Do Principals Fire the Worst Teachers?

Jacob, Brian A.

doi:10.3102/0162373711414704

Cited by 54 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…In other work, I show that once one controls for teacher background characteristics, factors such as school achievement level and racial composition of the school are not correlated with the school's dismissal rate (Jacob 2007). Indeed, a rich set of observable teacher, school 19 Note that this could influence teacher supply decisions with regard to accepting a position in the CPS initially as well as continuing to teach in the CPS in subsequent years.…”

Section: Some Basic Facts About Teacher Dismissalsmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…In addition to a full set of school x year effects, predictors all include a rich set of teacher, school and principal characteristics (including all of those shown in Table 3). While the school and principal characteristics are not identified in light of the inclusion of school x year fixed effects, I include a number of interactions between teacher characteristics and school/principal characteristics that are identified and were found to be predictive of dismissal in previous work (Jacob 2007). I use the coefficients from this model to calculate a predicted probability of dismissal for all teachers in both pre-and post-policy years.…”

Section: Measures Of Teacher Productivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Effect of Employment Protection on Worker Effort: Evidence from Public Schooling

Jacob

2010

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This paper studies the effect of employment protection on worker productivity and firm output in the context of a public school system. In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers (defined as those with less than five years of experience) for any reason, and without the elaborate documentation and hearing process typical in many large, urban school districts. Results suggest that the policy reduced annual teacher absences by roughly 10 percent and reduced the prevalence of teachers with 15 or more annual absences by 20 percent. The effects were strongest among teachers in elementary schools and in low-achieving, predominantly African-American high schools, and among teachers with highpredicted absences. There is also evidence that the impact of the policy increased substantially after its first year.

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Section: Some Basic Facts About Teacher Dismissalsmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Measures Of Teacher Productivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effect of Employment Protection on Worker Effort: Evidence from Public Schooling

Jacob

2010

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“…let go when reductions in force occur but also the teacher qualifi cations and characteristics that schools are revealed to value when they are allowed to exercise discretion over which teachers to retain (e.g., Boyd et al 2011;Cohen-Vogel and Osborne-Lampkin 2007;Goldhaber and Th eobald 2013;Grissom, Loeb, and Nakashima 2014;Jacob 2011).…”

Section: A Framework For Conceptualizing Employee Turnovermentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Employee Turnover in the Public Sector: Insights from Research on Teacher Mobility

Grissom

Viano

Selin

2015

Public Administration Review

108

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Employee turnover is a key area for public administration research, but one about which there is much still to be learned. Insights from an extensive body of research on employee turnover in a specifi c area of the public sector-public education-contributes to the understanding of employee mobility in public organizations more generally. Th e authors present a conceptual framework for understanding employee turnover that is grounded in economic theories of labor supply and demand, which have formed the foundation of many studies of teacher turnover. Th e main fi ndings of this body of work are documented, noting connections to the literature on public employee turnover, lessons that can be learned, and potential new areas for empirical inquiry for scholars of turnover in the public sector. Practitioner Points• An extensive research base on turnover among public school teachers can be useful for policy makers, practitioners, and researchers interested in the factors that lead some public employees to remain in their positions or organizations while others leave. • Public employee turnover has both labor supply and labor demand dimensions, meaning that fully understanding turnover requires consideration of both the factors that aff ect employees' work decisions, such as compensation and working conditions, and the factors that aff ect organizations' staffi ng decisions, such as budget reductions and connections between performance appraisal and job dismissal. • Aside from considering supply and demand, research on teacher turnover suggests a number of other insights for investigating public employee turnover more generally, including the importance of diff erentiating mobility and attrition, of gathering data on actual turnover and not just turnover intention, and of considering a wide variety of employee and organizational factors.O ver the past few decades, researchers have built a robust literature on turnover and mobility among public school teachers. Th is research base is large enough, in fact, to have sparked both synthetic review articles and meta-analyses summarizing its fi ndings (e.g., Borman and Dowling 2008; Guarino, Santibañez, and Daley 2006). A notable feature of the development of this literature is that, despite the fact that public school teachers are the most numerous public employees, it has occurred quite apart from the growth of the public administration literature on turnover among public employees more generally. Authored primarily by researchers in the fi elds of education and economics and published in journals aimed at those audiences, teacher turnover studies rarely seem to inform (or to be informed by) research into public sector turnover. Th e failure of these two bodies of work to speak to one another is unfortunate given similarities between schools and other public organizations, between teachers and other public professionals (Lipsky 1980), and even between annual rates of employee turnover in the two areas, which recent estimates place at 13 percent to 14 percent for federal emp...

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“…For example, studies have documented the prevalence (or lack thereof) of subjective and objective performance evaluation across occupations (e.g., Baker et al (1988), Murphy and Oyer (2001)), managers' reluctance to differentiate among employees (e.g., Medoff and Abraham (1980), Murphy (1992)), and managerial bias in the evaluation process (see Prendergast and Topel (1993)). In the context of public schools, there is some work showing that school principals' opinions of teacher effectiveness are correlated with estimates based on student test scores (Murnane (1975), Jacob and Lefgren (2008), Harris and Sass (2008)), but principals, like private sector managers, are reluctant to give teachers poor evaluations (Weisberg et al (2009)) or officially dismiss them (Jacob (2007(Jacob ( , 2010).…”

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confidence: 99%

Information and Employee Evaluation: Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in Public Schools

Rockoff¹,

Staiger

Kane

et al. 2012

American Economic Review

114

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We examine how employers learn about worker productivity in a randomized pilot experiment which provided objective estimates of teacher performance to school principals. We test several hypotheses that support a simple Bayesian learning model with imperfect information. First, the correlation between performance estimates and prior beliefs rises with more precise objective estimates and more precise subjective priors. Second, new information exerts greater influence on posterior beliefs when it is more precise and when priors are less precise. Employer learning affects job separation and productivity in schools, increasing turnover for teachers with low performance estimates and producing small test score improvements. (JEL D83, I21, J24, J45)

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Do Principals Fire the Worst Teachers?

Cited by 54 publications

References 40 publications

The Effect of Employment Protection on Worker Effort: Evidence from Public Schooling

The Effect of Employment Protection on Worker Effort: Evidence from Public Schooling

Understanding Employee Turnover in the Public Sector: Insights from Research on Teacher Mobility

Information and Employee Evaluation: Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in Public Schools

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