measures of constructs, such as school climate and college readiness. There is a clear need for additional research on the short- and long-term effects of expanded systems of measures. In particular, currently little is known about how the inclusion of input and process measures influences educators’ practices or student outcomes. The research suggests several practical steps that can be taken to promote effective systems of measurement, including providing supports for high-quality teaching to accompany new measures, offering flexibility to respond to local needs, and conducting validity studies that address the various purposes of the measures. The paper provides new information about how states and districts are expanding their systems of measures for various purposes, and informs accountability policy by highlighting the benefits and limitations of current outcomes-based approaches to accountability and by clarifying the trade-offs and decisions that should be considered.
Article Bibtex

Schwartz, H. L., Hamilton, L. S., & Stecher, B. M., & Steele, J. L. (2011). Expanded measures of school performance. Santa Monica, RAND Corporation.
The upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provides an opportunity to reconsider what factors school performance-reporting systems should include. Critics of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have pointed to the narrowing effects of the law’s focus on mathematics and reading achievement, and they have called for efforts to broaden the measures used to rate schools. This report poses and addresses questions regarding expanded measures of school quality to reflect the multiple goals of schooling. The authors convened a panel of five experts on school accountability policies, scanned published research about expanded measures of school performance, conducted ten semistructured phone interviews with staff from local or state education agencies and research institutions, and reviewed the measures employed in each state that publishes its own school ratings in addition to those required under NCLB. After classifying the measures state education agencies use to develop their own school ratings, they then describe categories of measures that research indicates are the most rapidly growing in usage by state and local education agencies. They supplement categories of measures with more detailed examples of localities that have adopted them, examining why they adopted the measures and how the measures are employed. This report describes promising directions for expanding the set of measures that schools have at their disposal while acknowledging the need for more research on how the availability of such measures affects educational practice and student achievement. Each chapter contains footnotes. A bibliography is included. (Contains 1 figure and 2 tables.) [Financial support for this report was provided by the Sandler Foundation.]
Report Bibtex

Steele, J. L., Hamilton, L. S., Stecher, B. M. (2010). Incorporating student performance measures into teacher evaluation systems. Washington, DC: Center for American Progress and the RAND Corporation. ISBN: 978-0-8330-5250-6
Many existing teacher evaluation and reward systems do not capture variation in teachers’ ability to improve student performance on standardized tests. Improved access to longitudinal data systems that link teachers to students facilitates the development of systems that incorporate student achievement gains into teacher evaluations. However, two important challenges remain: generating valid estimates of teachers’ contributions to student learning and including teachers who do not teach subjects or grades that are tested annually. In their analysis of the systems of three districts and two states that have begun or are planning to incorporate measures of student performance into their teacher evaluations, the authors examine how the five profiled systems are addressing assessment quality, evaluating teachers in nontested subjects and grades, and assigning teachers responsibility for particular students. The authors also examine what is and is not known about the quality of various student performance measures used by school systems and offer recommendations to policymakers about approaches to consider when incorporating student achievement measures into teacher evaluation systems.
Report Bibtex RAND Research Brief