Research Areas

Teacher pension systems target retirements within a narrow range of the career cycle by penalizing individuals who separate too soon or remain employed too long. The penalties result in the retention of some teachers who would otherwise choose to leave, and the premature exit of some teachers who would otherwise choose to stay. We examine how the effects of teachers' pension incentives on workforce composition influence teacher quality. Teachers who are held in by the "pull" incentives in the pension systems are not more effective, on average, than the typical teacher. Teachers who are encouraged to exit by the "push" incentives are more effective on average. We conclude that the net effect of teachers' pension incentives on workforce quality is small, but negative. Given the substantial and growing costs of current systems, and the lack of evidence regarding their efficacy, experimentation by traditional and charter schools with alternative retirement benefit structures would be useful.

Citation: Cory Koedel, Michael Podgursky (2014). Teacher Pension Systems, the Composition of the Teaching Workforce, and Teacher Quality. CALDER Working Paper No. 72

We examine the efficiency implications of imposing proportionality in teacher evaluation systems. Proportional evaluations force comparisons to be between equally-circumstanced teachers. We contrast proportional evaluations with global evaluations, which compare teachers to each other regardless of teaching circumstance. We consider a policy where administrators use the ratings from the evaluation system to help shape the teaching workforce, and define efficiency in terms of student achievement. Our analysis indicates that proportionality can be imposed in teacher evaluation systems without efficiency costs under a wide range of evaluation and estimation conditions. Proportionality is efficiency-enhancing in some cases. These findings are notable given that proportional teacher evaluations offer a number of other policy benefits.

Citation: Cory Koedel, Jiaxi Li (2014). The Efficiency Implications of Using Proportional Evaluations to Shape the Teaching Workforce. CALDER Working Paper No. 106

We use a unique longitudinal sample of student teachers (“interns”) from six Washington state teacher training institutions to investigate patterns of entry into the teaching workforce. Specifically, we estimate split population models that simultaneously estimate the impact of individual characteristics and student teaching experiences on the timing and probability of initial hiring as a public school teacher. Not surprisingly, we find that interns endorsed to teach in “difficult-to-staff” areas are more likely to be hired as teachers than interns endorsed in other areas. Younger interns, white interns, and interns who did their student teaching in suburban schools are also more likely to find a teaching job. Prospective teachers who do their internships at schools that have more teacher turnover are more likely to find employment, often at those schools. Finally, interns with higher credential exam scores are more likely to be hired by the school where they did their student teaching. Contrary to expectations, few of the measures of the quality or the experience of an intern’s cooperating teacher are predictive of workforce entry in the expected direction.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, Roddy Theobald (2013). Knocking on the Door to the Teaching Profession? Modeling the Entry of Prospective Teachers into the Workforce. CALDER Working Paper No. 105

This study explores whether teacher performance trajectory over time differs by school poverty settings. Focusing on elementary school mathematics teachers in North Carolina and Florida, we find no systematic relationship between school student poverty rates and teacher performance trajectories. In both high (>=60% FRL) and lower-poverty (<60% FRL) schools, teacher performance improves the fastest in the first five years and then flattens out in years five to ten. Teacher performance growth resumes between year ten and 15 in North Carolina but remains flat in Florida. In both school poverty settings, there is significant variation in teacher performance trajectories. At all career stages, the fastest-growing teachers (75th percentile) improve by .02-.04 standard deviations more in student gain scores annually than slower teachers (25th percentile). Our findings suggest that the lack of productivity “return” to experience in high-poverty schools reported in the literature is unlikely to be the result of differential teacher learning in high and lower-poverty schools.

Citation: Zeyu Xu, Umut Özek, Michael Hansen (2013). Teacher Performance Trajectories in High and Lower-Poverty Schools. CALDER Working Paper No. 101

This paper studies the pension preferences of Washington State public school teachers by examining two periods of time during which teachers were able to choose between enrolling in a traditional defined benefit plan and a hybrid plan with defined benefit and defined contribution components. Our findings suggest that a large share of teachers are willing to transfer from a traditional DB plan to a hybrid pension plan, and that the probability that a teacher will choose to transfer is related to financial incentives and factors related to risk preferences. Among new hires, observable teacher and job characteristics explain little of the pension decision, but there is some evidence that more effective teachers are more likely to enroll in the hybrid pension plan. The general popularity of the hybrid plan suggests that states could reduce the financial risk associated with DB pensions without sacrificing the desirability of pension plans to employees.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout (2013). Which Plan to Choose? The Determinants of Pension System Choice for Public School Teachers. CALDER Working Paper No. 98

