Research Areas

Analyses of public policy issues often rely on administrative data collected by state and local governments. The reliability of such analyses is contingent on the quality of the data and it is tempting for researchers to take the accuracy of administrative data for granted. In this paper we show how this can lead to spurious research findings. Specifically, we use two sets of administrative data on teacher compensation to study the issue of salary spiking (where end-of-career spikes in compensation are used to boost pension benefits) in Washington State. We illustrate how discrepancies in the reporting of pensionable compensation can lead one to strikingly different conclusions about the prevalence and financial implications of salary-spiking behavior. Our findings point to the importance of understanding how data collection processes and administrative uses of the data may (fail to) incentivize accuracy in reporting.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Kristian Holden (2018). Public Pensions and Salary Spiking: A Cautionary Tale of Data Inaccuracy Leading to Erroneous Results. CALDER Working Paper No. 202-0918-1

State-specific licensing policies and pension plans create mobility costs for educators who cross state lines. We empirically test whether these costs affect production in schools – a hypothesis that follows directly from economic theory on labor frictions – using geocoded data on school locations and state boundaries. We find that achievement is lower in mathematics, and to a lesser extent in reading, at schools that are more exposed to state boundaries. A detailed investigation of the selection of schools into boundary regions yields no indication of systematic differences between boundary and non-boundary schools along other measured dimensions. Moreover, we show that cross-district labor frictions do not explain state boundary effects. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that mobility frictions in educator labor markets near state boundaries lower student achievement.

Citation: Dongwoo Kim, Cory Koedel, Shawn Ni, Michael Podgursky (2017). Labor Market Frictions and Production Efficiency in Public Schools. CALDER Working Paper No. 166

We investigate the relationship between teacher licensure test scores and student test achievement and high school course-taking. We focus on three subject/grade combinations—middle school math, ninth-grade algebra and geometry, and ninth-grade biology—and find evidence that a teacher’s basic skills test scores are modestly predictive of student achievement in middle and high school math and highly predictive of student achievement in high school biology. A teacher’s subject-specific licensure test scores are a consistent and statistically significant predictor of student achievement only in high school biology. Finally, we find little evidence that students assigned to middle school teachers with higher basic-skills test scores are more likely to take advanced math and science courses in high school.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Trevor Gratz, Roddy Theobald (2016). What’s in a Teacher Test? Assessing the Relationship between Teacher Licensure Test Scores and Student Secondary STEM Achievement. CALDER Working Paper No. 158

Most public school teachers in the United States are enrolled in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Using administrative micro data from four states, combined with national pension funding data, we show these plans have accumulated substantial unfunded liabilities – effectively debt – owing to previous plan operations. On average across state plans, over 10 percent of current teachers’ earnings are being set aside to pay for previously-accrued pension liabilities. This amounts to a large reduction in real operating spending per student. Our findings make clear that a significant fraction of the resources allocated toward teacher compensation in current public education budgets is not being invested in resources to educate today’s students at all.

August 2016 Update; Originally posted November 2015

Citation: Benjamin Backes, Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Cory Koedel, Shawn Ni, Michael Podgursky, P. Brett Xiang, Zeyu Xu (2016). Benefit or Burden? On the Intergenerational Inequity of Teacher Pension Plans. CALDER Working Paper No. 148

Educators raise concerns about what happens to students when they are exposed to new teachers or teachers who are new to a school. These teachers face the challenge of preparing a year’s worth of new material, perhaps in an unfamiliar work environment. However, even when teachers remain in the same school they can switch assignments—teaching either a different grade or a different subject than they have taught before. While there exists some quasi-experimental literature on the effects for student achievement of being new to the profession (e.g., Rockoff, 2004) or to a school (Hanushek & Rivkin, 2010), to date there is little evidence about how much within-school churn typically happens and how it affects students. We use longitudinal panel data from New York City from 1974 to 2010 to document the phenomenon, and we tie assignment-switching behaviors to available student achievement in the period since 1999.

