Public Education

With effective teaching a top policy priority, certain school districts, the federal government, and nonprofit groups are renewing efforts to pilot and study strategies for pairing effective teachers with students in low-performing, high-poverty schools.

The results could offer clues about how to rectify an imbalance in the distribution of the best teachers within districts—a requirement of both the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the 2009 economic-stimulus law, and one of K-12 education’s most intractable problems.

The initiatives differ from earlier attempts to equalize teacher talent by using more sophisticated techniques to identify and target top teachers, including the use of value-added data.

They also go beyond narrow transfer incentives to include targeted retention strategies, improved professional development, and a focus on the caliber of the school leaders and peers that teachers new to such schools will be working with every day.

Some of the districts are even working to place whole teams of educators—rather than just individuals—in challenging schools, a promising approach, some scholars say, at a time when individual teacher performance has galvanized much policy attention.

“All this focus on individuals, on getting the best and brightest and placing them into schools, is a limited strategy,” said Susan Moore Johnson, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “It is driving so much of what’s going on right now, that we risk neglecting the context of these people’s work.”

Testing Theories

For years, studies have shown that low-income and minority students have teachers with lesser qualifications. The new efforts are among the first to approach the issue of teacher distribution by looking at teachers’ ability to boost their students’ academic achievement, an area that is only now generating significant research.

Many variables in the equation remain unclear. Researchers have found evidence to suggest, for instance, that school factors play an important role in a teacher’s success.

In a recent study of teachers and students in North Carolina, C. Kirabo Jackson, an assistant professor of labor economics at Cornell University, found that up to a quarter of a teacher’s estimated ability to raise his or her students’ academic achievement could be explained by what he called “match quality”—school-level factors such as differences in curricula or the demographics of the population being taught.

A federal research project, called the Talent Transfer Initiative, aims to provide insights into the question of what happens when effective teachers are assigned to schools with greater challenges.

Financed by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, the initiative offers high-performing teachers in select districts $10,000 a year for up to two years to transfer to a low-performing school in the district, and $5,000 to effective teachers already in such schools to stay put. The teachers are identified using three years of student-achievement data.

“These are teachers who have demonstrated a consistent ability to raise student achievement,” said Steven M. Glazerman, a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, the Princeton, N.J.-based nonprofit group that is conducting the analysis. “The question is whether they can produce similar results in their new setting.”

Researchers identified job openings in low-performing schools, and high-performing teachers were randomly assigned to half those vacancies. The results will be compared with those for a control group of regular hires filling the remaining vacancies.

The project covers schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem, N.C.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Mobile, Ala.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Houston. Three additional, yet-to-be-announced districts have signed on to join the project.

Holly Barzar is one of 63 teachers now taking part in the initiative. The 27-year-old transferred from a school she called her “comfort zone” to one in which most students are part of the Pasqua Yaqui Tribe, qualify for federally subsidized lunches, and live in troubled neighborhoods.

Students in her new school in Tucson, the 5th grade teacher said, lacked skills, were all over the board academically, and had had “experiences no kid that age should ever have to experience—drugs, gangs, violence. They come to school not being 10-year-olds.”

With her new colleagues aware of the incentive pay, she felt the pressure to perform. Some days were excruciating.

But Ms. Barzar also found that many students had simply never been challenged academically before.

“A lot of them thought writing a paragraph was three lines on a paper. Remedying that—those were some of the longest days of my life,” she said. “But now they can write a five-paragraph essay, and they will do a good job, too.”

Despite the challenges of the school, Ms. Barzar said she wants to continue to work in similar schools.

“As corny as it sounds, I feel like I’m really making a difference here,” she said. “I tell my kids, ‘I want to see you in middle school, see your grades, meet your friends. Because if they’re not good, I’m going to tell you.’ ”

Offering Support

If effective teachers embody certain characteristics, such as Ms. Barzar’s perseverance, researchers say that the context of the schools and support offered there are important ingredients that can help attract higher-caliber teachers.

Research on teacher-transfer patterns shows that some schools, despite serving populations that are traditionally difficult to educate, aren’t hard to staff, according to Susanna Loeb, a professor of education at Stanford University who has studied teacher-transfer issues for nearly a decade.

“Schools with lots of low-achieving students lose more teachers in general, but there are a fair number of high-poverty schools that are appealing places to teach,” Ms. Loeb said.

In his recent study, Mr. Jackson also found that the teachers studied tended to be more effective in mathematics after they transferred to a new school, suggesting they actively sought out schools that were a better match for their talents.

“Teachers aren’t as effective in environments they don’t want to be in, and they don’t stay in environments they don’t want to be in,” he said.