In this descriptive paper we detail the structure of two Washington State teacher retirement plans: a traditional defined benefit plan and a hybrid defined benefit-defined contribution plan. We provide preliminary evidence on how retirement plan structures may relate to the choices that teachers make. Our analysis of the financial incentives offered to Washington State teachers under the two different plans reveals several patterns that may influence teacher behavior. Teachers experience large gains in their pension wealth by crossing key age and experience thresholds. The relative magnitude of expected pension wealth differs sharply between the plans depending on when a teacher anticipates exiting the position, and the magnitude of anticipated returns to investment. We observe teacher choices between the traditional defined benefit plan and the hybrid plan during two time periods: 1996–1997 and 2008–2010. In 1996–1997 teachers were offered a financial inducement to switch into the newly created hybrid plan and defaulted into staying in the traditional plan if no action was taken. Teachers hired during 2008–2010 defaulted into the hybrid plan if no action was taken. Most of the teachers who were given a choice opted for the hybrid plan. This preference for the hybrid plan is more pronounced among the 1996–1997 cohort, who received a financial incentive in the form of a transfer payment for switching. The notable exception is among teachers who were over 55, and or teachers with relatively high experience levels, who were more likely to choose the traditional defined benefit plan.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Annie Pennucci, Wesley Bignell (2012). Teacher Pension Choice: Surveying the Landscape in Washington State. CALDER Working Paper No. 81

During the late 1990's public pension funds across the United States accrued large actuarial surpluses. The seemingly flush conditions of the pension funds led legislators in most states to substantially improve retirement benefits for public workers, including teachers. In this study we examine the benefit enhancements to the teacher pension system in Missouri. These enhancements resulted in large windfall gains for teachers who were close to retirement when the legislation was enacted. By contrast, novice teachers and teachers who had not yet entered the labor force, were made worse off. The reason is that front-end contribution rates have been raised for current teachers to offset past liabilities accrued from the enhancements. Other things equal, the teaching profession in Missouri is now less appealing for young teachers than it was before the pension enhancements were enacted.

Citation: Cory Koedel, Shawn Ni, Michael Podgursky (2012). Who Benefits from Pension Enhancements?. CALDER Working Paper No. 76

In this paper we report on work estimating the stability of value-added estimates of teacher effects, an important area of investigation given public interest in workforce policies that implicitly assume effectiveness is a stable attribute within teachers. The results strongly reject the hypothesis that teacher performance is completely stable within teachers over long periods of time, but estimates suggest that a component of performance appears to persist within teachers, even over a ten-year panel. We also find that little of the changes in teacher effectiveness estimates within teachers can be explained by observable characteristics.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Michael Hansen (2012). Is it Just a Bad Class? Assessing the Long-term Stability of Estimated Teacher Performance. CALDER Working Paper No. 73

In this paper we consider the challenges involved in evaluating teacher preparation programs when controlling for school contextual bias. Including school fixed effects in the achievement models used to estimate preparation program effects controls for school environment by relying on differences among student outcomes within the same schools to identify the program effects. However, identification of preparation program effects using school fixed effects requires teachers from different programs to teach in the same school. Even if program effects are identified, the precision of the estimated effects will depend on the degree to which graduates from different programs overlap across schools. In addition, if the connections between preparation programs result from the overlap of atypical graduates or from graduates teaching in atypical school environments, use of school effects could produce bias. Using statewide data from Florida, we show that teachers tend to teach in schools near the programs in which they received their training, but there is still sufficient overlap across schools to identify preparation program effects. We show that the ranking of preparation programs varies significantly depending on whether or not school environment is taken into account via school fixed effects. We find that schools and teachers that are integral to connecting preparation programs are atypical, with disproportionately high percentages of Hispanic teachers and students compared to the state averages. Finally, we find significant variance inflation in the estimated program effects when controlling for school fixed effects, and that the size of the variance inflation factor depends crucially on the length of the window used to compare graduates teaching in the same schools.

Citation: Kata Mihaly, Daniel McCaffery, Tim Sass, J.R. Lockwood (2012). Where You Come From or Where You Go? Distinguishing Between School Quality and the Effectiveness of Teacher Preparation Program Graduates. CALDER Working Paper No. 63