Citation: Allison Atteberry, Susanna Loeb, James Wyckoff (2016). High Rates of Within-School Teacher Reassignments and Implications for Student Achievement. CALDER Working Paper No. 151

We use data from workers in the largest public-sector occupation in the United States – teaching – to examine the effect of pension enhancements on employee retention. Specifically, we study a 1999 enhancement to the benefit formula for public school teachers in St. Louis that resulted in an immediate and dramatic increase in their incentives to remain in covered employment. To identify the effect of the enhancement on teacher retention, we leverage the fact that the strength of the incentive increase varied across the workforce depending on how far teachers were from retirement eligibility when it was enacted. Our results indicate that the St. Louis enhancement – which was structurally similar to enhancements that were enacted in other public pension plans across the United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s – was not a cost-effective way to increase employee retention.

Citation: Cory Koedel, P. Brett Xiang (2015). Pension Enhancements and the Retention of Public Employees: Evidence from Teaching. CALDER Working Paper No. 123

Due to data limitations, very little is known about patterns of teacher cross-state mobility. The issue is important because barriers to cross-state mobility create labor market frictions that could lead both current and prospective teachers to opt out of the teaching profession. For this paper, we match state-level administrative data sets from Oregon and Washington and present evidence on patterns of in-service teacher mobility between these two states. We find levels of cross-state mobility that are drastically lower than levels of within-state mobility, even when accounting for proximity to the border. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that there are significant penalties to cross-state mobility that may be attributable to state-specific licensure regulations, seniority rules and pension structures.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Kristian Holden, Nate Brown (2015). Crossing the Border? Exploring the Cross-State Mobility of the Teacher Workforce. CALDER Working Paper No. 143

We investigated the effects of a statewide program designed to increase the supply of teachers in “hard-to-staff” areas. The Florida Critical Teacher Shortage Program (FCTSP) had three elements: (a) it provided loan forgiveness to teachers who were certified and taught in designated shortage areas; (b) it compensated teachers for the tuition cost of taking courses to become certified in a designated shortage area; and (c) for a single year, it gave bonuses to high school teachers who were certified and taught in a designated subject area. Employing a difference-in-difference estimator, we find that the loan forgiveness program decreased attrition of teachers in shortage areas, although the effects varied by subject. Allowing for variation in the size of payments, we find that the effects were more pronounced when loan-forgiveness payments were more generous. A triple-difference estimate indicated the bonus program also substantially reduced the likelihood of teachers leaving the public school sector. A panel probit analysis reveals that the tuition-reimbursement program had modest positive effects on the likelihood a teacher would become certified in a designated shortage area. We also present qualitative evidence that loan-forgiveness recipients were of higher quality (as measured by value added) than nonrecipients who taught in the same subject but were not certified and thus ineligible.

Citation: Li Feng, Tim Sass (2015). The Impact of Incentives to Recruit and Retain Teachers in “Hard-to-Staff” Subjects: An Analysis of the Florida Critical Teacher Shortage Program. CALDER Working Paper No. 141

We investigate patterns of teacher mobility in districts with different collective bargaining agreement (CBA) transfer provisions. We use detailed teacher-level longitudinal data from Washington State to estimate the probability that teachers of varying experience and effectiveness levels transfer out of their schools to other schools in the district, to other districts, or out of Washington kindergarten through 12th grade (K–12) public schools. We find consistent evidence that within-district transfer probabilities increase for veteran teachers with the proportion of disadvantaged students in a school but decrease for novice teachers with the proportion of disadvantaged students, and that the strength of these relationships is associated with the strength of seniority transfer provisions in CBAs. Specifically, the pattern of veteran teachers’ leaving disadvantaged schools and novice teachers’ staying in disadvantaged schools is more pronounced in districts with strong CBA seniority transfer protections. CBA transfer provisions do not, however, appear to be an important factor in teacher transfers out of school districts or the K–12 public school workforce in Washington. Finally, we find some evidence that more effective teachers are more likely to stay in advantaged schools when seniority is not a factor in transfer decisions. 

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Lesley Lavery, Roddy Theobald (2015). Inconvenient Truth? Do Collective Bargaining Agreements Help Explain the Mobility of Teachers Within School Districts?. CALDER Working Paper No. 135