The Qualifications and Classroom Performance of Teachers Moving to Charter Schools

Do charter schools draw good teachers from traditional, mainstream public schools? Using an eleven-year panel of North Carolina public school teachers, the author finds nuanced patterns of teacher quality flowing into charter schools. High rates of inexperienced and unlicensed teachers moved to charter schools, but among regularly licensed teachers changing schools, charter movers had higher licensure test scores than other moving teachers, and they were more likely to be highly experienced. The author estimates measures of value added for a subset of elementary teachers and show that charter movers were less effective than other mobile teachers and colleagues within their sending schools, by 3 to 4 percent of a student-level standard deviation in achievement.