Employment and Education

In the face of unavoidable teacher layoffs, policymakers must juggle a variety of issues in choosing the best criteria for laying off teachers. The standard approach in most school districts relies on measures of seniority. Analyzing data on 4th and 5th grade teachers in New York City public schools, CALDER researchers find substantial differences in which teachers get cut under a seniority-based layoff policy versus a policy based on teacher effectiveness (value-added). The authors model the two layoff scenarios to respond to a (fictional) budget shortfall equivalent. The bottom line is that informing teacher layoffs with information about effectiveness, while not perfect, can improve student performance.

The Obama administration has emphasized postsecondary education as the key to its jobs policy, continuing a long-held federal strategy while broadening its goals beyond traditional four-year schools. But disadvantaged students and working adults may still fall through the cracks—and educating college-age youth alone can't meet the nation's employment and social policy objectives. While the focus on college has gone up, federal spending on adult employment and training programs and high school career and technical education has declined. As the nation recovers from the recession, we need to pay more attention to these alternative paths and do more to link education and jobs.

Even though children in the United States have higher poverty rates than adults and the elderly, federal spending on kids is disproportionately small and has been shrinking for years. The recession threatened to eat away further at those investments, prompting the president and Congress to temporarily boost funding for some two dozen federal programs that benefit children. To support the development of children in low-income families, we recommend making some of those provisions permanent. We also propose new investments in the preschool and postsecondary years when public spending is at its lowest, while also experimenting with new initiatives to support low-income children.

Search theory suggests early career job changes lead to better matches that benefit both workers and firms, but this may not hold true in teacher labor markets characterized by salary rigidities, barriers to entry, and substantial differences in working conditions. Education policy makers are particularly concerned that teacher turnover may have adverse effects on the quality of instruction in schools serving predominantly disadvantaged children. Although these schools experience higher turnover, on average, than other schools, the impact on the quality of instruction depends on whether more productive teachers are more likely to depart. In Texas, the availability of matched panel data of students and teachers enables the isolation of teachers' contributions to achievement. Teachers who remain in their school tend to outperform those who leave, particularly those who exit Texas public schools entirely. This gap is larger for schools serving mainly low income students— evidence that high turnover is not nearly as damaging as many suggest.

Race to the Top encourages states to adopt policies that measure the impact of individual teachers on student learning and use those measures to inform human capital decisions including tenure. As a number of states begin to revamp their tenure-granting policies, the idea that high-stakes personnel decisions need to be linked to direct measures of teacher effectiveness is gaining traction among education policymakers. Contributing to the debate over policies that enhance teacher quality, this brief evaluates how well early-career performance signals teacher effectiveness after tenure.